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Situating Ecology in Recent South African Fiction: J.M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals and Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness

2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 31; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/03057070500109482

1465-3893

Anthony Vital,

Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature

Abstract The culture of environmentalism in South Africa changed through the 1990s, influenced by the country's transition to democratic government. Environmentalism during the apartheid era retained features of an earlier colonial interest in conservation, but with the political change, tendencies have emerged that link environmental and social well-being in ways that are 'people-centred'. This new culture can be understood as developing a postcolonial understanding of ecology, one that grasps the continued influence of colonialism as well as the present positioning of South Africa within a global order dominated by countries of the North (and in particular the United States). Ecology in this context is deeply implicated in a postcolonial politics. This article reads two recent works of prose fiction by South African writers, J.M. Coetzee and Zakes Mda, against these developments in the environmental culture, claiming that they develop a similar implication for ecology. Drawing on postmodern strategies to destabilise meaning, they articulate a carefully circumscribed value for ecology within current social and cultural orders. The article suggests that South Africa's emerging environmental culture can also provide ways of reading limits to the works of fiction. Notes 1 For work that in different ways links ecology with empire, see R.H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1995); T. Griffiths and L. Robin (eds), Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies (Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1997); P. Anker, Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895–1945 (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2001); Journal of Southern African Studies, 15, 2 (1989), with an introduction by W. Beinart, 'The Politics of Colonial Conservation', is devoted to exploring related issues. 2 South Africa's environmental history is now a field marked by rich analysis and debate. See, for example, a special issue on 'African Environments: Past and Present', Journal of Southern African Studies, 26, 4 (2000). The recent comprehensive study of environmental attitudes and practice by W. Beinart, The Rise of Conservation in South Africa: Settlers, Livestock, and the Environment 1770–1950 (New York, Oxford University Press, 2004), is essential reading. For a fuller discussion of the different strands in this emerging environmental culture, see A. Vital, 'A South African Ecocriticism: Towards a Postcolonial Understanding of Ecology' (unpublished paper, 2004). 3 Earthlife Africa. See http://www.earthlife.org.za, accessed 8 January 2004. 4 Ecocriticism, developed first in the United States and Europe, is a form of reading that works to incorporate into its critique a sense of human dependence on the health of ecosystems. The present article builds on the work of South Africa's most prominent ecocritic, Julia Martin, published between 1987 and 1998. Her early work focuses on the writing of Gary Snyder, an American poet influenced by ecological and Buddhist thought. Then, broadening her scope in a series of essays, she explores how, in a South African context, reconceptualising the self and reconfiguring epistemology might reduce damage to both nature and people. See, for example, J. Martin, 'Practising Emptiness: Gary Snyder's Playful Ecological Work', Western American Literature, 27, 1 (Spring 1992), pp. 3–19; J. Martin, 'Interbeing and the "I" Habit: An Experiment in Environmental Literacy', in W. Harcourt (ed.), Feminist Perspectives on Sustainable Development (London, Zed Books, 1994), pp. 156–75. 5 D.A. McDonald, Environmental Justice in South Africa (Athens, OH, Ohio University Press, 2002; first published by the University of Cape Town Press). McDonald repeats a frequent and widespread accusation directed at the earlier kinds of environmentalism, that 'flora and fauna were often considered more important than the majority of the country's population' (p. 1). 6 5 D.A. McDonald, Environmental Justice in South Africa (Athens, OH, Ohio University Press, 2002; first published by the University of Cape Town Press). McDonald repeats a frequent and widespread accusation directed at the earlier kinds of environmentalism, that 'flora and fauna were often considered more important than the majority of the country's population' pp. 3, 5. 