Mastering arachnophobia: The limits of self-reflexivity in African fiction

Journal of Commonwealth Literature

Volumn 37, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 85-99

  Gaylard, Gerald ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF THE WITWATERSRAND   (South Africa)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950460855     PISSN: 00219894     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/002198940203700106     Document Type: Article

References (40)

1. J. M. Coetzee, The Master of Petersburg, London: Secker & Warburg, 1994. All subsequent relerences are to this edition and will be cited in the text
2. Rachel Lawlan provides examples of such reviews which tend to berate the novel for its labyrinthine obscurity and melancholic tone, "The Master of Petersburg: Confession and Double Thoughts in Coetzee and Dostoevsky", ARIEL, 29, 2 (1998), 131-57 (136)
3. See the following for just some examples of this characterization of African literature as increasingly expansive since independence: David Attwell, J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993
4. Ato Quayson,. Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing: Orality and History in the work of Rev. Samuel Johnson, Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka and Ben Okri, Oxford: Currey, 1997
5. Derek Wright,. "Introduction: Writer and Period", Contemporary African Fiction, ed. Derek Wright, Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies, 1997, pp.5-17
6. Coetzee critiques the unreflexive realism of Serote's To Every Birth Its Blood and Sepamla's Ride on the Whirlwind, "Grubbing for the Ideological Implications: A Clash (More or Less) with J. M. Coetzee", interview with A. Thorold and R, Wicksteed, Sjambok, Cape Town: University of Cape Town, n.d., pp,3-15
7. Ngugi wa Thiong'o particularly emphasizes contradiction and the "dialectically opposed", Writers in Politics, London: Heinemann, 1981, p.27
8. Michael Marais, drawing on Levinas in relation to J.M. Coetzee, argues that the ethical requires a generosity that resists dialectical notions of reciprocity and symmetry, " 'Little Enough, Less than Little: Nothing': Ethics, Engagement and Change in the Fiction of J.M. Coetzee", Modern Fiction Studies. 46,1 (2000), 159-82
9. This may be appropriate considering Deleuze and Guattari's image of the rhizome for postmodernism and Nugent's comments: This fictionalized web of intrigue is replicated in reality in a number of African countries. In Zaire, some of the most substantial fortunes that are made from clandestine trade accrue to those who are in government, including Mobuto himself Frequently, the local border official who colludes with smugglers is not moonlighting at all, but actually following orders! At the border, then, Weber tends to make way for the more ambiguous figure of Ananse . . . whereas Europeans thought of political space as a kind of chequer-board in which every state shared borders with others of its kind, the West African map looked more like a raisin bun with centres of political power interspersed between no man's lands and scatterings of decentralized polities . .. they also represented a wilderness into which dissidents could escape to bide their time before striking back ... It has often been noted that Africans imagined political space "as a structure of concentric circles of diminishing control, radiating from the core." Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p.39. Paul Nugent, "Arbitrary Lines and the People's Minds: A Dissenting View on Colonial Boundaries in West Africa" in African Boundaries: Barriers, Conduits and Opportunities, eds. Paul Nugent and A.I. Asiwaju, London: Pinter, 1996, pp.1-18
10. Jan Knappert examines the trickster in West African mythology, the relative of Shakespeare's clowns and the "brer rabbit" of African American stories, The Aquarian Guide to African Mythology Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1990, pp.25-6
11. Fredric Jameson suggests that capitalism is a global net repeatedly in "Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism", New Left Review, 146 (1984), 53-93
12. and particularly in "Culture and Finance Capital", Critical Inquiry 24,1 (1997), 246-65
13. Coetzee, J. M., Disgrace. London: Vintage, 2000. All subsequent references are to this edition
14. Peter Hitchcock, Dialogics of the Oppressed, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993, p.21
15. J. M. Coetzee, Boyhood: Scenes From Provincial Life. London: Secker & Warburg, 1997, p. 28
16. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, New York: Semiotext(e), 1983
17. Wright, "Introduction: Writer and Period", Contemporary African Fiction, p.14
18. Leon de Kock, "Reading History as Cultural Text", Alternation 2,1 (1995), 65-78 (66)
19. Christopher Nash, World Postmodern Fiction, London; Longman, 1987, p.242
20. J. M. Coetzee, "Confession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dosto-evsky (1985)", Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1992, pp.251-94. (p.251)
21. Ashraf Jamal, Love Themes for the Wilderness, Cape Town: Kwela Books, 1996, p. 130
22. M. G. Vassanji, The Book of Secrets, London: Macmillan, 1994, p.91
23. Mike Marais demonstrates this as part of Coetzee's "minimalist programme for prompting change", "Places of Pigs: The Tension between Implication and Transcendence in J. M. Coetzee's Age of Iron and The Master of Petersburg", JCL, 31,1 (1996), 83-96 (94)
24. Both Stephen Watson, "The Writer and the Devil: J. M. Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg", New Contrast, 22,4 (1994), 47-61
25. and Carol Brammage, A Study of J.M. Coetzee's Novel "The Master of Petersberg", with particular reference to its Confessional Aspects Unpublished Masters Thesis, University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2000, argue that the novel focuses on Dostoevsky's depression
26. Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox, London: Methuen, 1984
27. J. M. Coetzee, Giving Offence: Essays on Censorship. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1996, p.56
28. Ato Quayson, " Esoteric Webwork as Nervous System: Reading the Fantastic in Ben Okri's Writing", Essays on African Writing 2: Contemporary Literature, ed. Abdulrazak Gurnah, Oxford: Heinemann, 1995, pp.114-58 (p.155)
29. Jamal Mahjoub characteristically questions his own writing process thus: How do I begin? In order to tell a story you must first of all be in possession of the facts: what came before? which happened first? The entire landscape should ideally be stretched out before you with no shadowy vales or snaky clumps of trees waiting to waylay you . .. How am I to achieve this? Unless we are to resort to outright fairy tale invention a panoramic view is necessary. I am not God, and more to the point I am not a man who has devoted his life to learning the skills of the storyteller. My abilities in this area pale into insignificance alongside the craftsmanship of even the most minor rumour-monger who spreads his web in the dusty market places, surrounded by the straw and goat excrement of daily life. One must have a beginning and an end - I have neither. Time however is short and necessity dictates that a start be made. (Wings of Dust. London: Heinemann, 1994, p.3.)
30. Coetzee, Doubling, p.275
31. Dambudzo Marechera,. Mindblast, Gweru: Modern Press, 1989, p. 97. Subsequent references are to this edition
32. Marechera, "Throne of Bayonets", Mindblast, p.83
33. Biyi Bandele-Thomas, The Man Who Came in from the Back of Beyond, London: Heinemann, 1991, p.135
34. Stephen Slemon, "Unsettling the Empire: Resistance Theory for the Second World", World Literature Written in English, 30,2 (1990), 30-41 (31)
35. Attwell, J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing, p.5
36. Watson, "The Writer and the Devil", 53
37. Joseph Frank, in his Introduction to Crime and Punishment, notes that Dosto-evsky had "long been preoccupied with the question of crime and conscience and because, as a result of the attempt of the Russian radicals of the 1860s to establish morality on new and more 'rational' foundations, such questions had taken on a burning actuality", Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. Constance Garnett, New York: Bantam, 1986, p. ix
38. This criticism of ideological autocrats is common in African magical realism, as in Mia Couto's "The Secret Love of Deolinda" which attacks doctrinaire Marxism, Every Man is a Race London: Heinemann, 1993, pp. 110-113
39. or Bessie Head's A Question of Power, Oxford: Heinemann, 1974, p.132. Marais notes that there is typically tension between the political and the ethical in Coetzee's fiction, "Little Enough", 179
40. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, London: Picador, 1978, p.335. It should be pointed out that despite this apparent apotheosis of negation in the fragility and ephemerality of the parchments, the decipherment of the parchments does expose the absurd history of colonialism which is erased in order to open up the possibility of the "post-colonial"