Nowhere is Home：J.M.Coetzee’s Wrestling with Home Inside/Outside In the Heart of the Country*

DONG Liang

Abstract: By emphasizing and analyzing the frequent appearance of the term nowhere in J.M.Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country, I demonstrate the close correspondence between Coetzee’s unsettlement in South Africa in the 1970s and Magda, the female protagonist in In the Heart of the Country who fails to pursue an idealistic home on a remote farm.Coetzee’s authorship, or specifically speaking, his paradoxical feeling about South Africa, embodies itself in hostile coexistence with the rigorous censorship regime in South Africa and in his involvement in Afrikaner culture during this period.By choosing an anti-pastoral genre in an antirealistic narrative, Coetzee depicts a miserable picture of Magda’s struggle with her patriarchal father, rebellious coloured servants as well as her own identity crisis.The cruel answer for Magda is that nowhere could be the very place to accommodate the ethical values in her mind, though she attempts to subvert the patriarchal authority and seek reciprocity with the coloured servants.Magda’s tragedy provides us with an opportunity to explore the historical and ethical dimensions of the narrative and, beyond that, Coetzee’s wrestling with the issue of home.

Keywords: J.M.Coetzee； hostile coexistence； anti-pastoral genre； nowhere； home

The title, “nowhere is home,” is inspired by my observation that the word

nowhere

is not only one of the recurring motifs in Magda’s monologues, The word, , appears 16 times in J.M.Coetzee, (London: Secker & Warburg, 1977), either to constitute a phrase like“ in the heart of nowhere” (4, 76),“ in the middle of nowhere”(50, 71, 119, 226),“ from nowhere to nowhere” (16, 50, 56, 64) and“ out of nowhere” (46)“, from nowhere”(19), or to function as a separate adverb, such as “go nowhere” (63, 115), or as a noun, such as“ there is nowhere”(99, 117).but also an appropriate term to summarize the protagonist’s ambivalence towards her relations with the land, her father and the coloured servants, Hendrik and Klein-Anna, as well as her own identity.My basic assumption is that the tension between nowhere and home precisely represents Magda’s predicament on the rural farm and, furthermore, Coetzee’s paradoxical attitudes to the then rigorous censorship regime in South Africa and the Afrikaner culture behind the narrative.After laying bare the violence and brutality in his ancestry’s colonial expeditions to the South African interior during the eighteenth century in the novella “the Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee” in his debut fiction, Coetzee focused on the patriarchal tradition of Afrikaner culture and the blatant omission of the black in farm novels.If it is claimed that “the Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee”

is a work of rebellion for an Afrikaner descendant to challenge his origins ethically and, specifically, to challenge the roots of home, then

In the Heart of the Country

keeps the fire of this challenge burning by writing against the pastoral tradition in Afrikaner culture.The tendency of the criticism from an insider, the one “who knew them from inside,” David Attwell, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 43.is an overriding concern in Coetzee’s second novel where Magda, to some extent a spokeswoman for Coetzee, exemplifies the victimhood of, and attempts to subvert, the patriarchal tradition and the master-slave dichotomy in Afrikaner culture on her way to finding an idealistic home.However, the cruel answer to Magda’s search is that neither her dictatorial father nor the coloured servants can provide her with a promised land or help her establish such a place.The reality that nowhere is home for Magda is an impersonalized portrayal of her author’s predicament regarding the issue of home in the 1970s.The relation between Coetzee and the rigorous regime of censorship can be thought of as hostile coexistence: though he resented the regime, he was involved in it in his own way.

I.Hostile Coexistence with Censorship

After returning to South Africa, the harshness of censorship from the 1970s to the 1980s made Coetzee realize that his writing could not survive if he failed to get along with the censorship system, albeit he was repelled by the violation of press freedom under the Afrikaner’s governance.These conflicting feelings contributed to his sense that nowhere was the right place to appease his dissatisfaction with the political and cultural climate in South Africa at the time.

Why he picked up a topic concerning censorship soon after

Dusklands

is closely related to the contemplation of this survival priority as a fledgling novelist.The idea was directly sparked by a report he was required to submit for an evaluation of the influence of censorship on academic life, conducted by the Committee of University Principals in South Africa.Though the novel, entitled “The Burning of the Books,” regarding a censor’s life, was abandoned for it was beyond Coetzee to “find a coherent focus,”the theme of censorship was driven by his paradoxical feelings about South Africa, deeply and fundamentally.On the one hand, he tried to distance himself from his homeland: a four-year stay in England from 1961 to 1965 and then a si x-year residence in the United States until 1971 are his attempts to “shake the dust of the country from his feet”； J.M.Coetzee, , ed.David Attwell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 393.on the other hand, despite failing to extend his American visa in 1971, he refused the offers from the universities in Canada and Hong Kong and chose to return to South Africa, which reveals “a will to remain in crisis.”His engagement with the censorship regime is, among others, one of the representations of this will.In addition to expressing this criticism in his unpublished writing, Coetzee took the initiative to involve himself in censorship, including making an application for a job as a censor, actively learning about the censoring process of his submitted novel, etc.Coetzee knew what it entailed would be a kind of hostile coexistence.As he puts it,

Working under censorship is like being intimate with someone who does not like you, with whom you want no intimacy, but who presses himself in upon you.The censor is an intrusive reader, a reader who forces his way into the intimacy of the writing transaction, forces out the figure of the loved or courted reader, reads your words in a disapproving and censorious fashion. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 38.

