World Literature,the opaque archive,and the untranslatable: J. M. Coetzee and some others

Abstract

A key concern of recent theoretical orientations in the development of “World Literature” as a discipline has been the question of accessibility to literatures in minor languages, which is to say of literal and metaphorical translatability, even transparency. This essay explores the challenge posed by the occlusion of the possible intertextual influence of works in such languages that are evident only as a trace in texts that now seem indisputably part of a canon of World Literature. What happens when the engagement of writers in this canon with cultural production in languages adjacent to those in which they themselves principally operate is not evident to an increasingly global community of scholars, and perhaps not even evidenced in an author’s archive (whether this is understood to be a material collection or indeed a virtual space conceptualized as the literary ecosystem in which an author has developed)? This essay addresses these questions with reference to the work of South African-born Nobel Prize-winning writer J. M. Coetzee, and to the problem posed by some of his work’s (and his archive’s) others, here specifically Afrikaners and the work of Afrikaans-language writers. This consideration has implications not only for the current shape of Coetzee studies, but for that of World Literature more broadly, presenting something of a limit-case for the translation metaphor that directs some of its formulations as disciplinary field.

This article asks what remains irrecoverable on the other side of “World Literature’s” promise of literal and metaphorical transparency. In Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (2015), Rebecca Walkowitz presents a case for the exemplary novel of our global age being one that turns the directional preoccupations of World Literature — understood as writing that traverses borders, often in translation from the world’s minor languages into its major ones, moving from the margins of the West in the direction of Western metropolitan loci of cultural validation — into an element of its narrative occasion, its tropes, or its plot. ¹ Such a text, Walkowitz argues, approaches “translation as medium and origin rather than as afterthought” and is consequently, in her organizing metaphor, “born translated” (2015: 4, 3). The born-translated novel travels because it speaks to readers across space and time; appearing paradoxically not to have been written for any particular readers, it seems therefore to have been written for all.

It is perhaps no surprise that the work of South African-born, Australian-resident writer J. M. Coetzee provides Walkowitz with key examples of this kind of emblematic new global novel. Several of Coetzee’s fictions, written and published in English, ask the reader to imagine that the narrative has reached them already in translation, that characters are engaging with the world in other languages, whether Dutch in the second part of Dusklands (1974), an unspecified language in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), or Spanish in the novels of the Jesus trilogy (2013, 2016, 2019). ² In the discussion that follows, I use Walkowitz’s suggestion that writing like Coetzee’s directs our attention to a certain “resistance to mastery […] or […] fluency […] by pointing at versions and editions beyond our reach” (2015: 85)—for example, by suggesting that the fiction we are reading exists at one remove from an original—as a starting point from which to ask what precisely is mastered in the process of evoking a sense of a lost or irretrievable original. What if it is not only imagined versions or editions that lie beyond a reader’s reach, but whole archives, even whole networks of allusion and intertextuality — indeed, whole cultural ecosystems? What happens when the likely engagement by globally visible writers with cultural production in languages adjacent to those in which they operate is not evident to a majority of readers, and perhaps not evidenced in such writers’ archives? How might we hear the echoes of such engagements if they linger only as traces in texts that travel, works borne into the canon as always already “born translated”, and without (to many readers, apparent) memory?

When the Swedish Academy announced the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Coetzee in 2003, it described him as a writer “who in innumerable guises portrays the surprising involvement of the outsider” (Nobel, 2003: n.p.). This citation, seeking to distil the character of an oeuvre, reflected the truism that Coetzee’s fictions repeatedly engage with otherness. ³ It also developed a widespread tendency to regard his works as especially amenable to allegorical interpretation, a feature of their reception from the earliest international reviews. ⁴ This essay attends to a circumscribed subset of Coetzee’s others in service of a different way of thinking about the author’s elective affinities, the politics and psychology of disavowal, and — in a turn that will take us outside of the texts themselves — about stages in the methodological constitution of the field of study dedicated to his work. In the process, I seek to present something of a limit-case for the translation metaphor that directs some formulations of World Literature as a disciplinary field.

