a little of everyday

Nature, Nurture, and the Blank Slate

We are not blank slates that society writes on. Be it something in our nature, or something that we are nurtured to acquire, society is working hard to inscribe us with identities that we carry like markers, explicitly or implicitly on our bodies.

The nature/nurture debate has been around for years, but no resolution has come of it. Nor can it ever come. More and more, people are beginning to realise that even ascibed traits that are supposed to come with birth are but social constructions. The ideas of race, of gender, and recently even of sex, have been conceded to be socially inscribed onto an individual, and not pre-determined by nature or a higher being. As such, social inscription actually begins from our birth, when we take on traits and identities from our parents who gave birth to us: our race, our sex, our religion, all of these mark us out in particular ways different from others.

Yet, one of our friends said something that is especially illuminating: that nobody is born a blank slate, but that partial erasure can take place and inscription can be added to what has already been inscribed onto us during the course of our lives. This is very true, and it links in nicely with (what was mentioned in class) the idea that a prisoner is like a blank slate who is being fed new values during the term of imprisonment. (In the case of "In a Penal Colony", the inscription is done literally on the prisoners' bodies.) This can also be seen in a military institution, where a civilian will enter with the status of recruit and be converted into a soldier during the Basic Military Training phase.

These individuals all go through an initiation, or what the sociologist Arnold van Gennep termed "rites de passage". It is during this period of transition from one social community to another that an individual is given partial erasure of previous social inscriptions/values and provided with new inscriptions/values. Interesting, the initiation also requires a symbolic "stripping" of the initiate, usually performed through a series of rituals which lead to the final assimilation into the new social community. These rituals range from the shaving of the head to the wearing of uniforms. The important point here is to remove all markers of rank and or social privilege that may be enjoyed by the individual in the previous social community.

It is important to note that these individuals do not remain the same after the initiation, for the new values inscribed into them alter their world-views, and this will stay with them regardless of what other inscriptions are performed onto them subsequently. In a way, the layers of inscriptions add dimension and colour to a person's character and belief system.

It is clear that the writers do not see their characters as blank slants that are subject to inscription. Many of the characters are born into identity markers that differentiate them from others, and these shape their world-views and the ways in which they see others around them. For instance, David Lurie can never bring himself to see Petrus as superior to him or his daughter because he grew up in a South Africa where the Dutch constructed a social hierarchy in which coloured people are subordinated to their white colonial masters. Bodies, in this case, are engaged in a struggle for definition and power. The group that wins this fight gets to define their centrality in the community, such that all other bodies that do not fit this definition will be othered, marginalised, and oppressed.

Before I begin, I would like to thank a friend in class who had given me much encouragement from one single conversation we have had. I now emerge from my weeks of hiatus to engage again in discussions of corporeality. This essay is dedicated to him.


Foe, Part IV

Part IV of Foe, albeit short – five pages in all – in its physical length, carries a wealth of meanings which can only be summed up by the word “indeterminate”. Or perhaps “enigmatic” is a better choice. Yet, it is this ambiguity and the difficulty to find an appropriate word to describe the chapter that reinforces its multiple meanings.

To begin with, there is clearly a change in the narrative voice. It is definitely not the voice of Susan, Foe, or Friday, for the narrator sees them as “others” in the discourse. So then the narrator is Coetzee. But this in itself is problematic. We all know that, in a fiction, the speaking voice should always be distinct from the authorial voice, and that the views in the fiction should never come to fully represent the writer’s own opinions, although most of the time they do. (This is the reason why Salman Rushdie prefers writing fiction to news commentaries; it keeps him alive longer than it otherwise would.)

At the end, the narrative voice is and can never be identified, and like all other ambiguities in Coeztee-fictions, we have to be satisfied with ambiguity for our conclusion and continue with our lives. And so I have established that the issue of the narrative voice in Part IV is never resolved with the end of the novel.