Rather than an approval of censorship, these moves should be deemed his strategy to respond to the pressure of South African reality, especially the confinement induced by the censorship regime: not a direct confrontation, but a temporary compromise to balance the tension.Nevertheless, there is little evidence to indicate that Coetzee was affected or intimidated in writing

In the Heart of the Country

because of the explicit interracial sexual behaviours and the ensuing subversive dialogues.On different occasions, both Wittenberg and Attwell remark that neither the draft of the novel nor the letter he wrote to Randall betrays Coetzee’s timidity.Quoting some questions Coetzee addressed to Peter Randall, Ravan’s editor, Wittenberg points out that Coetzee was fully aware of the potential risk of being suppressed when writing the novel. Hermann Wittenberg, “The Taint of the Censor: J.M.Coetzee and the Making of,” 35, no.2 (2008): 135.Based on his investigation of Coetzee’s papers, Attwell observes that nothing could be found from the manuscript to demonstrate the novelist “was writing in the shadow of this unwelcome intimate.” Attwell,105.Thus, it is true to argue that this strategy never hinders his writing but empowers it to narrate against censorship.Coetzee’s engagement with censorship is coincident with his concern with the publication of this novel in South Africa.There are quite a few discussions about the history and the significance of its publication.Wittenberg analyses the dual publication history of the novel, one English version and the other’s dialogue written in Afrikaans, from a book-historical approach, namely, considering the fiction as a socially constructed artefact. Wittenberg, “The Taint of the Censor: J.M.Coetzee and the Making of,” 133-50.Andrew van der Vlies notes that Coetzee’s insistence on publishing a local version after the novel came off the press in Britain and the United States echoes “his commitment to a radical politics in the country in the wake of the Soweto riots of 1976.” Andrew Van der Vlies, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 135.At first, the sections 85-94 made their debut in

Standpunte,

a prestigious and largely Afrikaans literary magazine under the editorship of J.C.Kannemeyer.Then, it is worth noting that, until now, the novel has been the only one in Coetzee’s oeuvre published in two separate language versions.Due to the possibility of being banned in South Africa and his worries about the unwillingness of Ravan, a Johannesburg-based publisher, to shoulder the financial risk, Coetzee turned to Secker & Warburg, a British agent, for the publication.The international attention following the overseas publication enabled Coetzee to reflect on censorship in his native country from a more detached perspective, namely as “a transnational writer who could make meaning globally while still interpreting the local.” Wittenberg, “The Taint of the Censor: J.M.Coetzee and the Making of,” 148.Though Secker & Warburg managed to bring the English edition into the international market in 1977, he persisted in introducing a bilingual one by Ravan, which is supposed to include Afrikaans dialogues as well as English descriptive and meditative sections.For Coetzee, this was not out of consideration for more economic returns, but, once again, to consolidate his deep engagement with Afrikaner culture, because textures of masterslave relationships in the novel “could be properly reflected only in Afrikaans.” Attwell, , 89.As the above discussion attests, Coetzee’s attitude to South Africa became more realistic at this stage: he faced up to the censorship regime surrounding his writing and involved himself in the historical particularity and Afrikaner cultural tradition in his fiction.Though, in a talk given at

The Weekly Mail

’s book festival of 1987 in Cape Town, he maintained that novel and history were rivals, or, in other words, that the novel should not be written in the service of history, See J.M.Coetzee,“ The Novel Today,” 6, no.1 (1988).

In the Heart of the Country

indeed conduces to the remaking of the Afrikaner’s hierarchical tradition.Coetzee’s following novels will put more emphasis on the miserable and distorted lives under or after apartheid, rather than turn back to history, but the interrogation never ceases until he immigrates to Australia—only the perspectives of criticism vary.

II.A Prelude to Anti-Pastoral Writing

The logic underpinning the inseparability between Coetzee’s attitude to South Africa and his anti-pastoral writing is the more he feels attached to Afrikaner culture, the more reflective attention he will pay to it.Differently put, it is his affinity with Afrikaner culture, among others, that motivates him to undertake research on its history, including the earlier colonization period in South Africa, manifested in “Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee,” and the farm novel, a popular literary genre in the earlier twentieth century.