Coetzee’s other others

The “other” others serving as a pretext for my analysis here are Coetzee’s Afrikaners. Consider for a moment the first of his partly fictionalized memoirs, or autre-biographies, Boyhood (1997), later included with Youth (2002) and Summertime (2009) in an omnibus volume, Scenes from Provincial Life (2011). ⁵ Boyhood narrates in third-person present-tense prose the life, between 1948 and 1951, of a character (aged eight to 11) very like J. M. Coetzee, here called John. During this period, John's family — father, mother, two sons — moves from Cape Town to the dusty inland town of Worcester, where a majority of the population, white and coloured alike, ⁶ uses Afrikaans as their first language. Despite John’s own family’s facility with Afrikaans, they choose to perform as English-speaking white South Africans, a by no means uncomplicated choice. English is the adopted language of John’s mother’s family and, as Rita Barnard observes, Boyhood “reveals the young Coetzee” (the elision of John and J. M. here is hers) “to be — scandalously — his mamma’s boy” (Barnard, 2009: 92). Although their origins are in Germany by way of Polish Pomerania, and although they regret South Africa’s support for the Allies instead of Germany during the Second World War (Coetzee, 1997: 40–42), they are English-speaking by choice, John's mother and her siblings have English names, and “her English is faultless” to the extent that “[s]he is at home in the language” (106). John’s father, Zacharias (Jack), although from an Afrikaans-speaking family, also chooses to speak English even if he does so in an accent that betrays his heritage. This is a political choice, too: Jack served with South African forces on the Allied side in the War and is not a supporter of the National Party; he loses his civil-service post when the party comes to power in May 1948. ⁷ Jack does not therefore identify with the nationalists’ particularly narrow understanding of what it means to be an Afrikaner, and his spoken Afrikaans is closer to his own father’s: a hybrid performative language intimately connected to a particular place and that contrasts with the version valorized by the recently empowered peddlers of apartheid.

The supposedly pure form of the language the new government endorses appears to the young John as if “weighed down with idioms that are supposed to come from the volksmond, the people’s mouth, but seem to come only from the Great Trek” (Coetzee, 1997: 81). (“The Great Trek” denotes that mid-nineteenth-century exodus of pioneer proto-Afrikaner farmers from the Cape Colony to escape British rule.) This is a language replete with “lumpish, nonsensical idioms about wagons and cattle and cattle-harnesses”, seemingly trapped in a past subject to rigorously revisionist, conservative myth-making, while the version of Afrikaans spoken on John’s grandfather’s farm, by contrast, is a “slapdash mixture” that is “lighter” and “airier” (Coetzee, 1997: 81). As Barnard observes, John senses that the “system implicit in and imposed by Afrikaans is to be avoided” if he is not to “become entangled in various embarrassments”, including the childishness he associates with some Afrikaans grammatical formulations, “the bodily frankness and brutality that Afrikaans seems to encrypt”, and the marginality and backwardness he feels is embodied in those unwieldy idioms (Barnard, 2009: 93–94).

Neither of these versions of the Afrikaans language is what John hears in the mouths of the sheep-shearers. These men arrive on the family farm as if bearing news from another country, appear authentically of the land in a way that unsettles any presumptive white claims to it, and are understood as coloured. Their Afrikaans “is so thick, so full of strange idioms” that John “can barely understand it”; he wonders whence the shearers came and whether there might be “a country deeper even than” that of the family farm, “a heartland even more secluded from the world” (Coetzee, 1997: 93). It is something like this uncomplicated belonging that John seeks — and indeed thinks he finds — when he speaks Afrikaans on visits to the farm. He finds that “all the complications of life seem suddenly to fall away” in these moments, the language becoming “like a ghostly envelope that accompanies him everywhere, that he is free to slip into, becoming at once another person, simpler, gayer, lighter in his tread” (Coetzee, 1997: 125). This language is not, however, one that the reader witnesses the character speaking at any length. It is as if it remains private, imagined or reported, always at risk of being overtaken by expanding sets of impossible complicities or differences, and involving shifting sets of allegiances or resentments that implicate his parents. John

thanks God that his mother speaks English. But he remains mistrustful of his father, […] does not see why his father goes on making the effort to be English here in Worcester, where it would be so easy for him to slide back into being Afrikaans. (Coetzee, 1997: 126)

