J. M. Coetzee's Middle Voice

The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
Charting J. M. Coetzee's Middle Voice

Author(s): Brian Macaskill
Source: Contemporary Literature, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Autumn, 1994), pp. 441-475
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
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BRIAN
MACASKILL
ChartingJ. M. Coetzee'sMiddleVoice
... we are on the road from no A to no B in the world, if such a fate is

topologicallypossible....
J. M. Coetzee, In theHeartof the Country
n a sketch metaphoricallyoutlining the topology of recent

South African writing, the work of J. M. Coetzee might appropriately be placed somewhere in the middle of a topographical map-in the heart of the country, as it were. Coetzee's writing situates itself between: on the one hand, the less
novelistic and often "nonfictional" literary tradition long associated with black writing-poetry, autobiography, journalism, theater, and "protest" forms of short fiction-and, on the other hand,
the narrative legacy of liberal realism in white writing inherited
from Olive Schreiner and passed down through Alan Paton, Phyllis
Altman, Harry Bloom, Dan Jacobson, early Nadine Gordimer, and
a number of more recent novelists working in English or in
Afrikaans.
None of this should be taken to suggest that there have not appeared in print important novels by black South African writers,
nor am I insisting that Coetzee has somehow entirely escaped the
mantle of liberal realism, nor yet that other recent white writers
have not also challenged the tenets of liberal realism. Nevertheless,
Coetzee's distinctively South African blend of postmodern elements
from a cosmopolitan repertoire of the Latin American, European,
and North American avant-garde not only distinguishes him from
$1.50
0010-7484/94/0003-0441
ContemporaryLiteratureXXXV,3
? 1994 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

442
CONTEMPORARY
LITERATURE
that cosmopolitan avant-garde but also sets him apart from most of
his South African peers.1 There, apart from but among-in
between-his
peers, Coetzee seems flanked (on the topological left,
let us say) by histories of the dispossessed calling for action in
"nonfictional" forms or in collectivist rather than individualistic
narrative fictions, and flanked also (on the topological right, for
argument's sake) by mythopoeic narratives which-in the case of
several well-known Afrikaans writers, including Andre Brink and
Dalene Matthee-insidiously
represent and revise Afrikaner history.2 Situated between the extremities of black "nonfiction" and
Afrikaner mythography, and further surrounded by works with
historical affiliations to distinct ideologies of South African literary
the Black Consciousness of Mtutuzeli Matshoba
production-from
or Mongane Serote to the historical materialism of Nadine Gortakes up a narrative position
dimer's more recent work-Coetzee
in a time and place replete with the awareness that history may
"overtake" literary productions and thus affect the way those productions take place, causing them self-consciously to position or
reposition themselves.3
1. Writers like Ivan Vladislavic (Missing Persons, The Folly), Wilma Stockenstrom (Die
trans. TheExpeditionto the BaobabTree),and perhapsothers of their

Kremetartekspedisie;
generation are arguably situating themselves in a similar position.
2. Andre Brink insists in his expository prose on the identity of the Afrikaner as an
African and weaves this revisionist mythography into his fictions in ways I document in
"Interrupting the Hegemonic." Dalene Matthee's work provides another illustration of
such historical manipulation. Matthee generates sweeping panoramas in her historical
novels that, for example, trace the tribulations of poor Afrikaans woodcutters in a time
before apartheid-when archetypes, elephants, and ostriches regulated human behavior
(Fiela'sChild).
3. Thus, to cite only the most obvious of instances, the Soweto revolt of June 1976
brought about a profound transformation of South African history and transformed also
the literary consciousness of South African writers: the event metamorphosed fictional
works contemporaneously under production like Mongane Serote's To Every Birth Its
Blood and Nadine Gordimer's Burger'sDaughter; indeed, Gordimer herself refers to the
latter novel as a text "overtaken" by history ("Interview" 269). Quite clearly, the stylistic
rupture that takes place between parts 1 and 2 of To Every Birth Its Blood-from the
modernist representation of the protagonist's highly individualized consciousness in the
first part to the second part's representation of "the people" as a collectivity-is a direct
response to the events of the Soweto revolt; it is equally clear that the more equivocal
strategies of mediation in Gordimer's later fiction are stylistic responses to the marginalization of white writers by Black Consciousness and the passage of historical events that

M A C A S K I LL
443
From within this particular time and place, a time and place in
which, as Coetzee puts it, "the novel that supplements the history
text has attributed to it a greater truth than one that does not,"
Coetzee perversely takes up a counterposition that resists the "colonisation of the novel by the discourse of history" ("Novel Today" 2,
3). Coetzee explains himself this way: "in times of intense ideological pressure like the present, when the space in which the novel and
history normally coexist like two cows on the same pasture, each
minding its own business, is squeezed almost to nothing, the novel,
it seems to me, has only two options: supplementarity or rivalry"
(3). Refusing "supplementarity," a process in which the novel "operates in terms of the procedures of history and eventuates in conclusions that are checkable by history (as a child's schoolwork is
checked by a schoolmistress)," Coetzee argues for a "rival" practice
in which the novel is "prepared to work itself out outside the terms
of class conflict, race conflict, gender conflict or any other of the
oppositions out of which history and the historical disciplines erect
themselves" (3). Coetzee insists that he does not make these remarks "in order to distance [himself] from revolutionary art and
ally [himself] with those people who think there is nothing nicer
than cuddling up in bed with a novel and having a good old read,
people who, as they will say, see quite enough of reality on the
streets, thank you" (4). Nevertheless, signaling a heresy of sorts,
these remarks and the account they frame-an account that maintains storytelling as "more venerable than history, as ancient as the
a discourse scandalous to the place and
cockroach" (4)-engender
time they address and contribute ammunition to those (especially
those on the intellectual left in South Africa) who have accused
Coetzee (especially during the early to mid 1980s) of political quietism, of writing novels that willfully turn their backs to the allimportant contiguities between literary and historical-economicpolitical realities. From this perspective, Coetzee is charged with
producing fiction that is marginal to the reality of South Africa:
have placed white writers within South Africa on "very uncertain and uneven ground"
("Interview" 265). For more detail on history and Serote's novel, see Nicholas Visser. In
"Placing Spaces" I comment at greater length on Gordimer's historical placement, as
does Stephen Clingman in a more extensive study of the subject.

4444
CONTEMPORARY
LITERATURE
"distinguished throughout by a virtual effacement of economic motive" (Knox-Shaw 28), Coetzee's fictional projects "make no real
connection with forms of class struggle" nor offer any "basis for a
concern with objective social conflicts within industrial society"
(Vaughan 136). In his "studied refusal to accept historical responsibility" (JanMohamed 73) and by allowing his fiction to express
his "own revulsion" against "all political and revolutionary solutions" (Gordimer, "Idea" 6), Coetzee is doomed by such critics to
produce only an effete postmodernism "destined to remain the
vehicle for expressing the cultural and political dilemmas of a privileged class of white artists and intellectuals" (Rich 73). In sum, such
critics find the "agency" or "instrumentality" of Coetzee's writing
inadequate to the demands of South Africa's sociohistorical structure and associate this inadequacy with the self-consciously postmodern literary structure of his narratives.4
Despite a more recent critical trend in South Africa to speak of
Coetzee's writing in terms that rely more on the registers of poststructural theory than on those of historical materialism, and thus
despite an increasing willingness to speak of Coetzee with enthusiasm as an important participant in the heterogeneous proliferation
of worldwide postmodernisms, Coetzee's polemical "rejection" of
history would even now appear to mark his narrative practice as
marginal to the enterprise of much South African writing: either
because so much of this writing, black and white, is still fashioned
to complement notions of historical agency as formulated by theorists like Georg Lukacs,5 or-even more complicatedly-because
the
4. Though I shall later have occasion to use the words "agency" and "instrumentality" as technical terms from the registers of philosophy and linguistics, I use the terms
in a more general sense here. In this sense, the words are roughly synonymous: "agency"
thus here denotes instrumentality, a means of exerting power or influence.
5. In Doubling the Point, Coetzee remarks that "the general position" Lukacs adopts
"carries a great deal of power, political and moral, in South Africa today: one's first duty
as a writer is to represent social and historical processes; drawing the procedures of
representation into question is time-wasting; and so forth" (202). Doubling the Point
contains much of pertinence to the issues I address here. Unfortunately, it was published
after my essay was written, a circumstance that prevented me from making use of it at
an earlier stage. I have since tried, where possible, to incorporate some of the material
from the interviews it contains. Likewise, David Attwell's recently published study of
Coetzee postdates my writing; here I have been able only to gesture toward Attwell's