The farm novel, or the

plaasroman

in Afrikaans, was too prominent to be ignored for any writer in the first half of the twentieth century who bore the mark of Afrikaner culture.The farm novel was written under the background that the barrenness, caused by the arid weather, deprived many farmers of their means of living from the 1920s to the 1940s, so it would be inclined to “[celebrate] the memory of the old rural values” and give priority to the reminiscence of natural connection between people and land, both of which were the prominent features of pastoralism. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 63.Although Coetzee points out that the English farm novels and the

plaasroman

have different orientations, pastoralism is what they are most concerned with in the poetry of landscape.

One aspect in the family ethical values advocated by these two genres is that the male, the female and the black farmhand should play their destined roles, implying any trespassing of the boundary will be deemed immoral.In Afrikaner cultural discourse, the man is a paternalistic landowner, who is characterized by his authoritativeness and supremacy in the family while the woman is a peripheral figure, who is usually praised for her obedience, courage, and purity.The black servant is always neglected in these writings, though they help to support the running of the Afrikaner rural order with their laborious work.As Coetzee puts it,

Blindness to the colour black is built into South African pastoral.As its central issue the genre prefers to identify the preservation of a (Dutch) peasant rural order, or at least the preservation of the values of that order.

The effort to preserve the values of this order is grounded in the Afrikaner’s attachment to the earth, specifically speaking, to the farm, which is the root of “their sense of cultural identity” and also related to the rise and fall of farm novels. Rita Barnard, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 72.However, the feeling falls into the realm of “a failure of love,” Coetzee, , 97.suggesting that the Afrikaner’s dark love of the land cannot obliterate, or compensate for, their deliberate indifference to the black man.

The circle of logic proposed at the beginning of this section, in which ambivalence drives creativity, can continue in a way that the more familiarity he gains with the Afrikaner cultural heritage, the more critical he becomes in dealing with its essence and dross.What Coetzee wants to maintain in the pastoralism is the reciprocal interaction between the farm and the people, instead of the patriarchal tradition and the harsh exploitation of the black man.Ironically, Magda, the protagonist of

In the Heart of the Country

, confined on a desolate Karoo farm and going nowhere, is reluctant to give up her mentality of white supremacy in spite of attempting to throw off the shackles of her historical destiny.Coetzee did not turn his back on the striking phenomenon he found in the research of farm novels, so

In the Heart of the Country

came into being after the unrealized work, “Burning of the Books.” It is arguably held that Coetzee gets the baton from Olive Schreiner and continues to play the symphony of anti-pastoralism, but, as to the position of the novel in his oeuvre, it is only a prelude to his anti-pastoral writings since the issue will also be addressed in

Life & Times of Michael K

and

Disgrace

.As a point of departure in Coetzee’s anti-pastoral writing, the novel, firstly, subverts the family ethical values held in farm novels, highlighting the theme that these rural farms, whose “social textures are subtle in their own way,” Attwell,, 73.are not a home, idealized in the pastoral idyll, for anyone involved in the narration.Magda, under the pressure of patriarchal distortion and the rebellion of the coloured servant, is no longer a submissive and marginalized woman, nor does her father present us with the image of “a benign patriarch.” Coetzee, , 6.And the black servant is not a silent noun anymore but a verb which takes actions to rip off the label of the other (also the space Olive Schreiner does not step into) by raping the white protagonist.Secondly, the narrative style, featuring numbered paragraphs filled with repeated but different narrations of the same event, is Coetzee’s metafictional way to write against the realist tradition and, more than that, to articulate his philosophy against the requirement for “a more politically engaged artistic practice.” Wittenberg, “The Taint of the Censor: J.M.Coetzee and the Making of,” 134.

III.Magda's Pursuit of an Idealistic Home

Attwell observes that the earliest manuscripts of

In the Heart of the Country

are entitled “Home.” Attwell, , 47.Though the title is abandoned in the published text, one interpretation of the novel’s theme can be how Magda suffers and struggles in her home, the rural farm, due to a patriarchal father, rebellious slave servants and, beyond that, the invisible regime behind them, which further implies the novelist’s predicament as an Afrikaner descendant in the 1970s.Different from an idealistic home in its traditional sense where family members harmoniously and respectfully live with each other, the rural farm is the very place which witnesses Magda’s identity being located “nowhere” and her subversive but failed effort to get rid of master-slave relations.