In an interview with David Attwell, conducted some years before Boyhood’s publication, Coetzee addresses the complex calculus of belonging and exclusion at stake in linguistic choice, claiming to be “one of many people in this country” who had “become detached from their ethnic roots where those roots were in Dutch South Africa or Indonesia or Britain or Greece or wherever, and have joined a pool of no recognizable ethnos whose language of exchange is English” (Coetzee, 1992: 342). Such people, Coetzee continued, were “not, strictly speaking English South Africans”, since many of them (himself included) could not claim British ancestry. Instead, they were “merely South Africans (itself a mere name of convenience) whose native tongue, the tongue they have been born to, is English” (342). Coetzee casts the promise of a link between this common language and the heterogeneity of its speakers in ethnic or racial terms as distinctly utopian. Just “as the pool has no discernible ethnos”, he continues, “so one day I hope it will have no predominant color, as more people of color drift into it” and “in which differences wash away” (Coetzee, 1992: 342).

If English holds such promise, however, why pay attention to Afrikaans speakers or to Afrikaners in Coetzee’s oeuvre? To do so is to point out that, despite the presentation of John as Anglophone white South African (in Boyhood in particular), there is another other close at hand, an Afrikaans-speaking other who is deeply intimate to, if not co-eval with, the self. ⁸ This is also to raise questions about influence, and particularly which influences are visible and which not. It is less the representation of Afrikaners or of Afrikaans in Coetzee’s works that is at issue than what such representation distracts us from seeing. Baldly stated, this is the degree to which Coetzee’s writing has itself been influenced by Afrikaans-language literature, a body of writing to which many in the increasingly global community of scholars in an expanding field of “Coetzee studies” has little access, and one moreover whose significance the construction of writing like Coetzee’s as “born translated” risks obscuring (or absolves the scholar of a responsibility to consider).

For Walkowitz, Coetzee’s general avoidance of “stylistic marking such as grammatical inversion or broken diction that would remind readers of a specific foreign language” serves to produce “text in which even English readers are blocked from imagining a direct, simultaneous encounter with a language that is their own” (Walkowitz, 2015: 53, 54). In her reading, this furthers the project of Coetzee’s all-encompassing critique of hegemonic constructions like race and nation, speaking to his professed discomfort with national-language literary traditions. Coetzee’s writing, precisely on account of his association of “linguistic and cultural homogeneity with apartheid nationalism”, seems therefore “in some ways most South African — most attentive, that is, to the history and politics of apartheid — when it appears most translated”, Walkowitz argues (2015: 54). Boyhood is not the most useful text against which to measure this assessment: it addresses language choice directly, marks clearly speech that the reader is to understand has been spoken in Afrikaans (if it is not rendered in that language), and weighs up the relative merits of English in such a way that the Anglophone reader is unlikely to be “blocked from imagining a direct, simultaneous encounter” with their own language. Meanwhile in (let us say) a Spanish translation, Boyhood would still be about a character not unlike Coetzee choosing between two named languages. Rather than arguing that the book poses an exception to Walkowitz’s typology, however, I want instead to highlight her assessment that Coetzee’s project involves critique of the exclusionary tendencies of national–literary traditions — with which I agree. I believe we need to ask, however, about sub-national traditions that might be elided, whether by the choice to write in English (indeed the utopian promise of multiracial belonging imagined in English), or to write in a prose style that encourages readers of whatever language not to recognize theirs as the “original” of what is being read. ⁹