MACASKILL
445
newer, alternative modes of critical discourse in South Africa seek

in one way or another to reappropriate Coetzee's writing into the
folds of yet another history, a discursive history, the (predominantly European) history of poststructuralist vocabulary and its
variously dominant terms. In the first full-length specimen of such
latter studies, The Novels of J. M. Coetzee: Lacanian Allegories (1988),
Teresa Dovey submits Coetzee to those poststructurally interpretive practices denoted by the subtitle of her work. In the most
recently published study (1993), and in the editorial apparatus of
Doubling the Point (1992), David Attwell argues for a reading of
Coetzee's oeuvre "as a form of situational metafiction, with a particular relation to the cultural and political discourses of South
Africa in the 1970s and 1980s" (J.M. Coetzee 3). Acknowledging that
his argument goes 'Against the drift of Coetzee's argument" in
"The Novel Today" (17), Attwell nevertheless advertises his "schematically" developed case (3) as an exploration of "the relationship
between history and fiction in theoretical terms that seem to be
appropriate for the kind of fiction Coetzee's novels actually represent" (17). Attwell's "theoretical terms," in brief, pointedly situate
themselves at the margins of dominant poststructural discourses,
seeking thereby to distance Coetzee's practice from "the spirit of
abandonment that seems to typify much of what goes under the
name" of postmodernism (Doubling the Point 3). Coetzee confronts
the postmodern crisis, argues Attwell, by responding to political
history, or at least to historical configurations of power, including
the consciousness of poststructural figurations, to whose "skepticism and symptomatic sensitivity" Coetzee adds a conscience,
"searching for ways in which the novel might recover an ethical
basis, in full appreciation of the political context" (4).6
work, despite an overlap in our concerns, if not in our procedures. I address more
directly Attwell's contributions to Doubling the Point and to Coetzee scholarship in "The
Point of Autobiography."
6. Likewise, in A Story of South Africa, Susan VanZanten Gallagher seeks by way of a
"critical ethics" to "resituate Coetzee's fictions in their discursive moments" and to
examine "how his novels respond to the discursive practices of South Africa" (xi; ix-x).
The fourth extant book-length study of Coetzee, Dick Penner's Countries of the Mind,
indicates "linguistic analysis" as "Possibly the most challenging topic" awaiting "future
consideration" of Coetzee's fiction (xv-xvi). Penner does not, however, attempt to pro-

446
CONTEMPORARY
LITERATURE
What such debate serves to underscore is the extent to which

Coetzee's work may be thought of as medial and marginal at the
same time: South African literature is "marginal" to central AngloAmerican traditions, and Coetzee's central, "medial" preoccupations with peripheral, "marginal" subjects and circumstances-that
is, matters "marginal" to what some of his critics see as "central" to
"the reality" of South Africa-position
his work within boundaries
of value that themselves get variously reconfigured at local and
international levels. To complicate further the configurations of
value and evaluation gestured toward above as contingent upon
audience, marketplace, geopolitical boundaries, and perceptions of
the function of literature, Coetzee's writing tantalizingly violates
borders between narrative illusion and the discursive codes of linguistics, literary theory, and metacriticism in ways that have become increasingly familiar since the advent of poststructuralism, a
body of theoretical practices and constructs in relation to which
Coetzee's writing may be situated-medially,
or marginally.
Coetzee's literary and discursive acts of self-positioning thus
transgressively extend over a wide domain and cross levels articulated by the political, the aesthetic, and the linguistic. This essay
will approach Coetzee's fiction initially by way of the most narrowly focused of these levels, that of linguistics, some of whose
peculiarities afford a metaphorical base from which the significance of Coetzee's acts of positioning may be extrapolated to comment suggestively on the politics or protopolitics of postmodernism
and contemporary literary theory. My argument will pursue its
ends figurally-by way of topological tropes-rather than by allegorizing particular traces of sociopolitical "meaning" from the
novels, a project frequently and-for reasons I shall imply before
closing-mistakenly attempted by many of Coetzee's more supportive commentators at home and abroad.
vide such an analysis. Indeed, with the possible exception of Attwell's work, the four
studies mentioned here and above have not substantially advanced by way of linguistic
inquiry what Stephen Watson referred to as Coetzee's "critique of colonialism" (371). As
early as 1986, Watson pointed out that Coetzee "obviously wishes to register the impact
of colonialism" at the "basic level of language itself" (373), and that the "deconstruction
of realism" this project entails is itself "[a politicized] act of decolonization" (374).

M A C A S K I LL
447
Specifically, this essay will situate itself around Coetzee's explicitly voiced preoccupation with the notion of writing in the middle
voice, that "category of thought" Aristotle refers to as keisthai or
positionality, and which Emile Benveniste transposes into a category of language that indicates the linguistic state "to be placed"
(etre en posture or etre dispose) (Benveniste 66; 70). Taking the poetics
of middle voice as a particularly compelling juncture in the metaphorics of the margins and medians whereby Coetzee situates himself and lets his fiction take place, this study will suggest that
Coetzee's practice reveals much of importance to literary theory
and the placements theory seeks to make. Refusing to denigrate
Coetzee's project as an escapist retreat from history and political
culture, the contextualized "taking place" of this writing, I argue
instead that Coetzee's act of "doing-writing" in the middle voice
to the materialist
cogently represents a crucial-critical-response
still
the
that
dominates
articulation
of cultural polihistoriography
tics in South Africa.7 Coetzee's doing-writing, in other words-and
in words other than those employed by most contemporary histoa compellingly important encounrians of South Africa-provides
of
ter with the time and place
its birth. Furthermore, this essay will
that
Coetzee's
marginal-medial encounter with its literary
suggest
and intellectual context-a context imbued with the local antagonism between neo-Marxists and deconstructionists in South Africaalso importantly engages the antinomy between structure and
agency that attends literary theory internationally and that has
recently been foregrounded once again by border skirmishes in the
United States between linguistically based poststructuralism(s) and
a variety of reconstituted historicisms.
7. In a conference paper delivered at the Universite de Nice, June 1991, Coetzee

explicitly prefaced his remarks on "the spread of racist thinking" by announcing his
presentation as "part of a larger quarrel with materialist historiography, a form of
storytelling that dominates the field in South Africa" ("Spread"2); the published version
of Coetzee's conference paper omits this prefatory remark but provides instead a more
detailed critique of particular "materialist explanations" ("Mind" 6). See also Macaskill
and Colleran, "Interfering with 'The Mind of Apartheid.'"

448
CONTEMPORARY
LITERATURE
1 *
Following Coetzee's habitual procedure, my approach to what is
identified above as the central core of concern to this essayCoetzee's narrative practice and its pertinence to theory, the practice of speculating on practice-enters
from marginal apertures
and follows an oblique path. As opening text, then, I take Coetzee's
'A Note on Writing," which itself opens a collection of writings on
South African culture and letters, and curiously so. Whereas its
companion pieces by other South African writers are more or less
autobiographical essays that explicitly discuss writing from personal perspectives as the work of cultural politics and so on, Coetto an incipizee's opening entry is entirely-and
coyly-devoted
brief
meditation
on
the
and
technical
peculiarities of
yet very
ently
the middle voice.8 "Though modern Indo-European languages retain morphologically distinct forms for only the active-passive opposition," Coetzee tells us, "the phantom presence of a middle voice
(a voice still morphologically present in Ancient Greek and Sanskrit) can be felt in some senses of modern verbs if one is alert to the
possibility of the threefold opposition active-middle-passive" (11).
Indubitably aware of Jacques Derrida's contribution to this discussion, but most directly following Roland Barthes, who in turn relies
on the linguistic annotations of Emile Benveniste, Coetzee expresses
his fascination with the middle-voice possibilities of the verb to
write:
To write (active) is to carry out the action without referenceto the self,
perhaps,though not necessarily,on behalf of someone else. Towrite (middle) is to carry out the action (or better, to do-writing) with reference to
the self. Or-to follow Barthes in his metaphorical leap from grammar to
meaning-"today to write is to make oneself the centre of the action of la
parole;it is to effect writing in being affected oneself; it is to leave the writer
8. Reprintedin DoublingthePoint,'A Note on Writing"loses therethe significanceof

its originalplacementas the initial essay in a collectionby severalhands. However,its
re-placementin the later text also re-emphasizesthe essay's significance to Coetzee's
thought and practice:when David Attwell implies in the interview precedingits new
appearancein Doublingthe Pointthat the "politicalaspect" of this essay has been rendered anachronisticby more recentdevelopments,Coetzee respondsby saying that he
has "no desire to distance [himlself from"the "Note"(63-64).