i.Magda’s Self-Doubt and Emptiness

The name Magda, borrowed from the persevering and brave wife of the Great Trek leader, Piet Retief, symbolizes “one of the ‘mothers’ of South Africa.” Susan V.Gallagher, ’ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 84.Considering the heroic status of the Great Trek in Afrikaner nationalism, Coetzee arguably aims to parody the greatness of the heroic character since Magda’s image is a mixture of self-doubt, emptiness, and illusion.She repeatedly portrays herself as either “a black widow spider” or “a black flower” to highlight the identity of “an angry spinster” and “a miserable black virgin,” meanwhile denying the role of “a happy peasant,” Coetzee, , 39, 108, 4, 5.all of which are deconstructive of the heroic and submissive label put on women in Afrikaner discourse.She yearns for a life filled with happiness and enjoyment, but the suffocating life on the rural farm reduces her to chains of monologues dotted with illusion.In her fantasy, it is “in the middle of nowhere” that she is able to secure two sharply different positions: either to “expand to infinity” or to “shrivel to the size of an ant.”Even after the murders and the rapes, seemingly subversive of the master-slave relations, when Magda invites the coloured couple to live with her in the house, the state of being “a zero, a null, a vacuum” still permeates her dialogues with Anna:

Do you know what I feel like Anna? Like a great emptiness, an emptiness filled with a great absence, an absence which is a desire to be filled, to be fulfilled.

Magda’s emptiness corresponds with the phallocentric thinking in Afrikaner discourse, where a woman is always “an absence,” a hole needing to be filled.That is why, at the beginning of the novel, Magda, in extremely calm language, reminds the reader of her mother’s unforgivable sin of not giving birth to a son.Johannes’s voracious eroticism claims his wife’s life during her childbirth, resulting in Magda’s motherlessness and, furthermore, setting the tone for her tedium and void on the farm.

This emptiness gives rise to her contemplation on the role of language in the monologues：

But these words of mine

come from nowhere and go nowhere

, they have no past or future, they whistle across the flats in a desolate eternal present, feeding no one.After failing to elicit any resonance during her communicating with Anna, she laments that her words have no origins or directions, leaving no trace either on the farm or on people’s minds.The narrative evokes a strong sense of hollowness by emphasizing the word

nowhere

, which lingers to the next scene when Magda’s neighbour is querying where her father is: “[H]e has the means but not the words, I the words but not the means； for there is nowhere, I fear, where my words will not reach.”The self’s emptiness is equivalent to woman’s triviality and powerlessness under the formidable patriarchy, so no one would pay more heed to her and, also, her words are not penetrating at all to reach anywhere.For one of the “melancholy spinsters” like Magda,this kind of boredom and languor seems to be her destiny, one of the consequences of the patriarchal tradition.

In addition to the overbearing patriarch, Magda’s emptiness also suggests the “unbudgeable void” in colonizers’ irresistible desire to conquer alien people and their land, Stephen Watson, “Colonialism and the Novels of J.M.Coetzee,” 17, no.3 (1986): 376.which is powered by Descartes’ dualism to separate the self from the external world.Thus, in contrast with the isolation and solitude, Magda, in the very beginning, also states that she is one of “the daughters of the colonies” and tries to make the history remember her name.The irony lies in the fact that the colonists and the Afrikaner nationalists are doomed to step down from the historical stage due to their exploitative ideology and practices.It is this interplay between the emptiness and the colonial mindset that corrupts Magda and makes anxiety and tedium dominate her life.Magda’s suffering results in her repeatedly murdering Johannes and the abnormal intimacy with the coloured servants.However, Magda is not only a victim but also an agent of deconstruction, just as Dominic Head speaks of Magda’s “ambivalent position,” namely, “both victim and perpetrator of colonialism.” Dominic Head, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 43.In this sense, she is a continuation, and a female equivalent, of Jacobus Coetzee.

ii.Magda’s Conflicting Feelings about Her Father

Magda’s predicament leads her into a desperate hunger for a place with ethical values in family life rather than a farm with master-slave dichotomies, imposed by the institutionalized abnormality of colonization.The first dichotomy is the male-female paradigm in Afrikaner discourse, the dynamics of which reside in Magda’s attachment to, and resentment of, her patriarchal father, named Johannes.Johannes is an Afrikaans name for John, which appears only once in the novel.When inviting Klein-Anna to live with her, Magda, out of friendliness, plays jokes with the coloured servant in the following sentence: “Wouldn’t it sound strange if the minister baptized the children like that—Miss Magda, Baas Johannes, and so forth.” Coetzee, , 102.The Afrikaans word

baas

, meaning boss or master in English, together with the name after it, should refer to Magda’s father, which suggests a sense of irony.

