Interpretative authoritarianism : reading/colonizing Coetzee's foe

Abstract

Teresea Dovey raises a number of pertinent points in her criticism of Coetzee's detractors on the political left. l Her survey of the censure which Coetzee's work has received from this quarter reveals that the grounds for rejection are generally of an ideological nature, ranging from accusations that his writing is preoccupied problems of consciousness, thus betraying an idealist rather than a materialist stance to the contention that in failing to delineate the economic complexities of oppression, [he] has got his history all wrong.2 To her list could be added the accusation levelled at Coetzee's Foe* at a recent seminar on the novel, that it is divorced from South African social and political realities - another essentially ideological complaint.4 Dovey argues that this type of criticism, its desire that Coetzee write in some other way,5 exemplifies what Eagleton calls the illusion, defined as follows: The normative illusion constitutes a refusal of the object as it is; it 'corrects' it against an independent, pre-existent model of which the empirical text is an imperfect copy, an inessential appearance.6 When applied to Coetzee's distinction between novels which supplement history and those which rival it,7 this concept useful. According to Coetzee, readers attribute texts which supplement history with greater truth than those which rival it because the former are more engaged the historical present.8 It could be added that the latter are condemned because they do not conform to the normative illusion which, in the South African context, is the model text whose content engages the political crisis in this country. Foe's critique of the authoritarian nature of such a critical stance, which forms part of its critique of authoritarianism in general, is the subject of this paper, which aligns itself Dovey's argument that normative criticism proves vulnerable to the deconstructive activity of Coetzee's writing.9 In order for the reader to perceive this critique of interpretative