MACASKILL
449
(le scripteur)inside the writing, not as a psychologicalsubject... but as the

agent of the action."
(11)
The "Note" says little more than this but speaks volumes in its
reticence. Coetzee claims not to know "Whether Barthes's essay is
best thought of as a piece of speculative linguistics or as academic
propaganda for a post-modernist practice of writing" (11-12):
Perhapsit is of no more value than as a demonstrationof how deeply a
literaryconceptioncan be embedded (metaphorically)in linguisticcategories (arethereany deeper linguistic categoriesthan those of tense, person,
voice?).
(12)
Despite or because of Coetzee's reluctance to provide further details, I supply below an informally linguistic context for this middleness; however, the linguistic sketch I am about to provide should
not be viewed as an explanation, but rather as a "following" of the
kind Coetzee himself undertakes.9
The middle voice is nowhere evident as a morphological feature
of English; nor is ergativity, another set of linguistic characteristics
that curiously affects functions of transitivity and that is therefore
often associated with the middle voice.10 Nevertheless, some linguists claim to find syntactical and semantic evidence for the middle
voice and ergativity in English.11
9. By way of a practice explicitly designed to rival materialist "explanations" of the
spread of apartheid, for example, Coetzee adopts in his account of that spread a "reading position" that is "not a position at all" but what he can "only call a following" ("Mind"
30). In "The Mind of Apartheid" Coetzee undertakes a "following" of the madness in the
thought of Geoffrey Cronje, an early theoretician of apartheid. Coetzee's "following"
thus follows the language of Cronje's "ravings, from inside" (3), and in so doing displays
and displaces the metonymic transmission of racist metaphors. Likewise, though less
explicitly so, Coetzee undertakes in 'A Note on Writing" what could be described as a
metonymic "following" of the "science" (or metaphorics) of linguistic speculation into
the middle voice. That is, Coetzee appends his reflections to those of a list of contributors that stretches from Aristotle (Categories,esp. ch. 4) to Emile Benveniste (Problemesde
linguistique generale1: 63-74; 168-75), Roland Barthes ("To Write"), and Jacques Derrida,
who contributes to the discussion between Benveniste and Aristotle in "The Supplement
of Copula: Philosophy before Linguistics" (Margins of Philosophy 175-205).
10. For a thorough overview of ergativity, see R. M. W. Dixon.
11. See, for example, Samuel Keyser and Thomas Roeper (from whom I draw most of

450
CONTEMPORARY
LITERATURE
The highly specialized details of such linguistic inquiry are of no

concern to my argument; but in the interests of establishing metaphoric grounds for subsequent discussion, I call attention to some
features of syntax and agency in the sentences that follow.
(la) John sings. (Intransitive)
(lb) John hit the dog. (Transitive)
While the transitive-intransitive opposition in sentence pair (1) is

clear and straightforwardly determined by elementary patterns of
syntax, transitivity does not fully explain the relation between sentences such as (2a) The sun melted the ice, and (2b) The ice melted,
nor between (3a) Someone translated the book, and (3b) The book
translates easily [or well]. This is so for the relatively simple but
provocatively suggestive reason that, under certain conditions, semantic agency more obviously appears to operate at a different
level of theory than that governed by syntactical structure; speaknot as a linguist might-one
could say that
ing informally-and
the
determination
of
structure.
sometimes
escapes
agency
Agency is elided most obviously in the short form of the passive
voice, a construction Coetzee has submitted to extensive linguistic
and rhetorical scrutiny.12 Although there is considerable evidence
my example sentences) and Beth Levin (who illustrates several French examples to
which I am indebted).
12. Citing examples from Daniel Defoe's RobinsonCrusoe,Coetzee points out that
short passive formulations such as "Calamities are shared among the upper and lower
classes of mankind"cannot legitimatelybe thought of as being linguisticallyderived

from either the active and agent-specificsentence, "God shares calamitiesamong the
upper and lower parts of mankind,"nor from the long form of the passive in which
agency is also specified: "Calamities are shared by God among the upper and lower
parts of mankind" ('Agentless Sentence" 28). In brief, Coetzee argues linguistically that
the agentless form of the short passive has a derivation distinct from otherwise similar
forms of the active and long passive: the short passive is "the realization of an underlying form in which the (so to speak) missing agent is not represented at all, or is represented only in the most rudimentary form as being either animate or inanimate" (28).
Providing further examples from Samuel Beckett, Henry James, Jonathan Swift, and
Edward Gibbon, Coetzee goes on to observe that the short passive "opens up an area of
vagueness ... which can be explored and exploited for his own ends by a writer who
takes seriously the question of whether language is a good map of reality" (29). The
linguistic observations thus contribute toward an argument concerning the use of agent-
less sentences as rhetoricaldevice, and-among other corollaries-the argumentmandates a recognition of "the distinction between a syntactic operation and a rhetorical

M A C A S K I LL
451
that the short form of the passive is not transformationally derived

from its active or long passive counterparts, commonsense thinking
will most likely render this agentless form in syntactic terms, recognizing in it a syntax wherein the agentive or instrumental phrase
has been "omitted."Do Coetzee's ("materialist")critics not make a
closely related mistake by thinking of his novels as works from
which "history" (as conceived of by materialist historiography) has
been "omitted,"instead of recognizing here an entirely "rival,"alternately derived form of expression? And does not even Attwell's
more recent reading-an alternative to the orthodoxy of materialist
critique-abnegate the possibilities of seriously considering Coetzee's expressive practice as a rival to the discourse of history, favoring instead an analysis determined to uncover a deep-structure
discourse of history from which Coetzee's narrative expression is
supposed transformationally to derive?
These questions prompt further consideration of middle-voice
linguistics. For even more peculiarly than the passive, middle-voice
constructions offer some fascinating instances of anomalous interplay between agency and structure. In sentences such as (la) and
(Ib) above, for example, the syntactical subject of the sentence is
identical to the semantic agent of the sentence; this is also the case
in the transitive sentences (2a) and (3a). But such an identity need
not prevail in all cases. In sentences (2b) and (3b), the noun in
subject position is not the agent but the theme of the verb; or better
perhaps: in (2b) and (3b) the noun in subject position is subjected to
a (literally) absent agent and can only metaphorically act as agent
upon itself. Sentences (2b) and (3b) are thus different from (la),
although all three appear to be intransitive.
For reasons that once again are not of paramount concern here,
sentences such as "The ice melted" are linguistically identifiable as
ergative and so distinguished from the middle construction of sentences such as "This book translates easily," whose "middleness" is
operation whose vehicle is syntactic" (31). In Doubling the Point, Coetzee returns to the
"dilemma raised by a sentence like A shot was fired.'" "Either agency is not thought [in
this sentence], or agency is thought and then deleted," he writes here, pointing out that
"it is the first case that really teases thought. For one can say act without agent, but how
does one think act without agent?" (145).

45
CON
T E MPORA
RY
LITERATURE
more readily discernible in languages that employ a morphologically marked form of the reflexive verb (for example French: "Ce
livre se traduit facilement"; compare with the active form, "I1traduit ce livre," and with the passive, "Ce livre a ete traduit").13The
middle voice is thus invariably associated with reflexivity and is
indeed morphologically marked by a reflexive form of the verb in
those languages that allow such marking. In English, which does
not mark the verb in this way, reflexivity is nevertheless implied
by the middle voice ("The book translates [itself] easily [through
the implied agency of a translator]"). Another observation that
emerges repeatedly in linguistic accounts of the middle voice and
that will be of use to an application of a middle-voice metaphorics
in Coetzee's writing is that middle-voice expressions seem incapable of referring to particular events in time.14 This inability, one
might speculatively venture, suggests that middle-voice locutions
cannot be made to relate to "history" in the sameway as active- and
passive-voice locutions do.
Reflexivity and the evasion of representation as the representation of historical event in any direct sense are emblematic characteristics of Coetzee's fiction, the most obvious signs of this fiction's
links to middle-voice utterance. But above all, the metaphorical
value to Coetzee of the middle voice as linguistic phenomenon
must surely reside in that dissimulative persistence and resistance
of agency occasioned by middle-voice utterance. Specifically, as
13. The mere presenceof the reflexivemarkerse in "middlevoice"sentencessuch as
"Celivrese traduitfacilement,"or "Celivrese vend bien,"however,does not necessarily
signal the middle voice, whose characteristicsare most compellinglydefined in relation
to notions of semantic agency ratherthan by way of morphology or syntax. Accordingly,Levin cites "Lesenfantsse lavent [Thechildrenwash themselves]"as an example
of simple reflexivity but argues for the recognitionof middle voice in "Ces livres se
vendent bien [Thesebooks sell well]."
14. One of the most interestingcriteriaused to distinguish between ergative and
middle constructionsand also between middle and passive constructionsis that middle
verbs cannot comfortablybe made to refer to particularevents in time. Ergativeand
passive constructionsmay referto an actualevent:The ice melted yesterdayat 8:15;Ces
lunettesont ete nettoyeeshier a huit heureset quart(Theseglasses were cleanedyesterday at 8:15).Implyinga generic,habitual,or potentialinterpretation,middle constructions are not as amenableto such modification:?Yesterday,the book translatedeasily,
accordingto the newspaper;*Ceslunettes se sont (facilement)nettoyees hier a huit
heures et quart (*Theseglasses cleaned [easily] yesterdayat 8:15).