In those few texts in which Coetzee has touched on the subject of inheritance and influence, his own answer to the question of how much Afrikaans-language writing had influenced his work has been a resolute not much. In “Homage”, first given as a lecture at UC Berkeley in November 1991, he disavows South African literary paternity tout court. When he first left the country in the 1960s, he claimed, there simply were no South African writers to whom he might turn for models (Coetzee, 1993: 7). ¹⁰ And yet, in typically self-referential and meta-critical mode, Coetzee also issues a note of caution about this disavowal, suggesting at the start of the lecture that while what followed would address “some of the writers without whom I would not be the person I am”, it was not — or was “[p]robably not” — anything like “the full story” (1993: 5). There is in fact a great deal of allusion to and conversation with Afrikaans-language progenitors in Coetzee’s writing, but (as might be expected on the basis of the comments in “Homage”) such engagement is all but elided in Coetzee’s own version of his literary genealogy. One could compile a list of Afrikaans-language writers discussed in Coetzee’s essays and other nonfiction or who are translated by him; it would include C. Louis Leipoldt, Mikro, Toon van den Heever, Breyten Breytenbach, André Brink, and Wilma Stockenström. ¹¹ To these one might add those relatively few writers on whom there are reading notes in the Coetzee Papers at the Harry Ransom Center in Texas. ¹²

If, however, the Texas archive has much to offer the literary historian on the trail of intertextual echoes or influences, anyone who has spent a period in this archive begins to wonder about its silences. In the case of Coetzee’s Afrikaans-language intertexts, though not only these, much is simply not present, or is invisible, in those portions currently accessible to scholars. ¹³ Another version of the question I have been posing might therefore be: who or what are the archive’s others? Absences might only seem apparent to the reader convinced that some trace is missing. What are the implications for a scholarly field concerned with the study of an author whose papers become accessible, when — as in this case — the language of the vast majority of the archival material (and of its description and management) is not the same as the language in which the evidence of a trace is sought? Where might such a trace be found, and by whom?

In the present case, I suggest the task falls to readers qualified to attend to what, after Alexander Beecroft, we might term the “literary ecology” (2015: 18) of that part of South Africa in which Coetzee came to maturity as an artist. Beecroft’s model of literary “biomes” (2015: 25), which makes possible paying attention to “the interaction of literature with its environment” (3), counters the reliance of many influential theorists of World Literature (not least Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova) on economic metaphors that cast texts as commodities in a global marketplace. The ecological metaphor allows for a differently productive account of the conditions pertaining in a particular language community, in a particular place and time, and of their relationships with past and future. “[W]here economics tends to simplify our understanding of complex systems in order to make them easier to understand”, Beecroft argues, “ecology is more comfortable accepting that the complexity may be inherent to the system” and that “any given literature must […] be understood as being in an ecological relationship to other phenomena — political, economic, sociocultural, religious — as well as to the other languages and literatures with which it is in contact” (2015: 18, 19). In a space like late-apartheid South Africa, for Anglophone writing (perhaps in particular by writers like J. M. Coetzee), such “languages and literatures” include, preeminently, Afrikaans. To reframe the problem posed at the end of the preceding paragraph, then: what happens when inter-linguistic echoes and influences are not visible in the archive, whether this archive is understood to be the physical collection of manuscripts and other materials or indeed a fantastic, virtual space conceptualized as the literary (and linguistic) ecosystem in which an author has developed and with reference to which they continue to work?

Textual others: Inheritance and plot

Coetzee’s Age of Iron (1991/1990) is a key text of what many call South Africa’s long interregnum — repurposing the term to which Nadine Gordimer, citing Antonio Gramsci, gave great currency in the early 1980s. ¹⁴ Coetzee’s sixth fiction, to use the mode of reference employed by the author himself during composition, it features a white English-speaking protagonist, Mrs Curren, who admits to her home a vagrant known only as Vercueil during the mid-year (Southern-hemisphere) midwinter of 1986. Against the backdrop of state-sponsored vigilante violence that left many black people without shelter in the townships outside Cape Town that season, Mrs Curren contemplates her complicity with the unjust racial order. She finds that it is to Vercueil, whom she compares to an angel of death (Mrs Curren has been diagnosed with cancer), that she must finally entrust everything — even the letters addressed to her daughter that constitute the occasion of narration of this epistolary text.