7 For recent political debate over ecology's value globally, see W. Sachs (ed.), Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict (London, Zed Books, 1993). 8 J.M. Coetzee, M. Garber, P. Singer, W. Doniger and B. Smuts, The Lives of Animals (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1999). The novella's central character, Elizabeth Costello, appears first in J.M. Coetzee, What is Realism? (Bennington, Vermont, Bennington College, 1997). Coetzee's recent publication, Elizabeth Costello (New York, Viking Press, 2003), draws these pieces together and adds new ones. I will be considering The Lives of Animals as a book, with its own integrity. Z. Mda, The Heart of Redness (Cape Town, South Africa, Oxford University Press, 2000). Coetzee has since emigrated to Australia. At the time of writing the novella, he was still resident in South Africa. 9 The work of Bessie Head, for example, and Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist would bear fruitful study. J.M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K has been read by Derek Wright and Dominic Head as exploring nature's vulnerability and proposing nature's value. Written before 1994, these narratives require recognition of a very different historical context for the significance they articulate for nature. 10 Coetzee, Lives of Animals, pp. 19, 53–4. 11 Coetzee, Lives of Animals, p. 54. 12 Coetzee, Lives of Animals, p. 55. Marjorie Garber comments on the narrative's indeterminacy, concluding that, among the academics, the family-members and the noted novelist, 'We don't know whose voice to believe', Coetzee, Lives of Animals, p. 79. She also points to the 'hall of mirrors' established by the correspondences between Costello and Coetzee and the undecidability of the questions that these correspondences raise, Coetzee, Lives of Animals, p. 76. This uncertainty is reinforced by the absence of any realistic development of Costello as 'Australian' in this narrative. 13 Coetzee, Lives of Animals, p. 18. 14 Coetzee, Lives of Animals, p. 26. 15 Coetzee, Lives of Animals, pp. 61, 69; for her comment on the 'opened heart', see: '"I was hoping not to enunciate principles," his mother says. "If principles are what you want to take away from this talk, I would have to respond, open your heart and listen to what your heart says"', Coetzee, Lives of Animals, p. 37. 16 N. Lazarus, 'Modernism and Modernity: T.W. Adorno and Contemporary White South African Literature', Cultural Critique, 5 (Winter 1987), pp. 131–55. Lazarus argues that the writing of Gordimer, Coetzee and Breytenbach up to the mid-1980s exists as oppositional to 'that violence and domination which have served to make the present what it is', N. Lazarus, 'Modernism and Modernity: T.W. Adorno and Contemporary White South African Literature', Cultural Critique, 5 (Winter 1987), p. 132. Drawing on Adorno, he reads all three South African writers as, in their own way, 'saying no to the prevailing imperatives within society', as embodying a negativity which '[gives] the lie to the world's ideological presentation of itself', N. Lazarus, 'Modernism and Modernity: T.W. Adorno and Contemporary White South African Literature', Cultural Critique, 5 (Winter 1987), p. 134. On a line of continuity between Waiting for the Barbarians and The Lives of Animals, Costello's particular alienation permits her to expose what those caught in the 'everydayness' of the social world have 'come to terms with'. Coetzee, Lives of Animals, p. 69. 17 J.M. Coetzee, 'Erasmus' Praise of Folly: Rivalry and Madness', Neophilologus, 76, 1 (Jan. 1992), p. 1. 18 J.M. Coetzee, 'Erasmus' Praise of Folly: Rivalry and Madness', Neophilologus, 76, 1 (Jan. 1992), pp. 9–10. 19 J.M. Coetzee, 'Erasmus' Praise of Folly: Rivalry and Madness', Neophilologus, 76, 1 (Jan. 1992), p. 10. 20 If her commitment to 'heart' leads her to exhibit imperfect logic in her academic address and conversations, it also leads her to fail to ease public events towards a polite conclusion. She is in this sense, 'rudis', unable to participate in the inauthenticity which social institutions seem to require. Coetzee, Lives of Animals, pp. 15, 18, 36, 69. 21 See the early chapters of K. Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (New York, Oxford University Press, 1996) for a valuable account of European pre-Enlightenment attitudes towards animals, which provides a useful contrast to the sort of thinking from the heart that Costello engages in. 22 Coetzee, Lives of Animals, p. 57. 