M A C A S K I LL
453
shown above, semantic agency is typically determined by syntactical structure, except in those utterancesthat most closely resemblearticulations of the middlevoice. In these latter cases, agency appears
to escape the determination of syntax, and-most interestinglycannot obviously be linked to structures of transitivity or intransitivity.
That Coetzee is especially fascinated by the determinism of linguistic structure and by efforts to escape such determinism-by
the possibilities of "writing through" deterministic structure, one
might say-can be further substantiated by pursuing yet another of
Coetzee's discursive pursuits: an inquiry into the notion of a transparent scientific language and Isaac Newton's relationship to this
ideal of perspicacity. In "Newton and the Ideal of a Transparent
Scientific Language," which picks up where an earlier and more
technical study, "The Rhetoric of the Passive in English," leaves off
and which builds on material documented in "The Agentless Sentence as Rhetorical Device," Coetzee comments on Newton's inability-when not working with mathematical symbols-to express
the general law of gravitation without recourse to the metaphor of
"attraction"or some synonym thereof (5). Figuratively explaining
gravity as an attraction between bodies, Newton scandalized colleagues like Christiaan Huygens and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, who respectively denounced the principle of gravitational attraction as "absurd" and "occult," and who felt that with this
formulation Newton was turning his back on the achievements of
mechanistic philosophy: by attributing agency and even volition to
celestial bodies, Newton was reverting to the animistic explanations of medieval science ("Newton" 5-7). The linguistic problem
here, as Coetzee renders it, is that-in both Latin and EnglishNewton's expression falls prey to "the link between syntactic subjecthood and semantic agency" (8). The link is one "not easily broken": it commits Newtonian explanation to those agentive or instrumental readings that so disturbed Huygens and Leibniz. Aware
of this problem, Newton responds by making use of the passive
voice, whose virtue in this context-to stand committed neither to
agentive nor to instrumental readings-glosses over the problem
but also glosses, or comments upon, the difficulty, becomes complicit with it, calls attention to the character of the problem: the

454
CONTEMPORARY
LITERATURE
"solution" of passivity itself dissolves into the difficulty it is intended to solve-the

"dense complicity between thought and lan(9).
guage"
Had Newton worked in a radically different medium from Latin
or English, Coetzee wonders, might he have been better able to do
justice to his thought?
One might suggest, for example, that if Newton regardedthe agentiveinstrumentalopposition as a red herring, an opposition forced upon him
by elementarylinguistic structuresand at best glossed over by means of
rhetoricaltricks, then what he needed for a proper discussion of gravity
was a language which at this elementarylevel genuinely did not distinguish between agent and instrument.Such a language is conceivable....
But if one tries for a moment the (literallymind-bending)experimentof
locatingoneself within such a language,one can see that the entirecontroversy over occult causes would never have occurred,simply because from
inside the language the distinctionsthat people like Leibnizwere making
would have been unnaturalor even invisible.
(9)
? 2
The two acts of speculative linguistics outlined above-Coetzee's

reflections on doing-writing in the middle voice and on Newton's
linguistic attempt to escape apparently inherent constraints of synfirst glance might
tax by reconfiguring language from within-at
I propose their
fiction.
to
concerns
of
Coetzee's
the
appear marginal
centrality. Coetzee's linguistic investigations do much more than
reveal a fascination with peripheral quirks of language: they establish the rhetorical ground for a figural practice in which metaphor
takes the performative role of antagonist to structurally paired
regard to whether it is "history" or "art" or "theplayers-without
or
"practice" that is assumed to direct the pairings.
ory"
Since the beginnings of recorded speculation on literary matters,
when Plato mandated a recognition of difference among registers
of representation and knowledge, the borderlines between the literary and the discursive have been reinterpreted time and time again.
But their disjunctive bordering is what has most commonly been
reiterated. As a result, it has seemed self-evidently the case to many
theorists that the literary must somehow be accounted for as an

M A C A S K I LL
455
aesthetically "intransitive" utterance forever removed from the

transitivity of more "practical" communications; or-just as selfevidently by those who would reconfigure the borderline-that the
literary is itself an especially privileged locus of transitivity, which
it renders more significantly than other forms of institutionalized
discourse.15 What unites these two apparently disparate positions
is their articulation within a theoretical "language" whose conceptual structure seems inevitably complicit with the literary/
discursive opposition it seeks to negotiate by means of its "grammar," a grammar "naturally" based on transitive or intransitive
patterns of complementarity. However, if-as I shall argue-Coetzee's project involves an attempt to revise from within language the
"naturalness"of such oppositions between the literary and the discursive, to render thereby unnatural ("oreven invisible") the distinctions between transitive and intransitive, active and passive,
theoretical speculation and literary practice in theseterms,then the
items of speculative linguistics referred to above cease to be marginal appendages to his novels and have to be reconfigured in terms
of the centrality from which they were previously imagined to be
displaced.16
15. Coleridgeand Wordsworthconvenientlyprovideexemplarypositions. Following
the lead of Kant'sCritiqueof Judgment,Coleridgein On thePrinciplesof GenialCriticism
and from the "good."The lattertwo
distinguishesthe "beautiful"fromthe "agreeable,"
categories,he argues,"bothact on the will, and excite a desirefor the actualexistenceof
the image or idea contemplated,"while "the sense of beauty rests gratified"in disinterestedcontemplation(466).Poeticlanguageparticipatesin the beautifuland is defined
in Coleridge'sBiographia
Literariaas "thatspecies of composition,which is opposed to
works of science, by proposingfor its immediate
objectpleasure,not truth"(471).In the
"Prefaceto the SecondEditionof LyricalBallads"
Wordsworthalso distinguishes"poetry"
from "matterof fact,or science"using an intuitionof (in)transitivityas the fundamental
criterionfor such distinction. But Wordsworthrelocatesintransitivityto the isolated
or transitivityfor poetry:
domainof scientificactivityand appropriates"connectiveness"
althoughthe "knowledgeboth of the poet and the man of science is pleasure,"scientific
knowledgeis individualand isolated ("slowto come to us, and by no habitualand direct
sympathyconnectingus with our fellow beings"),while poetic knowledgeis communal
and connective (it "cleavesto us as a necessary part of our existence,our naturaland
unalienableinheritance"[439]).
16. The "centrality"to which I referis of course a figural centralityin two senses of
the term:metaphorand metonomy are figures centralto Coetzee'sthought;moreover,
these linguisticvehicles (middlevoice, the rhetoricof the passive, metaphor,metonomy,
and so forth)constitutea center"only"figurallyor metafigurallyin a system of thought

456
CONTEMPORARY
* 3
?3
LITERATURE
Nowhere is the metaphorical centrality of these "marginal" linguistic concerns more compellingly displayed than in the narrative
permutations of Coetzee's second novel, In the Heart of the Country,
whose pages have already provided me with an epigraph hinting at
new topological possibilities, and which now prompts a closer
mapping of Coetzee's narratological scandals.
With In the Heart of the Country, Coetzee offered South Africa its
second homegrown and exemplary specimen of the postmodern
novel, an event already prepared for by the earlier publication of
Dusklands. Like those of Dusklands, In the Heart of the Country's
claims to authority are bold and self-consciously seek entitlement
for the South African novel to a cosmopolitan avant-garde.17 But, as
I have already indicated, Coetzee's gestures of authority are polemical, and for many of his critics this text negligently lays insufficient
claim (or no claim at all) to the paramount authority of those historical and political "realities" that condition South African existence;
its utterance, such critics imply, is insufficiently transitive.
The uncertain events of In the Heart of the Country are focalized
through the introverted consciousness of an aging, unattractive
spinster by the name of Magda, who lives on her father's farm "in
the heart of nowhere" (4), "on the road from no A to no B in the
world, if such a fate is topologically possible" (19). The unreliability
of Magda's account-given
to us in 266 numbered sections that
come in presentation to resemble the formal apparatus of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as much as they resemble undated diary entries or as much as they resemble a catalogue to an
that antisystemicallydefers any notion of stable and permanentcenteredness.Hence
Coetzee's linguistic practice may be aligned with that deconstructionexemplified in
Derrida's"Structure,Sign, and Play,"since the play of differance
Derridadescribesthere
neitherdenies the conceptof centernor yet disablesthe differenceit bringsinto beingby
displacingthe center,spreadingcenterto peripheryand makingthe marginalcentral.In
otherwords,differance
is itself a shiftingof placementand displacement-a metaphorof
metonymy.
17. Coetzee's novel titles are all emblematicin ways that reflect their engagement
with other literary works and that precociouslysignal their claims of entitlement to
participatein a wider (and international)domain of literaryhistory.Formore detail on
authority and entitlementin Coetzee's writing see Macaskilland Colleran, "Reading
History,WritingHeresy."

