Postmodernism and Postcolonialism

Any discussion of metafiction today must pay some attention to what has become known internationally as the postmodernism debate. This is essentially an argument over the political status of what Jean-François Lyotard calls postmodernism's "incredulity towards metanarratives" (xxiv). The argument I have conducted thus far, on the relationship between reflexivity and historicity, implicitly adopts a position in this debate, one that shares with Linda Hutcheon a certain regard for the "paradoxically worldly" condition of particular forms of postmodern writing (Politics of Postmodernism 2). My account of Coetzee's fiction, however, touches on the question of postmodernism only in medias res, for although Coetzee's oeuvre draws significantly on modernism and its legacy, its strength lies precisely in his ability to test its absorption in European traditions in the ethically and politically fraught arena of South Africa. The problem, in other words, is to understand Coetzee's postmodernism in the light of his postcoloniality.

Here we run immediately into difficulties with respect to the postmodernism debate because the cosmopolitanism of the debate has become an obstacle to understanding the unique features of postmodern literature in different regional contexts. How we theorize about postmodern literature produced on the periphery of colonialism must involve an interplay between metropolitan and nonmetropolitan sources, but the specificity of regional forms of postmodernism is vulnerable to misrepresentation in the international scene. (The postmodernism debate is perhaps itself an instance of the global, homogenizing spread of postmodernity, a process embodied, in this instance, in the academic book trade.) Neil Lazarus, in a valuable essay on contem-

porary white South African literature, illustrates this vulnerability. Lazarus applies Theodor Adorno's account of the critical potential of modernism to the writing of Gordimer, Coetzee, André Brink, and Breyten Breytenbach. In the course of argument the following point emerges:

This literature must now be defined not only by its negativity, but also by its marginality and acute self-consciousness. And one is tempted to ask whether a literature displaying these characteristics, and written after—and frequently even in the idiom of—Kafka and Beckett and, for that matter, Kundera, could be anything other than modernist; especially when it is borne in mind that as a discourse it is so ethically saturated, so humanistic in its critique of the established order, so concerned to represent reality, and so rationalistic that it would be quite inappropriate to describe it as postmodernist. (148)

I share Lazarus's appreciation of the ethical value of this writing, but what is puzzling is his insistence that it would be impossible for postmodernism in any form to achieve an ethical stance; indeed, Lazarus drives the point home in a footnote, saying that he would "go so far as to argue… that 'postmodernist' literature in South Africa could only be reactionary" and that an aesthetic of modernism, because of its "rational humanism," "might well exist as the only aesthetic on the side of freedom" (148). But in the case of two of the writers mentioned— namely, Coetzee and Breytenbach (to a lesser extent Brink)—the label "modernist" does not explain the fact that these writers have relied on major developments in the European novel since the nouveau roman in developing their own responses to the state of deadened moral consciousness produced by South African oppression. If the decadence of postmodernism is assumed, then the oppositionality of white South African writing can be substantiated only by identifying it with earlier forms of modernism; but as we have seen, this maneuver entails an anachronism. What Lazarus says about white South African writing, via Adorno's aesthetic theory, ought to enable us to challenge the by now orthodox view of postmodernism, which is informed by the essentially metropolitan experience of post-1968 disillusionment, its accommodation to the postindustrial age, and its subsequent celebration of relativist experimentation. The fact that South Africa does not share this experience does not mean that postmodernist techniques do not percolate through its literary culture, taking on new forms and acquiring a different animating spirit.

In other words, there is postmodernism and there is postmodernism. In Australia and New Zealand, Simon During, Helen Tiffin, and Stephen Slemon have developed an interesting critical discussion of the specificities of postcolonial literary practices, partly in response to what they see as a lack of regional sensitivity within Euro-American versions of the postmodernism debate. Slemon argues, for instance, that a great deal of the work being done in the name of postmodern literary studies remains unaware of the historically "grounded "strategies of "deessentialization" evident in postcolonial literatures; this ignorance of postcolonial literatures "is perhaps contributive to postmodernism's overwhelming tendency to present itself… as a crisis, a contradiction, an apotheosis of negativity" ("Modernism's Last Post" 14).

The unique contribution of these critics has been their attempt to clarify the range of situations and discursive strategies emerging in postcolonial literary cultures. During's point concerning what he calls the "crisis of emptiness" in "postcolonizing" (as opposed to "postcolonized") discourses is particularly relevant to the situation of white South African writing:

The crisis of postcolonialism is not just a crisis for those who bore the burden of imperialism: who have seen the destruction of their modes of production, the de-privileging of their language and the mutilation of their culture. It is also a crisis for those who have been the agents of colonialism and who, once colonialism itself has lost its legitimacy, find themselves without strong ethical and ideological support. (370)

The challenge facing these writers. During argues, is to find a language that encodes new forms of historical and ethical vision without unwittingly celebrating colonialism's material and epistemic capture of the colonized world and its traditions. Tiffin speaks of a "canonical counter-discourse" that is characteristic of writers in this situation ("Post-Colonial Literatures and Counter-Discourse" 22); elsewhere, she argues that canonical counterdiscourse, like nationalist literatures in which the recovery of identity is a more or less feasible project, "still promotes polyphony, eschews fixity, monocentrism and closure, interrogates concepts such as history and textuality, opposes oral to written formulations, but does so by inhabiting the absences or the oppositional 'positions' in the imperial textual record, and from these absences or oppositions interrogating its presence or fixity" ("Post-Colonialism" 176). Coetzee's carefully positioned metafictional constructions would certainly fit this description. Slemon has distinguished the forms of

reiteration such projects involve from those of the metropolitan postmodern strategies discussed by Hutcheon in her studies of metafiction; like metropolitan postmodernism, Slemon argues, postcolonialism involves a parodic repetition of dominant, imperial forms of textuality, but unlike it, postcolonialism—including its "postcolonizing" varieties—remains basically oppositional and retains a "referential" or "recuperative" relationship to national issues ("Modernism's Last Post" 7–9).

To continue the implicit direction of this discussion, one ought to make further distinctions with respect to South Africa (though Coetzee provides these scholars with several examples of their leading propositions), for it needs to be acknowledged that there are fewer grounds in South Africa for the degree of optimism evinced by Slemon concerning the critical capacities of "postcolonizing" literature. What During calls the "crisis of emptiness" remains a significant determinant of white South African writing, so that the limited, marginal option of consistently "eroding one's own biases," as Tiffin puts it ("Post-Colonial Literatures and Counter-Discourse" 32), emerges as an ethically appropriate strategy in the armory of the postcolonial writer. Coetzee has fine-tuned this strategy to the extent of making it a hallmark of his later fiction. The fact, however, that he has developed fictional forms that dramatize so acutely the limitations of their authority raises questions about Coetzee's national situation that need to be addressed in different terms.