Magda admires her father, which can be clearly traced in her appraisal of Johannes’s gracefulness.In her eyes, the father, with “a fine figure,” is quite a gentleman in his manners.Her father always comes back “in pride and glory” after the day’s work, though what he does is a mystery to Magda.He wears waxed boots and well-tailored dress, uses delicate brandy-glasses and maintains good hygiene practices (e.g., washing his hands with soap).This appreciation results in an exaggerated and cryptic metaphor for Magda’s wish to seek identification with her father: the twisting of their excrement after they take regular turns to relieve themselves in the bucket-latrine before Hendrik cleans it.As Dick Penner remarks, instead of “Swiftian scatology,” the metaphor would be “a rendering in the most earthy imagery of Magda’s ultimate desire” to integrate with her father. Dick Penner, (Santa Barbara: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1989), 61.

Magda’s affection for her father is rooted in her identification with white supremacy, featuring their occupation of the land and the preservation of the traditional Afrikaans family order, which is grounded in the inequality between the white and the non-white.Some critics argue that Magda longs to break away from the regime her father represents, and gets along well with the coloured servants.For example, Derek Wright asserts that Magda’s “desire to be rid of her father, and the regime he represents, springs from her white liberal impulse to communicate with and befriend her slave servants Klein-Anna and Hendrik.” Derek Wright,“ Fiction as Foe-the Novels of J.M.Coetzee,” 16, no.2 (1989): 114.However, the argument only rings true at first hearing and is worth discussing more critically.Magda’s invocation of the pastoral tradition originates from the denial of the blacks’ ownership of their own land.It is a penetrating legacy from misdirected love: the love of South African hereditary masters, according to Coetzee, “has consistently been directed toward

the land

, that is, toward what is least likely to respond to love: mountains and deserts, birds and animals and flowers.” Coetzee 97, emphasis original.To Afrikaners, the farm constitutes their way of life, especially from their settlement in South Africa in the middle of the seventeenth century to the first half of the twentieth century.It has become, thus, a cultural token for them.A father is not only the bread-earner for an Afrikaner family, but also an embodiment of proprietary ownership of the land, so it is by attaching herself to the father that Magda can reinforce her superiority over the coloured and the blacks.It is in this sense that she identifies with the old rural values.In

White Writing

, Coetzee poignantly argues that the first dream topography of Afrikaners is “a network of boundaries crisscrossing the surface of the land, marking off thousands of farms, each a separate kingdom ruled over by a benign patriarch with, beneath him, a pyramid of contented and industrious children, grandchildren, and serfs.” , 6.The ideal pastoralism is the place where Magda wants to accommodate her empty self.Nevertheless, nowhere on the rural farm exists such “a benign patriarch.” Magda’s father, who should have been the powerful pillar responsible for hunting and farming in the family, turns into a domineering and philandering man.

Magda longs for a reciprocal bond between humans and the land.The nostalgia is transformed into her insistence on staying on the farm, reluctant to step out into the outside world:

It takes generations of life in the cities to drive that nostalgia for country ways from the heart.I will never live it down, nor do I want to.I am corrupted to the bone with the beauty of this forsaken world.[...] I have chosen at every moment my own destiny, which is to die here in the petrified garden, behind locked gates, near my father’s bones, in a space echoing with hymns I could have written but did not because (I thought) it was too easy. Coetzee, , 139.

Magda, “corrupted to the bone with the beauty of this forsaken world,” utters her attachment to the land here.Even the house which looks like the shape of letter H is deemed an “[act] of inscription,” a way for Afrikaners to write down their laborious history and traditional culture on the land.She declares her love for the farm which is, in Kannemeyer’s words, “an Eden” to her, J.C.Kannemeyer, , trans.Michiel Heyns (London: Scribe Publications, 2013), 282.so the idea of flying away with the “sky-god” at the end of the novel never really appeals to Magda.

Magda’s yearning for this reciprocity is also related to her wish for a home in a familial sense, so there are “people to talk to, brothers and sisters or fathers and mothers” and, beyond that, “a history and a culture” to allow and even encourage this communication. Coetzee, , 119.In Magda’s monologues, she shows her longing for a marriage, a typical symbol for a happy family life, that “if only I had a good man to sleep at my side and give me babies, all would be well.”In her mind, she can still be redemptive “by marriage,” in spite of being “a lonely, ugly old maid.”However, the family life she has in mind is also miserable.The emotionless husband cares for nothing except for his own eroticism, even during her parturition, which is the same mistreatment her mother has received from her father.The children are also hopeless to escape this fatality: they grow up in the way she has been raised and carry on with the monotonous life as she has lived.She once turns to the land for help, hoping to find out her “revelatory, Wordsworthian moments” with the coloured servants on the farm. J.M.Coetzee, (New York: Penguin, 1999), 23.But the reality reminds Magda of the impossibility to transcend herself:

There was a time when I imagined that if I talked long enough it would be revealed to me what it means to be an angry spinster

in the heart of nowhere

.[...] Aching to form the words that will translate me into the land of myth and hero, here I am still my dowdy self in a dull summer heat that will not transcend itself. Coetzee, , 4, emphasis mine.Trapped in her father’s domineering authority, Magda is immersed in the fantasy that he has brought back a new wife.The phrase,

in the heart of nowhere

, stands for not only her attempts to relate the self to the surrounding land but also the puzzlement over her identity.