M A C A S KI L
457
thus first and

exhibition of photographs in massive montage-is
foremost an unreliability guaranteed by hybrid representation: it is
not at all clear to what genre or even mix of genres this writing
belongs.18
Furthermore, what Magda records is everywhere marked by
signs of doubt, erasure, denial, and speculation. "TODAY my father
brought home his new bride," the opening section begins:
They came clip-clopacrossthe flats in a dog-cartdrawnby a horsewith an
ostrich-plumewaving on its forehead,dusty after the long haul. Or perhaps they were drawn by two plumed donkeys, that is also possible. My
fatherwore his blackswallowtail coat and stovepipe hat, his bride a widebrimmedsunhat and a white dress tight at waist and throat.Moredetail I
cannot give unless I begin to embroider,for I was not watching.
(1)
But the "embroidering" has already begun, as we are forced to

recognize when Magda proceeds to ax her father and his new bride
to death (11) before we learn that her father "does not die so easily
after all" (16) and are confronted with a duplicate scene of homecoming in which Hendrik, the farm laborer, brings home his new
bride in a donkey cart, having "bought her from her father for six
goats and a five-pound note, with a promise of five pounds more,
or perhaps of five goats more, one does not always hear these
things well" (17). Hendrik's marital homecoming appears to deny
the opening scene and its subsequent occasion of intrigue between
the homestead's "rival mistresses" (7) that culminates in the axmurder, and appears to set in its place an unfolding of how Magda's
father takes Hendrik's new wife as lover, prompting Magda to kill
him (again?) with a rifle shot as he lies in bed with Anna, Hendrik's
bride (61). Although a psychologically based hermeneutics could
perhaps impose coherence on such events and explain away a final
appearance of Magda's father on the homestead porch (135) while
18. The similarities in presentation between these entries and those of a diary or
those of a philosophical treatise in the manner of Wittgenstein are self-evident. In
Doubling the Point, Coetzee explicitly identifies the extent to which the presentation of
Magda's narrative was influenced by montage techniques of "film and/or photography," though he hastens to add that In the Heart of the Country is "no screenplay" (59-60).
The latter disavowal further substantiates the hybrid nature of this work's presentation.

458
CONTEMPORARY
LITERATURE
Magda attempts to converse with flying machines that speak to her

in an amalgam of Indo-European languages she mistakes for Spanish, it remains the case that "perhaps" is itself just one of many
signs by which Magda is known and by means of which she has
herself come to speculate about sign languages and their "nuances
of tune and tone," their "gaps and absences whose grammar has
never been recorded" (7).19 A reading of this novel, then, must
attempt to record the "grammar"of the signs Coetzee uses rhetorically to place Magda in a text most strikingly marked by the absence of "historical"reference in the coding of its representation.
Pointing out that her "life is not past" and that her "art cannot
[thus] be the art of memory" (43), that "Lyricis [her] medium, not
chronicle" (71), Magda acknowledges herself as one of "the castaways of history" caught in the tautology of a "desolate eternal
present" (135;114 [115]).20"History is God," she says, but "I am I,"
and "my story is my story" (5). But "With cunning and treachery"
Magda nevertheless "fight[s] against becoming one of the forgotten
ones of history" (3). Reminiscent of that figure in Coetzee's "The
Novel Today" whereby storytelling is described as "morevenerable
than history, as ancient as the cockroach," Magda characterizes
herself as one of those "melancholy spinsters ... lost to history, blue
as roaches in our ancestral homes" (3), and as "a thin black beetle
with dummy wings who lays no eggs and blinks in the sun, a real
puzzle to entomology" (18).As storytelling cockroach she makes up
her stories, succumbs to them-"I make it all up in order that it
shall make me up" (73)-but also struggles with them, wondering
19. "Perhaps" is one of the text's most prevalent terms. It occurs no less than eleven
times, for instance, in two passages that total only twenty lines in section 149 of the
novel (79-80). Dust, Marion Hansel's film adaptation of In the Heart of the Country,
smooths over much of the novel's uncertainty by recasting Magda's account in predominantly psychological terms. Hansel abandons the (numbered) sequence divisions of the
novel and follows a sequencing of her own creation. The sequential numbering of
Coetzee's divisions, however, is precisely what foregrounds the discontinuity of Magda's
being. Coetzee says of the divisions in the novel that they are numbered "as a way of
pointing to what is not there between them" (Doubling 59).
20. I have been citing page numbers (within parentheses) from the South African
edition published by Ravan Press; up to this point these page numbers have coincided
with those from the Penguin edition. Here they do not, and the Penguin numbers are
enclosed within square brackets, as they shall henceforth be to mark the difference.

M A C A S K ILL
459
along the way "whether a speculative history is possible, as a speculative philosophy, a speculative theology, and now, it would appear, a speculative entomology are possible, all sucked out of my
thumb, to say nothing of the geography of the stone desert and
animal husbandry" (19). 'And economics," she ponders immediately after, "how am I to explain the economics of my existence,
with its migraines and siestas, its ennui, its speculative languors?"
(19).
Scandalous talk, for a white South African. Magda is placed neither by reference to the particularities of history (the novel's action
is only vaguely located around the turn of the century in a diction
replete with anachronisms) nor by reference to the economic realities that would otherwise define her time and place with greater
socioeconomic verisimilitude. In fact, Magda is presented as one
who has spent "all [her] life in the economic dark" (17). Vainly
she tries to meet the servants' demands for their wages after her
father's death ("What do I know about money?" [94]); in puzzled confusion she abandons her attempt to pay the wages when
Hendrik, whom she has sent to town in search of money, returns
with a withdrawal slip from the Post Office (103). In other respects
too Magda is portrayed as a hyperbolically naive character.She has
no idea, for instance, if she has or has ever had brothers or sisters,
or neighbors; when men come to the farm to search for her missing,
dead, or nonexistent father, she says, "I did not know, in my aboriginal innocence, that there were so many people in the world" (120
[121]).
As a character, then, Magda is an utterly naive country girl, a
"drudgemaiden who has spent her days over a cooking-pot" (14),a
"poor provincial blackstocking" who knows nothing of philosophy
(18).But there remains a fundamental contradiction in the presentation of this characterwho tells us she is "full of contradictions" (39).
Magda is contradictorily the tautologous agent she is because she is
situated in the interior of the process over which her agency governs; or, to put it another way, her agency is simultaneously configured from inside and outside her inside-in the metaphorics of
desires she participates with but cannot understand, and in the
metonomy of number that arbitrarily orders her paper existence.
Moreover, as a characterMagda might be naive, but as a paperbeing

46
CON
T E MPORAR
Y LITERATURE
she is a philosopher whose every utterance betokens a "learning

[that] has the reek of print, not the resonance of the full human
voice telling its stories" (47). Her mind works with absolute clarity,
"like the mind of a machine" (15):
There is no doubt about it, what keeps me going (see the tears roll down
the slopes of my nose, only metaphysics keeps them from falling on the
page, I weep for that lost innocence, mine and mankind's) is my determination ... to burst through the screen of names ... in despite of all the
philosophers have said (and what do I, poor provincial blackstocking,
know about philosophy, as the lamp gutters and the clock strikes ten?).
(18)
The contradiction that emerges between the characterization of

Magda and the intellectual qualities and qualifications of the voice
in which she speaks underscores the extent to which Magda's narrative is not only Magda's narrative but also an act of "speculative
linguistics" on the part of Coetzee, scripteur,who is inscribed within
the writing and who acts as its agent. Coetzee writes Magda into
being both as "real"person and as paper entity, shaping her-and
allowing her to shape herself-between the demands of the verisimilitude valued by historical materialism and the discursive play
practiced by poststructural theories of language. The "internal"
characteristicsof Magda's voice thus reflect the "external"situation
whereby she is made to speak-by a writer conscious of and embroiled by competing notions of appropriate speech. In these terms,
In theHeartof the Countrycan also be said to constitute-inside and
out-an act of agency that seeks to speak between incommensurable imperatives.
Inside a work itself placed, at least locally, between South African monologues of deconstruction and historicism, Coetzee places
Magda-again locally, that is to say in the South African edition of
the text-between the two natural languages that articulate her
and that she articulates, English and Afrikaans. These languagesEnglish, Afrikaans, and the "languages" of deconstruction and of
historicism-configure the hierarchy and paternalistic patterns of
authority against which Magda and this text struggle, but configure also the range of metaphorical and metonymic utterance by
means of which such struggle is undertaken.