But that is only the beginning of the many ambiguities and multiplicities in the chapter. Consider the pause in the chapter, as marked by

* *
on the page. Think of this as a boundary, something that dichotomises the narrative into two. The question is: why? I argue that the two asterisks function as a border that demarcates the two sides of the narrative, marking them out as two mirror images that juxtapose one onto the other. If we consider the discourse in the two parts of the narrative, we can find many similarities between them.

Here is a list that presents some of these similarities:
§ The speakers in both instances enter a room
§ The speakers find a woman and a man lying on a bed
§ In both instances Friday is found in an alcove

Let us now pause and think for a moment. Although it is true that these similarities exist between the two halves of the narrative, there remain certain disparities in the details. Just like how a mirror image is always a lateral-inverted image of the original, and hence similar but not identical to the original, these disparities reveal more profound meanings between the two (similar) discourses.

Let me elaborate. In the first part of the narrative, Susan and Foe lie in bed, “not touching” each other (153), but in the second part, they have turned and now lie “face to face”, with “her head in the crook of his arm” (155). This change in physical intimacy is important and I shall come back to it shortly. For now, consider the other subtle nuances in the two parts. In the first part, the speaker enters without noticing whose residence it is, but in the second part the place is identified to belong to “Daniel Defoe, Author” (155). Finally, the position of Friday is also changed in the second part when compared to the first. While he is first seen to be “stretched at full length on his back” (154), he is later seen to have “turned to [face] the wall” (155), revealing a scar about his neck.

These differences suggest, I think, the subjectivity in human perception when looking at the same thing/s at different times. These differences, subtle or drastic, may occur because of a change in lighting, a newly acquired worldview, or the loss of a previously subscribed value or belief. Coetzee here is showing, through these subtle differences between the two parts of his narrative, the multiplicity of fiction and the multiple interpretations that can be gotten within a single narrative. To come back to my previous point, the change in physical intimacy between Susan and Foe can generate many new meanings surrounding their relationship. While a lack of body contact would suggest a platonic relationship between the couple, the fact that Susan is “face to face” with Foe, with “her head in the crook of his arm” allows the reader to infer a more intimate, probably sexual, relationship between the two.

To further develop this point, consider the association of the room with Daniel Defoe. The fact that Coetzee attaches the word “Author” to Defoe’s name opens up the many possibilities of Defoe’s actual vocation instead of closing it. If it is so easy to attach an identity to an individual, Coetzee seems to say, how can we be sure that this individual is who he is supposed to be? For that matter, if another name has appeared on the wall, say Susan Barton, would we now be reading Robinson Crusoe as a novel written by a female novelist instead? The issue of multiplicity is not a simple one to resolve.

So what is the moral of the story? The moral of the story here, to me at least, is that the story is what the writer makes it out to be. And the writer, being a product of social, cultural, and historical influences, always carries with him the writers of previous epochs, their thoughts and ideas, their values and belief systems. As such there is no original story. Neither is there a fixed or original text; all texts are inter-texts of previous texts and the texts to come.

By revealing this intertextual quality within his novel, Coetzee reinforces the fact that his text is yet another intertext, this time to Daniel (De)Foe’s Robinson Crusoe. (Incidentally, Defoe’s original last name was Foe; he changed it to Defoe to increase the literary reception of his writings by allowing people to associate him with the French.) And that his text is a reinterpretation of Defoe’s text, just like Defoe’s text might have been a rip-off of some other (unknown) text that came up during or before his time. To bring this to another level, writing can be both a physical and metaphysical process that transcends time and space. Similarly, ideas, fiction, values, and entire belief systems are not fixed but rather fluid entities that may mix, match, and transcend time and space to make their presence felt in different societies depending on the varying needs of these societies

The dilemma of words

Words and descriptions allow the reader to realise certain images in his mind’s eye, but they also confine the reader’s imagination to the extent of the vocabulary he possesses, or for that matter, the range of words constructed and in existence in a particular language system.