When Johannes presents his abusiveness and aloofness, the coalition of the father and the daughter will come to a halt, together with the deconstruction of the idealized family ethics.Thus, the other extreme of Magda’s feelings with her father is fear and resentment, gradually driving her to murder the latter, firstly with an axe, then with a shotgun (I shall turn to this anti-realistic element in the following).Magda’s monologue can display the sharp feeling：

The boots, the thud of the boots, the black brow, the black eyeholes, the black hole of the mouth from which roars the great NO, iron, cold, thunderous, that blasts me and buries me and locks me up ...I squirm, again the boot is raised over me, the mouth hole opens, and the great wind blows, chilling me to my pulpy heart.

The boots are not well-waxed shoes any longer； instead, together with the father’s hideous facial expression and harsh words, they become forceful weapons to dominate the protagonist.In the following sections, Johannes’s aloofness casts its shadow on his attitudes to Magda：

Therefore I am more than just the trace of these words passing through my head on their way

from nowhere to nowhere

, a streak of light against the void of space, a shooting-star (how full of astronomy I am this evening).

When suffering from insomnia, Magda turns to Johannes for help but receives a series of scolding and hypocritical consolation from him.The scolding and consolation goes “from nowhere to nowhere,” so, to Magda, the words do not sound like comfort at all but the patriarchal order to obey unconditionally.After Magda murders her father, the odd burning-bush dream becomes a parody of “Moses seeing the angel of God in the burning bush,” which reminds readers of the “authoritarian, judgemental, retributive” God from the Old Testament. Penner, , 61.The messages imply more a domineering patriarchal statue to smash than a venerated figure to follow.

The invisible ideology behind this resentment is women’s otherness in a traditional patriarchal society.As Gallagher claims: “within Afrikaner society the woman is decidedly inferior.” Gallagher, ’, 90.They cannot enjoy equality with men not only in social lives, including religious and political spheres, but also in their families.In a review of Sheila Fugard’s novel

A Revolutionary Woman

, Coetzee points out that South Africa is “a patriarchal society that worships a patriarchal God, a society whose women are never visible.” J.M.Coetzee, “Satyagraha in Durban,” 24 (1985): 12.This is where the significance of Coetzee’s anti-pastoral writing partly lies.He makes Magda refuse to wear the label imposed by the traditional Afrikaner discourse and, furthermore, fight for her ideal home in fantasies and actions.As Jonathan Crewe aptly puts it, “unlike the silent, insentient colonial patriarch or empire-builder, [Magda] is hypersentient, but at the cost of her sanity.” Jonathan Crewe, (Maryland: University Press of America, 2016), 1.Coetzee enables Magda to vocalize his own repugnance of the Afrikaner patriarchal culture, so, in this sense, the novelist begins to explore the themes, either explicitly or allegorically set in South Africa, of how the consequences of the legacy from Afrikaner discourse, including the patriarchal tradition, the farm novel, and apartheid, constitute diverse barriers for natural interpersonal communication in the family and the nation.Magda’s open-ended narrative suggests that the author’s exploration of home consciousness will not stop but continue in his following writings.

iii.Magda’s Fraternal Effort with the Coloured Servants

More striking racial issues in the colonial period to some extent overshadow the fatherdaughter dichotomy in Afrikaner discourse.As a white descendant, Magda’s close connection with the land, which is as pathological as her extreme self-doubt, relates to the failure of pursuing reciprocity from the coloured servants.Therefore, the second master-slave dichotomy in the novel involves Magda’s effort to seek fraternity with Hendrik and Anna to overthrow a longheld value in colonial culture.Coetzee suggests that we should “replace the word

love

with the word

fraternity

” to describe the white’s warped feelings with the land and the black people in South Africa. Coetzee, , 97, emphasis original.By borrowing the term

fraternity

, I attempt to highlight Magda’s wish for a kind of reciprocal relationship with the slave servants, which should be one of the social ethical values based on interpersonal equality.It is different from Magda’s paradoxical feelings about her father, which is not racial-oriented but gender-centred.Nevertheless, Magda’s wish and effort are doomed to fail because there is no so-called equality on the farm.

At the beginning of the novel, Magda indicates that she “[grows] up with the servants’ children” and speaks in the same way with her playmates, Coetzee, , 6.entailing her craving for the fraternity in the pastoral tradition.The moment that she recalls, “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” further strengthens this idea.It chimes with Jacobus Coetzee’s statement: “our children play with servants’ children, and who is to say who copies whom?” J.M.Coetzee, (London: Secker & Warburg, 1982), 57.However, Jacobus Coetzee’s reminiscence is only a flash of thought, which is never a problem to his way of colonizing the natives with violence, while Magda’s hope for fraternity is fulfilled at the cost of her sanity and virginity.