MACASKILL
461
If Magda knows nothing about the practicalities of economy and

very little about economic value, she nevertheless knows a great
deal about linguistic economy and the value of words (in the Saussurean sense of value). "It has always been that the word has come
down to me and I have passed it on," she says to Anna, "I have
never known words of true exchange" ("wisselbare woorde," the
South African edition adds in Afrikaans: exchangeable words,
words that can be broken into a currency of small change [101]).
Magda becomes conscious of being imprisoned by tautology; she is
unable to extract anything other than a confirmation of her isolation from Anna, whom she cannot cajole into calling her Magda
(102) and who, when confronted with Magda's question "wie is ek"
("who am I?"), will only confirm the boundaries of tautology by
responding that "Mies is die mies," or "Madam is the madam" (30).
Magda has inherited an economics of incommensurate exchange
from an "antique feudal language" (43) whose value of "exchange"
she seeks to renounce, though this language is itself lodged in a
tradition stonily implicated in tautologous rigor: "Woorde wat ek
aan jou kan gee kan jy nie terugee nie," she says to Anna, "Hulle is
woorde sonder warde [Words that I can give to you, you cannot
give back to me. They are words without value]" (101).
Presented in part as an exemplar from a primer on deconstruction, Magda is "a hole crying to be whole" (41). Magda is a hole
predicated of tautology and a lack of exchange that prevents her
from becoming whole, that locks her into a "monologue of the self,"
"a maze of words" out of which she will "not find a way until
someone else gives [her] a lead" (16). She looks to her father for
this lead, but how could she possibly find it there? Tautology is the
only dowry her father can bequeath Magda. His is the language
and the home she must abandon, but he cannot lead her out, and
there are no suitors for her hand. Desperately she turns to Anna
and Hendrik, but they leave without her, and she finds herself
"alone again, alone in the historical present" (120). In solitude she
seeks her cue from the flying machines, which speak a universal
"Spanish" that she imagines herself to understand, although she
knows no Spanish, because "while in their externals the words [that
come floating down from the machines] may present themselves as
Spanish, they belong in fact not to a local Spanish but to a Spanish of

462
CONTEMPORARY
LITERATURE
pure meanings such as might be dreamed of by the philosophers....

The words are Spanish but they are tied to universal meanings"
(125-26 [126]). "[G]agging on a diet of universals," Magda thus tries
to communicate with the machines in a speculative language which
she has to invent "from first principles," first by shouting back at
them (130 [131]), then by writing (132), and finally by means of
ideographs (133 [134]).
In fact, "like a key rattling in a can, waiting to be taken out and
used to unlock the mystery" (62),the clue, Magda's lead, was there
all along: in the median term of her communicative series, in the
writing itself, in the linguistic permutations that enabled the writing and made possible a typographical topology that violates "The
law" of speech which has "gripped [Magda's] throat" (84), a law
against whose orthodoxy she and her text have struggled from the
very beginning. For Magda is only in part a theoretical construct, a
"hole" born of deconstruction, or an absence indicated by lack of
historiographic record. Her "wholeness" lies elsewhere, though it is
here-in the intersection of linguistic and literary codes especially
visible in the collision between two natural languages-that we
must take an initial bearing on Coetzee's fictional topology in order
to see its implications for intellectual demographics.
.
4 .
My account of Magda's narrative thus far seems only to confirm

Magda-and Coetzee's novel-as imprisoned by the contamination of a present that allows no change, a present dictated to
by linguistic structures that deconstructively consume individual
agency with arbitrary yet totalitarian laws. And indeed, Magda
herself wonders, "Is it possible that I am a prisoner not of the lonely
farmhouse and the stone desert but of my stony monologue?" (12).
But it is precisely the logic of this stony monologue that finally
makes it impossible-despite Magda's doubts-to accept her words,
or Coetzee's writing, as an intransitive and only self-referential act
of verbal solipsism-as "merely" an instance of deconstructive
play. Neither "omitted"nor banished to brackets, nor yet buried as
a deep structure, history in this stony monologue has been made to
confront its making by language.

M A C A S K I LL
463
In the course of her narrative, and partly in English, Magda has

been sounding the depths of Afrikaans, her native tongue, "a language of nuances, of supple word-order and delicate particles,
opaque to the outsider, dense, to its children, with moments of
solidarity, moments of distance" (30). This the text has been doing
also (again primarily in terms of the English language, although
the South African edition renders much of its dialogue, about a
quarter of the text, in Afrikaans). The language of the law, that
nonexchange expected to pass between Magda and the farm servants, "the old language, the correct language" (43), has been
subverted by her father's sleeping with Anna and the postpaternal consequences of this act, under which Hendrik, Anna's husband, comes to share Magda's bed. "I cannot carry on with these
idiot dialogues" (97), Magda confesses under the strain of broken
laws which "no angel has descended with flaming sword to forbid" (108):
The language that should pass between myself and these people was
subverted by my father and cannot be recovered. What passes between us
now is a parody. I was born into a language of hierarchy, of distance and
perspective. It was my father-tongue. I do not say it is the language my
heart wants to speak, I feel too much the pathos of its distances, but it is all
we have.... I have no words left to exchange whose value I trust. Hendrik
is ducking and grinning secretly all the time he offers me the old locutions. "Mies, mies, mies!" he says to my face; "Ek ken vir jou, jy is jou pa se
dogter," he says behind his hand: "jy is my vrou se kamma-suster, waar
jou pa gele het 1e ek ook, ek ken die man, sy merk is in my bed." "Jy,jy, jy,"
sings Klein-Anna from behind him where I cannot see her.
(97)
Or, as the English language edition presents the encounter:

"Miss, miss, miss!" [Hendrik] says to my face; "I know you, you are your
father's daughter," he says behind his hand; "you are my wife's half-sister,
where your father lay I lie too, I know that man, his mark is in my bed."
"You, you, you," sings Klein-Anna from behind him where I cannot see
her.
More graphically than the entirely English language edition, the

South African text here presents a narrative dramatization of the
shape Magda's struggle against the subjection of language takes

4646
CONTEMPORARY
LITERATURE
and must take. The text shapes this struggle as a linguistic place of
conflict and as a linguistic time struggling to get beyond the old
locutions of a previous time. Consequently, it becomes even more
obvious here than in the English-language edition that one of the
central subjects of this novel is the struggle against subjection by
language. Far from being an escapist retreat from the protopolitics
of cultural production and the interventions of history or economy,
Coetzee's text goes to the very heart of such matters: their inescapably linguistic formulation.
Language, we are first reminded by this passage, is a social fact
embedded within ideological matrices. One such matrix, for example, governs forms of address between South African servants and
their mistress, a code of socioracial exchange violated in this passage by Hendrik and Anna. The discursive hegemony of "the old
locutions," a hegemony that mandates and guarantees the character of master-servant exchange, is here violated by the servants' use
of intimate forms of the personal pronoun instead of more formal
variants or nominative circumlocutions (Afrikaans is in this sense
analogous to French).21That is to say, address within the hegemonic codes is violated by the directness of Hendrik's possessive
attribution (jou pa [your father] rather than die mies se pa [the
madam's father]), and in his semantic blurring of distinctions fundamental to South African codes of socioracial exchange (die man
[the man, this man] rather than die baas[the master]). All of this is
underscored by Klein-Anna's "insolent" refrain, "Jy,jy,jy" (secondperson pronoun, intimate form). Such modulations graphically
evoke the "parody" of "hierarchy,of distance and perspective," as
the "father-tongue"slurs and distance diminishes.
21. Another similarity between French and Afrikaans that comes into play in this
exchange is the lexical distinction (unavailable to English) between the comparatively
intimate connditre(to be acquainted with; Afrikaans ken) and the more removed savoir (to
know [intellectually]; Afrikaans weet): Hendrik says to Magda, "Ek ken jou" (I know you
[intimately]); he does not say, "Ek weet wie jy is" (I know who you are). Furthermore, the
exchange in Afrikaans contains an interesting reference to Magda as Klein-Anna's
"kamma-suster," whose implications Coetzee obviously did not consider possible (or
worth extrapolating) in the English version, where he translates the term as "halfsister." Not quite "half-sister" (for which there exists an Afrikaans equivalent), "kammasuster" literally translates as "play-play sister"; that is, as sister only in terms of some
game.