Ungraceful Bodies

The notion of disgrace is a social construction. We are never disgraced until others think us to be so. To develop this further, consider the sociological definition of “deviance”. A person is labelled a deviant when he/she commits an act which is considered socially incorrect. Significantly, that act has to be committed in the open where people can bear witness and confer their opinion or judgement onto the actor.

As such, Lurie’s "rape" of Melanie was not deviantised because sex between them was a private affair which was done away from the prying eyes of the public. However, it became deviant when Melanie revealed it to her boyfriend and subsequently her family, the latter of whom decided that actions have to be taken against this Romantic (no puns intended) lecturer. That transformed Lurie from a non-deviant into a deviant, marking the start of his fall from grace.

As such, we can see how powerful social labels and the act of social labelling can be. Consider how the Blacks were perceived by the Whites in apartheid South Africa. Because of certain expectations and ideological slants, the Whites saw themselves as the superior race. The body thus became a site for political contention, resulting in a power struggle that saw people’s bodies becoming identity markers when they are in public. Skin colour became especially sensitive as segregation in places like restaurants and trains were based simply on the dichotomy of white and black. There came to pass a vicious cycle as children were born and socialised into their respective social circles, growing up to feel and think themselves superior or inferior to others depending on the kinds of social markers they carry.

This was the old South Africa, the Africa that Lurie knew and understood, the society that he lived and struggled in for survival. Yet the South Africa now, the Africa after apartheid, with the new political regime of Nelson Mandela, functions on a different body politic. Although still in a grey zone, Blacks are slowly rising in their social status. We see that in the progression of Petrus’ social position. From a dog-man to a co-owner to an independent land-owner, Petrus is representative of the new Black man and his changing social role in South Africa. At the end, even Lucy concedes that she is no more than a “bywoner”, “a tenant on [Petrus’] land” who is dependent on the latter for shelter and protection (Disgrace 204).

This is the power of symbolic interaction in society. Living the majority of his prime studying and teaching in the ivory towers, Lurie is a privileged White man protected from experiencing the real political changes that are happening all around him in the 1990s. Even the school’s inquiry was conducted, not to displace him, but to protect him and to preserve the position that he holds in the university. As Hakim puts it: “We would like to help you…find a way out of what must be a nightmare” (52). The small and closely-knitted community that Lurie is a part of prevents him (and the rest of them) from finding out that the centrality that the Whites have held in South Africa has come to be destabilised.

Perhaps the enlightenment that he receives begins on the day he has sex with Melanie, who is, not without deliberation on Coetzee’s part, a Black. His fall from grace, thanks to his rendezvous with his student, opens his eyes to a new social system with new symbols and meanings that he takes some time to decipher, but nevertheless comes to understand. The act of travelling from the city into the country foreshadows the transition that Lurie eventually comes to experience. Remember Lucy’s words to him when he reveals his displeasure for Petrus over the soon-to-be slaughtered sheep: “Wake up, David. This is the country. This is Africa” (124). This is a statement that can be read in many different ways. Perhaps what will be most useful in this discussion is a careful consideration of how Lucy articulates the last sentence “This is Africa.” When done in the right way, the sentence may come to imply that this, the country, and what is happening here, is a true reflection of the real Africa, the post-apatheid Africa as opposed to the Africa that Lurie knows in the ivory towers with its closed doors and its elitism. This explains why signs and symbols in the country are so destabilising to Lurie: he does not understand and appreciate these signs and their meanings.

That is why he is upset that Lucy is not getting something more (sophisticated) to do in her life (being a White); that is why he is disturbed when he realises that his “simple” neighbours Ettinger and the Shaws believe that they can be friends with him, a highly educated White male professor, just because they live near one another; that is why he cannot accept the fact that Lucy is subservient to Petrus and in need of his protection against other Blacks, a small man who is “big enough for someone small like” her (204). This is the new South Africa, the one that Lurie does not and refuses to know until the end of the novel.