After murdering her father, Magda seems to have removed the patriarchal block to her idealistic home and the dream of fraternity； but the farm, without her father’s management, gradually witnesses food shortage and a rebellion of the slave servants.The collapse of patriarchal authority fails to bring any peace but tips the balance in the new master-slave relation, exemplified by Hendrik asking for his unpaid wages, moving to the farmhouse and raping Magda.Since the scene that Hendrik demands payment for his labour is a way of perpetuating the patriarchal system, Magda’s hope for fraternity faces new challenges.Rather than a “shadowy presence” in the novel, Coetzee, , 5.the slave servants play subversive roles in Magda’s longing, which, together with Magda’s resistance against patriarchal authority, contributes to the novel’s anti-pastoral features.

The rape, which is narrated twice in different versions to show the novelist’s anti-realistic tendency, is the culmination of Magda’s striving for fraternity with the coloured servants.As Dominic Head notes: “Perhaps the most resonant motif in the book is the recurring image of the body being inhabited by the body of another.” Head, 44.If Magda is raped by Hendrik in their first sexual encounter, it is definitely not out of unwillingness that she waits for Hendrik’s regular visits every night in the later part of the story.This episode is the most striking one in Hendrik’s actions since the Immorality Act, initially established in 1927, and the sequent legislation prohibited any sexual contact and marriage between whites and non-whites.In Coetzee’s opinion, “horizontal intercourse” had been cut off so that there was no space for social reciprocity, including fraternity, to develop； Magda is empowered to try to deconstruct the vertical relation of “giving and receiving orders,” Coetzee, , 97.the price of which is to have illicit intercourse with Hendrik, either willingly or unwillingly.The consequences of these immorality laws are so far-reaching that, even in postapartheid South Africa, interracial sexual intercourse still has strong political overtones, which makes up one of the controversies in

Disgrace

.The metafictional elements in the novel, such as different descriptions of Magda murdering her father and Hendrik raping the protagonist, bring us back to what happens to Klawer in “the Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee.” If the double-death of the Hottentot servant is served only as a starter, the feast of this practice is the numbered paragraphs in

In the Heart of the Country

to enable the novelist to “drop all pretense of continuity.” Joanna Scott and J.M.Coetzee,“ Voice and Trajectory: An Interview with J.M.Coetzee,” 114/115 (1997): 89.

Though Coetzee’s endeavour to write the novel within a historical context can be testified in the theme he has chosen, the narrative, fraught with revisions and Magda’s conflicting fantasies, equips the text with some postmodern features, which does not meet what realism requires.This anti-realistic tendency is consistent in Coetzee’s earlier and middle writing career in spite of some exceptions.As Coetzee expresses his disapproval of realism in an interview with Tony Morphet: “I don’t have much interest in, or can’t seriously engage myself with, the kind of realism that takes pride in copying the ‘real’ world.” Tony Morphet, “Two Interviews with J.M.Coetzee, 1983 and 1987,” 69 (1987): 63.However, his anti-realism attracted severe criticisms in South Africa since the novels, possessing an allegorical inclination due to this writing strategy, could demonstrate his elusiveness in facing the social reality and his failure to answer the urgent demand of political struggle. Perhaps the most influential criticism is from Nadine Gordimer, who, in a book review of, notoriously proclaims that both Coetzee’s allegorical writing and his protagonist, Michael K, convey no political meaning.See Nadine Gordimer, “The Idea of Gardening: by J.M.Coeztee,” in , ed.Sue Kossew (New York: Prentice Hall, 1998).Nevertheless, if the authorship and the novels are juxtaposed for further consideration, these criticisms may not be as tenable as they seem.

Coetzee, as “a member of the Western-oriented English intelligentsia,”introduced the avant-garde narrative genre to South African writing in his first few novels.Though it diverges from dominant realistic writing, which is canonized as the only effective weapon for novelists to engage themselves with South African discourse, it cannot be neglected that Coetzee also explores the historical complexity and ethical predicaments inflicted by the colonial or apartheid regime in his writing.Critics who cast suspicions or complaints on Coetzee’s experimentalism are most likely to stick too much to the invariable standard of realism and thus take no notice of the historical and ethical concerns behind the genre.As Derek Attridge notes, the pressure that literature should be responsive to the struggle in realist terms leads to intolerance of anything “hermetic, self-referential, formally inventive” or “distant from the canons and procedures of the realist tradition.” Derek Attridge, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 1.Coetzee’s anti-realism, instead of a denial of his political involvement in the writing, is, in fact, his strategy to relate his intellectual pursuits to the South African context, which not only betrays the novelist’s deep preoccupation with South African history and reality, but also invites more thought-provoking readings so that his novels are not “easily assimilated and reduced to a single canonical meaning.”