MACASKILL
465
In response to this scandal of pronouns, which specifically prefigures a more general and even more scandalous contamination of
the laws that dictate appropriate utterance, Magda expresses toward the end of the text a longing to be "LA MEDIAENTRE"in a
poem she writes with white-washed stones to the flying machines
that pass overhead:
The medium, the median-that is what I wanted to be! Neither masternor
slave, neither parent nor child, but the bridge between, so that in me the
contrariesshould be reconciled!
(133)
Here Magda expresses-in

writing-her
hope of being a middle
voice, her desire to write herself into a new existence, to escape
the "old locutions" that have forced her to veer to and from the
"master-talk" between mistress and servants and alternate attempts
at intimate chatter with Anna and Hendrik. She wants to revise the
"old locutions" and the rules, broken now, that they prescribe; she
wants to enter the domain of action the law has proscribed; she
wants to learn how to negotiate the difference between tongues of
rule and tongues of intimacy.
Voiceless under the authority of her father, but in turn forced to
inhabit the voice of authority when speaking to the servants (from
rewhom-even
after her sexual "intimacy" with Hendrik-she
mains forever isolated), Magda desires a middle locution between
active and passive in which she can discourse (or "do-writing")
"with reference to" a "self" that rigid strictures of sociolinguistic
barriers have hitherto not allowed her to know. Thus "lost in the
being of [her] being" (35), Magda seeks a median place from which
to articulate herself, and the numbered entries in which she seeks to
record this articulation come in turn to constitute Coetzee's act of
"doing-writing" in the middle voice: a means, no less, of enumerating (for Coetzee) equally complex negotiations facing the writer in
that time and place of contemporary South Africa.
Here also then In the Heart of the Country locates its attack against
the authoritarian locutions of deconstruction and historicism alikeby demonstrating the extent to which structures of language ("the
old locutions") do indeed determine and limit individual agency
while simultaneously demonstrating the possibility of acting nev-

466
CON
T E MPORAR
Y LITERATURE
ertheless "with reference to the self" that commits itself to resisting

structural determinism.
*?5 5
I hope so far to have shown that the literary voice of In the Heart of
the Countryresonates with properties of the linguistic middle voice,
whose capabilities of putting thought into place between the disjunctive logic of dichotomous options is suggestive not only in the
context of Magda's project but-more crucially-reveals also the
import of Coetzee's "doing-writing," in which Magda functions
only as a cipher, albeit a central one. Magda's act of writing, which
she herself recognizes as taking place in the modality of "aneternal
present" that forever distinguishes it from history and even from
story (114 [115]) and that aligns it instead to the temporal and selfreferentialvagaries of the middle voice discussed in section 1 above,
itself further serves as a medial figure for Coetzee's middle-voice
writing, that "taking place" that here takes place between the strictures of self and other, language and history, intransitive and transitive utterance, practice and theory.
Magda's words "come from nowhere and go nowhere," are-she
feels-deprived of a history and not promised a future (114 [115]);
but Coetzee's middle representation of those words most certainly
has a history. This is a history documented within the text as complicity between thought and language, particularly the Afrikaans
language, and a history documented also "outside" In the Heart of
the Countryby Coetzee's "following" of middle-voice linguistics. In
the Heart of the Countrydirectly engages with the conceptof history,
addressing that concept by way of a stylistic or figuratively grammatical response that rivals the "grammar"of its historical predecessors and contemporaries; that rivals, in other words, those (perhaps discursive) fictions that "supplement" events ("historical"
events) and ideas ("ideological"ideas) by way of causal determinations. Quite aside from its address to history, to the concept of
history-past as well as present-In the Heart of the Countrylooks
into the future too, itself participating in that "speculativebias" that
Magda muses might originate from the local habit of "staringinto
the distance" (20). The staring is no doubt motivated by the "feeling

M A C A S K I LL
467
of solitude" the voice from the flying machine tells Magda is "a
longing for a place." And no doubt Magda and the text both desire
nostalgically to occupy this place, this center, "the navel of the universe" from which they will nevertheless always be marginalized
(134 [135]). But, and this has little to do with nostalgia, the act of
speculative staring that Coetzee's text undertakes is also surely
born of a desire to turn language inside out, to renew it in a way
that mandates a practice of relocating from the inside the imminently repressive categories of master-slave, transitive-intransitive,
active-passive, and structure-agent. Coetzee's practice, it seems to
me, insists that this future, this relocation, must be predicated upon
mechanisms more responsible than simple reversal.22
Coetzee's practice does not "omit," abandon, or conceal history;
it does, however, redefine history in a manner that avoids the
"structural determinism" Anthony Appiah associates with certain
"contemporary modes of historicism" (the "New Historicism" in
particular) which seek to fix an "agent's sociocultural location" in
the belief that by so doing "his or her capacities for and in agency
are fixed also" with the result that "we will understand the outcome
of social process only as the consequence of social structure and not
'merely' as the result of individual acts" (66-67).
In the dissimulation of agency effected by In the Heart of the
22. That the middle locutions Magda longs for involve more than a disingenuous
reconciliation of contraries is emphasized by the pervasive pressure of allusion to and
direct quotation from the work of William Blake throughout the text. In Blake's prophetic poems, the notion of "contrariety" is crucially distinguished from that of "negation." While a negation cannot itself be negated without perpetuating the repressive
cycle of negation, it can be opposed by means of a contrary that undermines the logic of
binary opposition upon which the negation rests. In Blakean terms, one could say that
Magda is placed between the opposing terms of dichotomous negations (man/woman,
father/daughter, master/slave, good/evil, white/black, transitive/intransitive, and so
forth, the catalogue of binaries in which one term enjoys privilege). Magda is so situated
as to constitute a Blakean contrariety-not so that she may constitute a negation of the
privileged term in the series man, father,master,or whatever, but precisely to undermine
the disjunctive logic that enables such privilege. Sometimes going as far as directly
quoting the epigraphs of contrariety first uttered by Blake's "Voice of the Devil"
("Energy is eternal delight" [101]), Magda occupies a position reminiscent of Blake's
"Proverbs of Hell," in whose directly quoted formulations the voice from the flying
machine also sometimes speaks ("Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak
enough to be restrained"[134]) and which themselves serve as contrarieties to the negations promulgated by orthodoxy.

46
CON
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Y LITERATURE
Country'smiddle-voice utterance, Coetzee has illustrated the pervasive power of structure (or society) and language (or social fact)
in which agents (or subjects) are embedded, but he has also powerfully illustrated the extent to which individual agents may position
themselves in such a way as to resist the determinism of structure,
just as this text resists the critical orthodoxy that mandates it serve
as a supplement to history and serve the interests of a more transitive contribution to the struggle currently under way in the "South
African reality."
6
If my reading of In the Heart of the Country has sufficiently indicated the figural force of Coetzee's practice of "doing-writing" in
the middle voice, it remains only to suggest some of the implications this practice bears for a more embracing reading of Coetzee's
fiction, and, but briefly so, for the practice and politics of literary
theory.
While the middle voice and its metaphorics can quite clearly be
seen metonymically to spread in ways that enrich readings of other
texts in Coetzee's oeuvre, no notion of middle-voice practice would
support the ever-growing body of critical commentary that insists
on interpreting Coetzee's fiction by way of allegory. Despite the
dislocations of particular times and particular places (in Dusklands)
or the teasing indeterminacies of time and place that characterize
much of Coetzee's narrative universe (In theHeartof the Country,of
course, but even more so in Waitingfor the Barbarians),and despite
explicit reference within some of the novels to issues of allegory
(Barbariansagain, but also Life and Times of Michael K), Coetzee's
fiction resists the opposition between transitive allegory and intransitive symbol (here Foe is exemplary). Instead, Coetzee's fiction
runs a median course and pits its middle placement as a contrariety
to such oppositions, endorsing Elizabeth Curren's contrary search
in Age of Iron for an alternate word someplace between the "Yes"
and the "No" she says the judges of law mandate and which Coetzee identifies in Doubling the Point as the "only two words" in the
lexicon of censorship (Age 145-46; Doubling 299). "Life on the
farm," Magda lets us know, includes for her and her father that

MAC
A S K I LL
469
time of sleep, and for the reader perhaps that time of reading, in
which one retires "to dream allegories of baulked desire such as we
are blessedly unfitted to interpret" (3). Indeed, if the notion of
middle-voice writing and a reading thereof were to perform no
further function than to prevent that ilk of reductive allegorizing
which identifies Magda's father as "the Afrikaner government"
while associating Magda with the "oppressed black race" (Post 70),
or which interprets the farm as standing for "South Africa itself, the
father as the Afrikaner baas,and Magda as the ineffectual, dreaming liberal" (Roberts 30), or which reads "Magda'suse of language"
as a showing of "white South Africa getting drunk on words but
incapable of saving action" (Maes-Jelinek 90)-to cite only some of
many examples and to restrict such examples only to Coetzee's
"attain[ment of] the universality of allegory" in In the Heart of the
Country(Brink 192)-if it calls such baneful readings into question
by denying the facile transitivity under which allegorical exegetics
marshals its master code into battle against idiolect, the notion of
doing-writing, middle voice, will surely have contributed a sufficiently valuable service.
But the middle voice perhaps has even more than this to offer.
Perhaps the metaphors of middle voice by means of which I have so
far endeavored to place Coetzee locally, and to situate some of his
writing interdiscursively,also speak-by way of Coetzee's writingto an even wider domain of international and interdisciplinaryconcern over the politics or protopolitics of postmodernism; perhaps
the middle voice even has something to add to the current debate
about the consequences of theory.
My account of middle-voice rhetoric has illustrated some of the
interests Coetzee shares with the poststructural performance of
that metaphorical linguistics put into play by Derrida and Barthes,
and has implied affinities between Coetzee's practice and that of
other influential poststructural theorists-Foucault and Lyotard,
for example. Especially at a local level, the affinities between Coetzee's writing and poststructural theory have prompted cogent and
important responses-accommodations as well as indictmentsfrom critics in South Africa. As indicated earlier, such criticism
operates in the immediate vicinity of argument that traces familiar
but locally urgent claims about deconstruction (using the term for

