Parody: The South African Context

In part 2 of Dusklands Coetzee shifts attention from cultural anthropology to historiography. Eugene Dawn's counterpart is the editor and historian S. J. Coetzee, and his mythography is matched by S. J. Coetzee's white nationalist, pioneer history.^[8] Significantly, the dates given for the fictitious course of lectures by S. J. Coetzee at the University of Stellenbosch, from which the afterword is drawn, precisely mark the period of the rise of formal political power of Afrikaner nationalism under D. F. Malan, from the break with the Smuts-Hertzog Fusion government in 1934 to final electoral victory in 1948. J. M. Coetzee is therefore largely concerned with the discursive resources and the legacy of that achievement.

"The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee" is a collection of four documents: (1) the narrative itself, a first-person account of Jacobus Coetzee's journey and return; (2) the record of a second journey (also given by Jacobus Coetzee in the first person) under the leadership of Captain Hendrik Hop, amounting to a punitive raid on Jacobus Coetzee's deserted servants; (3) an afterword by S. J. Coetzee; and (4) an appendix, consisting of the "original" deposition or Relaas of 1760 by Jacobus Coetzee. As editor of Jacobus Coetzee's narrative and its official historian, S. J. Coetzee's role in the reproduction of historical data places him at the center of part 2; however, J. M. Coetzee, as "translator," is S. J. Coetzee's antagonist, for it quickly emerges that J. M. Coetzee subversively reproduces the work of S. J. Coetzee, both by dropping intertextual ironies and by actively rewriting the historical documents themselves; he thus explicitly breaks the conventionally neutral stance of translator.

The epigraph to part 2, "What is important is the philosophy of history," comes from a point in Flaubert's parodic Bouvard et Pécuchet when, having discovered the relatively arbitrary status of dates, the protagonists question the relevance of facts in general; this insight

provides the momentary certainty of "Ce qu'il y a d'important, c'est la philosophie de l'Histoire!" (190). Very soon, however, Flaubert's characters discard even this formula for other opinions. In Dusklands the formula emphasizes the fickleness of data and directs attention to the struggle over history. It is interesting that Coetzee should have returned to Bouvard et Pécuchet; his more modest subversion of the archives of the Van Riebeeck Society has, as one of its points of origin, Flaubert's subversion of the scientific documents of the Enlightenment, especially the encyclopedia.

The source of S. J. Coetzee's version of pioneer history could have been provided by one N. A. Coetzee, who in 1958 published in the journal Historia an essay entitled "Jacobus Coetzee: Die Boerepionier van Groot-Namakwaland."^[9] Whereas S. J. Coetzee is defensive and less than ingenuous (in the hands of J. M. Coetzee), the actual N. A. Coetzee is forthright in his treatment of the ancestral frontiersman: "Jacobus Coetzee was een van die merkwardigste persoonlikhede in ons pioniersgeskiedenis" (one of the most noteworthy figures in our pioneer history; 588). N. A. Coetzee drops phrases such as die binneland oop te maak (to open the interior), die voorposte van die beskawing (the outposts of civilization), and die wye onbekende van 'n eie vaderlandsbodem (a profound oxymoron, literally, "the wide unknown of one's own native soil") (593). Most pertinently, N. A. Coetzee argues that Jacobus Coetzee was resourceful in finding ways of exercising his "gesag as blanke… in 'n see van barbare" (authority as a white man in a sea of barbarians) when he approached the "Great Namaquas." His strategy involved keeping out of their camp, claiming the authority of the governor, and negotiating for safe passage in the vernacular (595). This version of the encounter, in relation to the experience of other explorers in the region, notably Carel Fredrik Brink and Hendrik Jacob Wikar, is atypically confrontational, but it is nevertheless N. A. Coetzee's account that endures in the parodic version in Dusklands itself (69–73). J. M. Coetzee's use of sources, in other words, would seem to be directly related to his critical intentions with respect to white nationalism, which found the confrontational version useful to its purposes.

It has been assumed since Peter Knox-Shaw's discussion of Coetzee's sources that the deposition or Relaas of Jacobus Coetzee (reproduced as an appendix to the novel) is the one authentic historical document in Dusklands and that the remaining sections are either fictitious or deliberately corrupted (27). This assumption is inaccurate, however, for Coetzee tampers substantially with the deposition as well. Apart from

minor but consistent alterations in dates and figures, Coetzee significantly omits from and adds to the document. Omitted (among other details that disturb narrative coherence) are references to the friendly disposition of the Namaquas; the fact that Jacobus Coetzee was allowed to pass through the territory without interference; that there was an exchange of gifts (oxen for links from his trek-chain; Wikar 285); and, finally, that he returned with one of the Namaquas who wished to get to the Cape (289)! (Needless to say, N. A. Coetzee omits most of these details as well, since they detract from the confrontational emphasis.) Still more startlingly, added to the deposition (in suitably imitative language) are two accounts of desertion, one involving an "envoy of the Damroquas [who] had not long ago met a treacherous end at the hands of servants afflicted for lack of pursuits with the Black Melancholy; that these servants had fled to the Namaquas he the narrator had first met and dwelt yet among them" (Dusklands 132). The other instance involves an episode in which Jacobus Coetzee was "deserted by his servants but not … disturbed by the aforementioned Namaquas" (133).