23 Coetzee, Lives of Animals, pp. 57–8; and see also her reference to the Aristotelian linking of hunting and war, p. 59. 24 The narrative gives Costello's daughter-in-law a passage in praise of reason but then, to underscore the moral dimension lacking in this vision of reason triumphant, makes her, in a moment of narrative play, inadvertently assert: 'rationality is not just', Coetzee, Lives of Animals, p. 48. Marjorie Garber points out this play in naming as Norma the daughter-in-law, Ph.D. in philosophy, suburban wife and mother, Coetzee, Lives of Animals, p. 80. Only one character (never seen, only referred to) is too angered by her analogy of the industrial use of animals with the Holocaust to attend the dinner in her honour. 25 See also the debate over whether to consider 'species' a class or an entity, referred to in L.E. Johnson, A Morally Deep World: An Essay on Moral Significance and Environmental Ethics (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 155. 26 Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, p. 54. 27 K. Milton, Loving Nature: Towards an Ecology of Emotion (New York, Routledge, 2002), provides a powerful theoretical examination of 'what makes people care about nature' p. 3. In the process, she discovers ways in which people can come to live with an enlarged and affectively awakened sense of the social, one which includes the non-human. 28 The journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A Journal of Socialist Ecology (published by Routledge/Taylor & Francis, Abingdon, UK) publishes work that explores ways of theorising ecologically sound development of the modern world, ways that might avoid the ravages accompanying capitalist development (and that plagued societies with centralised command economies). 29 Mda, Heart of Redness, p. 74. 30 Mda acknowledges his reliance on the work of J. Peires who assigns as cause for this catastrophic event a 'millenarianism' with its origin in British intrusion. See Peires, The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle Killing Movement of 1856–7 (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1989). 31 Leslie Bank, in a study of rural communities in the Eastern Cape, 'Beyond Red and School: Gender, Tradition and Identity in the Rural Eastern Cape', Journal of Southern African Studies, 28, 3 (September 2002), pp. 631–50, finds Mda's depiction of village life anachronistic ('people do not wear red blankets anymore') and as more accurately reflective of life in the 1950s (p. 633). I suggest that the novel with its elements of magic realism, its interest in the play of ideas, is to be read less as literal depiction and more as exposing the processes of 'intercultural hybridisation' that Bank does indeed find at work in the communities of this region. 32 Mda, Heart of Redness, pp. 124, 218. 33 Mda, Heart of Redness, p. 216. 'Twa' denotes roughly what 'Bushmen' originally denoted, that these were a people who lived without livestock. For brief commentary on the naming of the region's early inhabitants, see 'Hunter-Gatherers in Southern Africa', http://www.museums.org.za/sam/resource/arch/hunters.htm, accessed 22 August 2003. 34 Mda, Heart of Redness, pp. 216–18. 35 Mda, Heart of Redness, p. 286. 36 Mda, Heart of Redness, p. 319. 37 For example, Mda, Heart of Redness, p. 110. See also Bhonco's rage at his wife being made to perform for tourists with camcorders – 'making a monkey of her … would they do that kind of thing to their own mothers?' (p. 163); Camagu's argument with Dalton, pp. 285–6, in which he equates 'the attempt to preserve folk ways' with 'reinvent[ing] culture'. 38 Mda, Heart of Redness, p. 175, and also Chapter 12. 39 Mda, Heart of Redness, p. 320. 40 A useful southern African narrative to contrast with Heart of Redness is Bessie Head's When Rain Clouds Gather, for the way it treats gender and development issues from a woman's perspective. Valuable discussion of Head's complex negotiation of gender can be found in D. Driver, 'Reconstructing the Past, Shaping the Future: Bessie Head and the Question of Feminism in a New South Africa', in G. Wisker (ed.), Black Women's Writing (New York, St. Martin's Press, 1992), pp. 160–87. 41 African Coastal Adventures: Nongqawuse's Folly, http://www.africoast.co.za/nongqawuse.htm, accessed 4 August 2003. Additional informationNotes on contributorsAnthony Vital Thanks to Dr Gautam Kundu and fellow organisers of the British Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies Conference, Georgia Southern University, for sessions that provided comments on earlier versions of this material; thanks, too, to Dr Jonathan Highfield for his comments on the drafts.