I agree with Attridge to a certain extent when he says that Lurie comes to attain a state of grace towards the end of the novel. After all, Lurie’s development from the start of the novel till the end comes very near to resemble a relinquishment of worldly desires, a kind of Buddhist enlightenment or Taoist Zen. Consider his loss of status: firstly, he was stripped of his professorship; then his last name was converted from “Lurie” to “Lourie” following the name of his daughter cited in the Herald regarding the attack on their “smallholding” (115-6); and towards the conclusion he actually comes to identify himself with the dog-man (146), an identity that Petrus have long since given up with his social aspirations. Think also of his growing compassion for animals: he was affected by the sheep and the fate that awaited them at Petrus’ party; his participation in putting the dogs to sleep affected him so much that, going home one day, the “tears flow down his face” and “his hands shake” so much that he is forced to stop “at the roadside to recover himself” (143). This moment marks the turning point for Lurie: by showing his emotions for the animals Lurie comes to connect with Lucy’s statement about there being “no higher life” except that “which we share with the animals” (74). By appreciating his life through the bodies of animals and through an existence of the most basic, simple kind, Lurie does come to gain a form of enlightenment and attain a state of grace at the end of the novel.

The Body in Pain

It is enlightening when we use Scarry’s “Pain and Imagining” to analyse the motivations of the officer in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony”. At one point in her article, Scarry discusses the notion of work and how one can come to feel a sense of self-worth when one’s work is recognised and acknowledged by others (170). In many ways, the officer craves for that recognition in his work. Consider how absorbed he is when narrating the Golden Age of the Harrow, where people gathered in the thousands to see a prisoner executed by the machine and revelled in the pain and torture the punished individual was made to undergo. Contrast this to his bitter confession that the Harrow and the punishments it executes are not held in high esteem with the new Commandant. This is further reinforced by the officer’s great sense of disappointment when he realises that the explorer is not going to speak up for him and the torture machine. This particular moment in the story is especially revealing:

It did not look as if the officer had been listening. “So you did not find the procedure convincing,” he said to himself and smiled, as an old man smiles at childish nonsense and yet pursues his own meditations behind the smile. (160)

The smile here is more powerful and conveys a deeper sense of dejection and resignation than a sob is capable of. Because no one recognises his work as work anymore, the officer has lost all purpose in life, and is better off dead than being in a suspended mode of living where everyone treats him like an alien from another dimension. The officer therefore experiences the greatest torture in the story, a torture that stems from an unfulfilled desire for respect and recognition for his work and efforts in maintaining the machine and its serviceability. It is also significant that he receives no enlightenment from his execution as a result of the machine’s malfunction during the procedure. Because of the officer’s inability to change and move on with the times, his death is cold and gruesome, and provides him with no relief, with no release.



An After-thought

After reading Kafka's "In the Penal Colony", I thought about the various characters in the story and gave them each an archetypal representation.

The list is as follows:

The Officer - The old-guard elites; the creator and preserver of the eroding political ideologies of the Colony;

The Explorer - Representative of an alternative ideology; his presence challenges and threatens the already declining mores of the Colony;

The Soldier - The law enforcer; the preserver of the status quo; however his mindless subjection to the Officer actually accelerates the fall of the old system;

The Prisoner - The masses; to follow rules and orders without questioning them; it is significant that the Prisoner is condemned to death because of disobedience.

The story presents a chaotic period of transition from the old order to a new, still crystalising, order. The officer is the last protector of the old faith, and with his dying the new order can begin its full-fledged development towards social progress and modernisation.

It is also revealing that the explorer is unable to decipher the calligraphy of the Harrow, highlighting the obsolete language and ideology of the dead Commandant and his servant the officer. This is emphatic in that the society is in need of change, which is representative of the foreign explorer and the new Commandant of the colony.