The anti-realism also finds its way into Magda’s philosophical reflections.After Hendrik and Anna flee, Magda ponders social reciprocity with a host-parasite metaphor: “the host is dying, the parasite scuttles anxiously about the cooling entrails wondering whose tissues it will live off next.” Coetzee, , 119.The metaphor is quite poignant if, according to Magda’s philosophy of white supremacy (ironically, Magda claims in the latter part that she is not a philosopher), the host refers to herself while the parasite hints at the coloured servants.It is the servants who undertake most of the labour to support their white masters； to put it differently, the whites, like the parasites, live off black labour.The root of Magda’s failed efforts to find social reciprocity lies here because “fraternity ineluctably comes in a package with liberty and equality,” both of which Hendrik and Anna are deprived of. Coetzee, , 97.In Magda’s hope for reciprocity with the coloured servants, she never manages to abandon her mastership.Though Hendrik conducts a series of subversive actions, it will not change his otherness.Through the questions with which Magda bombards Hendrik, readers can empathize with the protagonist’s strong reluctance to eradicate this philosophy:

I am not simply one of the whites, I am I! [...] You know who I am, I don’t have to tell you! [...] What more do you want? Must I weep? Must I kneel? Are you waiting for the white woman to kneel to you? Are you waiting for me to become your white slave? [...] How can I humiliate myself any further? Must the white woman lick your backside before you will give her a single smile? Coetzee, , 118.

The thought necessitates the idea that “this is not Hendrik’s home,”which manifests that Magda, as an Afrikaner woman, regards the Karoo, or even South Africa itself, as her promised land, and denies the native’s ownership of their territory.However, to some extent, even Magda realizes the land is not acquired with peace and her forebears’ life on the farm is not as pastoral as she has imagined:

Did my father or my grandfather perhaps simply gallop up pistoled and bandoliered to the farmhouse one day,

out of nowhere

, and fling down a tobacco-pouch of gold nuggets, and shoo the schoolmistress out of the schoolhouse, and install his hinds in her place, and institute a reign of brutishness.The allegorical monologue implies that “the history of agricultural enclosure, as Raymond Williams demonstrates so well in

The Country and the City

, is a history not just of settlement but of displacement and exclusion.”To the native people, Magda’s ancestors came “out of nowhere” to their territory with resource-plundering and merciless killing, just like the question raised by Coetzee: “[F]or how can the farm become the pastoral retreat of the black man when it was his pastoral home only a generation or two ago?” Coetzee, , 5.Furthermore, Magda even briefly suspects her inheritance of the land by reckoning “but how real is our possession? [...] the land knows nothing of fences, the stones will be here when I have crumbled away [...]” Coetzee, , 114.Both of these moments, manifesting Magda’s temporary self-awareness of the concealed truth in her ancestry’s colonization, can be thought of as her sincere intention to overthrow the master-slave dichotomy, but it is not strong enough to eradicate her own mastery in dealing with the coloured servants.Coetzee speaks of Magda’s incompetence in overthrowing the dichotomy in an interview with Folke Rhedin:

At a certain point she tries to drop the master/slave relationship in favour of a relationship of equality which I think is entirely sincerely intended on her part.But it fails, and it fails because a mere effort of the will is not enough to overcome centuries of cultural and spiritual deformation. Folke Rhedin, “J.M.Coetzee: Interview,” 6, no.1 (1984): 7.

It is beyond Magda, not only because she is alone in seeking to transform the centuries-old deformation, but also in her incapacity to break away with the mentality of white supremacy to realize racial equality.In terms of the patriarchal and colonial mindset, Magda’s idealistic home with a benign father and fraternal servants is nowhere, leaving only the pathological self to witness her vain efforts in dealing with the master-slave dichotomies.

IV.Conclusion

Magda’s tragedy adds another dimension to Coetzee’s ambivalence about home, which is an opportunity to “trace the development of Coetzee’s self-questioning as a white writer and of his historical consciousness.” Jane Poyner, “Contexts and Criticism,” in ’Disgrace, eds.Laura Wright, Jane Poyner, and Elleke Boehmer (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2014), 6.Under the rampant censorship in South Africa in the 1970s, Coetzee, an Afrikaner descendant with a western-oriented academic background, was wrestling with the issue of home in

In the Heart of the Country

, not in the voice of an explorer of colonialism’s history, which he had done previously, but as a gravedigger of the hierarchic tradition in Afrikaner culture.Though the legacy of this tradition will not embody itself in massive violence and brutal killing, it does drive the people confined within it, such as Magda, into madness and make them go nowhere.