J. M. Coetzee therefore omits cordial exchanges from the record and adds desertion. The immediate purpose would seem to be to engineer a certain consistency: Jacobus Coetzee's first-person narrative at the start of part 2 also includes an episode of desertion. The deeper and more salient purpose, however, is that these alterations radically turn the narrative into a game of power. Desertion and its consequences are key components of the movement of the colonizer-self as it runs from assertion to debilitation, with Jacobus Coetzee delivering punishment to the wayward servants in an attempt to reconstitute his authority.

I shall track this movement more carefully in what follows, but the game of power would explain another, equally spectacular alteration. The actual Hop expedition was a fact-finding mission prompted by the original Coetzee's Relaas to investigate the economic prospects in the territory and to locate a people (the Herero) who "are tawny in appearance, with long hair on their heads and are clad in linen, and who it must be supposed are a civilised People" (Brink and Rhenius 5). J. M. Coetzee ignores this original purpose (although he uses details from the Brink expedition in constructing Jacobus Coetzee's narrative), making it a punitive raid on the servants who have taken up with the Namaquas. In rewriting the facts of the Hop expedition in this way, Coetzee seems to have picked up two specific incidents in the events of the actual journeys and conflated them. The first is the murder, during the return journey of the Hop expedition, of a servant named Ruyter by a certain Coenraad

Scheffer (in the novel, "Scheffer" rivals only Jacobus Coetzee in sadism). Ruyter refused an order to fetch water and a struggle developed in which he was stabbed; later the same night, Scheffer shot Ruyter while everyone was asleep. The official narrative of the expedition was amended to conceal the murder from the Chamber of Seventeen in Holland (Brink and Rhenius vii, 115). The second incident concerns an illegal trading expedition (twenty-two years before Jacobus Coetzee's) by a party of burghers; the fact of the expedition was discovered by the authorities when, on the return journey, the Hottentot servants, "with or without their masters' permission, returned armed, and robbed the Great Namaquas, killing seven of them" (Brink and Rhenius 94). As in "The Vietnam Project," in other words, J. M. Coetzee renders explicit what is relegated in the original documents to the borders of legality. "But I have nothing to be ashamed of," says Dawn; "I have merely told the truth" (38).

Knox-Shaw's objection that the "fictional narrative is distinguished throughout by a virtual effacement of economic motive" (28)—a position that has held currency (it is repeated by Teresa Dovey and Peter Kohler)—seems misplaced, therefore, in the light of what the revision of sources does achieve. But the observation is incorrect even on its own terms. The very opening paragraph of "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee" deals with the social consequences of the shift in white settlement from burgher to trekboer in the political economy of the eighteenth century, consequences that involved a developing competitiveness between the Boers and Khoisan over land and cattle. The narrative begins with the story of Adam Wijnand, the son of a servant who left home and established himself with "ten thousand head of cattle, as much land as he can patrol, a stableful of women" (61); this tale locates Jacobus Coetzee's bitterness immediately and precisely within this context. If, as Kohler argues (24–25), the background to the story of Adam Wijnand is the history of Adam Kok, then we must deduce that it was precisely to contextualize Jacobus Coetzee in this way that J. M. Coetzee was once again so deliberately cavalier with the historical record, for Coetzee would be omitting Kok's political career in order to emphasize the contest over resources. Jacobus Coetzee himself mentions the object of his journey—to find ivory—when negotiating with the Great Namaquas (75). In S. J. Coetzee's afterword we are also told of Jacobus Coetzee, on the banks of the Great River, dreaming "a father dream of rafts laden with produce sailing down to the sea and the waiting schooners" (128). One might go so far as to say that the novel's

depiction of the material context is subtle enough to be able to plot Jacobus Coetzee's economic options in terms of attempts to revive earlier practices in the colonial enterprise (a raid on natural resources followed by trade) in the face of the threat of impoverishment that the shift from mercantile capitalism to settler pastoralism entailed in the political economy of the Western Cape in the eighteenth century. It would be more accurate to say, however, that Coetzee's interests simply lie elsewhere.