470
CONTEMPORARY
LITERATURE
now as a synecdoche): deconstruction brackets the social world,

turns history into a mere linguistic predicament, and therefore conservatively ratifies the existing order. Deconstruction disenables
agency, obviates responsibility, discourages political action, and so
forth. In this respect, Coetzee's situation as a South African writer
becomes exemplary for an intellectual topography of wider geopolitical dimensions. Thus, for instance, Coetzee's local situation
might evoke the international analogue of Derrida's presence in the
Western academy, a presence that has led Jiirgen Habermas to
speak out against the line of "young conservatives" extending
"from Bataille via Foucault to Derrida" (13), that has prompted a
variety of dissociations from critics on the left more or less alarmed
by "postindustrial" culture (Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, Hal
Foster, and others), and that has inaugurated a boom in publications "againsttheory"-from academics (Steven Knapp and Walter
Benn Michaels have figured prominently), from administrators
(William J. Bennett, Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, has had his say in the Wall StreetJournal),and from the
"general public" (for whom David Lehman claims to speak in one
of the more recent attacks on theory, Signs of the Times).Coetzee's
situation-particularly insofar as it is grounded in a rhetoric of
inquiry attached to the practical exigencies of linguistic analysis,
and insofar as it is informed by what Habermas labels "the postmodernism of the neoconservatives" exemplified by early Wittgenstein (13)-may further be construed in relation to the widely based
return in U.S. literary theory to the pragmatism of Peirce, Dewey,
and James, "postmodernized" by Richard Rorty and welcomed in
The PostmodernTurnby Ihab Hassan.
Coetzee's embattled position at home thus becomes reminiscent
of a worldwide antagonism between linguistically based textualists
of one sort or another and a variety of newly reconstituted historicisms (including the "Wittgensteinian"variety of pragmatic argument currently associated with Duke University and the sorts of
New Historicist claims prevalent on America's West Coast, especially at the University of California, Berkeley). Given even this
brief an indication of placements, it hardly needs to be said that
contemporary literary theory is politically, indeed geopolitically,
situated. Competing and often incommensurable claims for criti-

M A C A S K I LL
471
cism and cultural models vie for power within and across international boundaries that mark the trajectory of theory in the twentieth century as it has migrated (primarily) from Europe to the rest
of the world. Nor is it surprising that postmodern fiction-which
has followed a substantially different course from that of theory,
journeying mostly from the Americas back to Europe-has itself
not only drawn upon but also contributed toward the overlapping
boundaries of work, genre, and context that theoretical speculation
mediates. This is not to claim, however, that the fictions promulgated by postmodernism are indistinguishable from those of theory. And once again, Coetzee's South African situation, being neither that of Europe nor that of the U.S., provides a marginal gloss on
these "central"intercontinental migrations.
My argument and its reading of In the Heart of the Country has
encouraged a consideration of Coetzee's fiction as a doing-writing
that takes place in the median between "literature"and "theory."
Although Magda acknowledges her paper dependence on theory
(43)-literary theory, linguistic theory-she also insists, "I am not a
principle, a rule of discourse, a machine planted by a being from
another planet on this desolate earth beneath the Southern Cross to
generate sentiments day after day, night after night, keeping count
of them as I go, until I run dry" (119 [120]). Indeed, it is perhapsbut also precisely-because she is neither a philosopher nor a principle of discourse nor yet a historian that Magda can so cogently
exhibit her "talent,"a "talent [that] is all for immanence, for the fire
or ice of identity at the heart of things" (71). So too, however much
the "boundaries" separating literature from other discursive practices have been justifiably compromised by recent critical thinking,
it is nevertheless crucial to appreciate that Coetzee is not finally
"doing-linguistics"or "doing-politics"or "doing-history"but "doingwriting," an activity that in this case participates in those other
"doings" but without prioritizing any one of them, ever cautious in
its suspicion of determinism.
The middleness of Coetzee's writing is thus astutely duplicitous in
the context of the politics which enfold it. The ostensible presentness
or "timelessness"and the dissimulating agency of Coetzee's linguistic locutions, his fascination with subversive linguistic, literary,and
social codes are signs, simultaneously, of a linguistic and cultural

472
CONTEMPORARY
LITERATURE
staging, of a literary and political stance that unfashionably and

therefore courageously seeks to exercise its own agency despite its
recognition of the ways in which agency is constricted by linguistic,
sociohistorical, and even theoretical determinations. Negotiating the
syntax of a hegemony which has made him who he is-a white
South African, a linguist, a doctor of philosophy, a professor, a custodian of discourse, a writer (doing writing, middle voice)-Coetzee
offers to his country and to the world a voice whose parameters are
inevitably born of and limited by the hegemonics against which such
a voice utters itself, but whose oppositional force is not thereby
diminished, nor rendered intransitive or inconsequential.
Coetzee confronts the demands of theory in his writing and unsettles from within the middleness of his fiction writing the deterministic dictates of language and the expectations of theory. Subverting
false dichotomies between "readerly" and "writerly" texts and between transitivity and intransitivity-if
only by persistently atof
while
not
tempting possibilities
agency
disregarding the deternotion of a
ministic force of linguistic and historical structure-the
middle voice militates against facile and misleading oppositions,
and not only generates subtle and affective ways to "do-writing,"
but allows also for the activity of "doing-listening," middle ear, as it
were. This latter activity, finally, is one with which postmodern
culture and its theorists can ill afford not to engage:23 on the site of
South African culture, where a new government will very soon
have to listen as well as to act in order to bring about a new topopolitics, but also more generally on behalf of the topopolitical sight,
or insight, of critical theory worldwide.
We are enfolded, Derrida maintains in "The Principle of Reason,"
by "an implacable political topography" where "one step further
toward a sort of original an-archy risks producing or reproducing the
hierarchy" (18); perhaps this is so. But then again, perhaps listening to the middle voice struggle toward whatever agency it can
23. Addressing the ear in a discourse that among other things takes as its topic the
subject of "academic freedom," Derrida remarks that the ear is "the most tendered and
most open organ, the one that, as Freud reminds us, the infant cannot close": "large or
small is what [the ear] can make or let happen ... large or small as well the manner in
which one may offer or lend an ear" (Ear 33).

M A C A S K I LL
473
command-choosing middleness precisely to avoid negation or the

reproduction of hierarchy with simply alternate terms, deliberately
resisting determinism of whatever sort as best we can-provides the
most promising means of making, reading, and using our maps.
JohnCarrollUniversity
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The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

Charting J. M. Coetzee's Middle Voice

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... we are on the road from no A to no B in the world, if such a fate is

n a sketch metaphoricallyoutlining the topology of recent

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trans. TheExpeditionto the BaobabTree),and perhapsothers of their

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newer, alternative modes of critical discourse in South Africa seek

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What such debate serves to underscore is the extent to which

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7. In a conference paper delivered at the Universite de Nice, June 1991, Coetzee

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8. Reprintedin DoublingthePoint,'A Note on Writing"loses therethe significanceof

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(le scripteur)inside the writing, not as a psychologicalsubject... but as the

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The highly specialized details of such linguistic inquiry are of no

While the transitive-intransitive opposition in sentence pair (1) is

classes of mankind"cannot legitimatelybe thought of as being linguisticallyderived

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that the short form of the passive is not transformationally derived

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"solution" of passivity itself dissolves into the difficulty it is intended to solve-the

The two acts of speculative linguistics outlined above-Coetzee's

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aesthetically "intransitive" utterance forever removed from the

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thus first and

But the "embroidering" has already begun, as we are forced to

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Magda attempts to converse with flying machines that speak to her

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she is a philosopher whose every utterance betokens a "learning

The contradiction that emerges between the characterization of

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If Magda knows nothing about the practicalities of economy and

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pure meanings such as might be dreamed of by the philosophers....

My account of Magda's narrative thus far seems only to confirm

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In the course of her narrative, and partly in English, Magda has

Or, as the English language edition presents the encounter:

More graphically than the entirely English language edition, the

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Here Magda expresses-in

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ertheless "with reference to the self" that commits itself to resisting

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now as a synecdoche): deconstruction brackets the social world,

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This content downloaded from 49.203.53.43 on Mon, 29 Sep 2014 04:30:27 AM

J. M. Coetzee's Middle Voice

J. M. Coetzee's Middle Voice