That Coetzee is in part writing back to Gordimer’s oeuvre, taking the older writer’s liberal politics to what he saw as its logical endpoint, is made clear in notes for and drafts of Age of Iron at the Ransom Center. ¹⁵ Early in the composition process, it occurs to Coetzee that the book might be “an anti-July’s People” (1987e: 4). In an early draft, the protagonist (at this stage male) observes to his domestic worker that there is “a writer who lives in Johannesburg, called Nadine Gordimer, who writes about people like us”. “It is”, he concludes, “a very humiliating experience to read about oneself in her books” (1987b: 25). Such direct references do not survive in the published text, however, although the intertextual allusions are evident in echoes of imagery and phrases from Gordimer’s novels. Mrs Curren thinks of her room as “a late bourgeois tomb” (Coetzee, 1991/1990: 137), ¹⁶ evoking the title of Gordimer’s 1966 novella, The Late Bourgeois World; a comparison of the faces of the dead with pig iron in Gordimer’s Booker Prize-winning novel The Conservationist (1974) is echoed in Mrs Curren’s description of a young revolutionary fighter’s body (114–15); and Mrs Curren, like Bev Smales in Gordimer’s 1981 novel July’s People, keeps a “shortwave radio” at her bedside (20). ¹⁷

If the reader alert to these echoes is able to corroborate the suspicion of direct influence by consulting the archive, what might it mean for there to be another possible intertext for many of the key scenarios and tropes in Age of Iron of which there is no direct archival evidence at all? If the links with Gordimer reinforce Coetzee’s situation — or the situating of Coetzee’s work — in a specifically English-speaking South African context, one from which writing travels out into the global Anglosphere (and beyond) with little impediment (whether or not on account of those qualities Walkowitz identifies), what journeys and genealogies might be overlooked in the case of these other potential traces, these other (non-archived) others? What might be the reward for a more nuanced sense of Coetzee’s conversations with local literary contexts if we consider the oeuvre — exemplified in this case by Age of Iron — alongside the writing in Afrikaans we know Coetzee was likely reading, works that spoke to his sense of himself as emotionally — if not politically or perhaps ethnically — at least in part an Afrikaner?

The principal text I have in mind is a novel entitled Erf, the word suggesting both a plot of land or a yard, and also the question of genealogy (om te erf means “to inherit”). Now little read, and neither republished nor translated from its original Afrikaans, Erf appeared from Taurus, one of the most important of the small anti-apartheid presses, in the very year in which Age of Iron is set, 1986. (The first draft of Coetzee’s manuscript for Age of Iron is dated May 1987. ¹⁸ ) Erf was the second novel by Lettie Viljoen, a pseudonym used by the writer and artist Ingrid Winterbach for her first five novels, published between 1984 and 1993. The others were: Klaaglied vir Koos (1984, Elegy for Koos), Belemmering (1990, Hindrance), Karolina Ferreira (1993, the protagonist’s name was replaced with the title The Elusive Moth when the translation appeared under Winterbach’s name in 2003), and Landskap met vroue en slang (1996, Landscape with Women and Snake). Winterbach has since published a number of novels, several translated into English, and has won almost all of the major literary prizes for Afrikaans-language writing in South Africa, several more than once.

Erf features a number of tropes and plot points that bear direct comparison with Age of Iron, most obviously a female protagonist living on a property somewhere near Cape Town (likely the town of Stellenbosch) on which a vagrant, Loe-wie, has taken up residence. There are two narrative voices. One is a third-person narrative voice, often focalized through the chief protagonist, Bets (but occasionally describing other characters, including a coloured gardener and his common-law wife, and a young white woman named Agnes). The other is an unidentified first-person voice, possibly that of Bets, describing daily terrors, the space in which she lives, and her relationships. There is reference throughout to violence occurring in nearby townships, by which is meant areas of inadequate housing reserved for those not classified white by apartheid racial legislation. However, the author also makes clear the direct link between what the government euphemistically calls “unrest”, and the structural violence playing out as hunger closer to white characters’ own front doors. Consider for example these two sentences, whose juxtaposition drips with irony: “Die land was toe reeds onregeerbaar. Vyandige bruinkinders het by die hek saamgebondel en brood geëis” [The country was then already ungovernable. Hostile brown children bundled together at the gate and demanded bread] (Viljoen, 1986: 7). ¹⁹ Later, Bets has a newspaper by her bedside, the front page featuring a fire behind which brown youths dance (63). Meanwhile, white characters opposed to the regime face a choice: whether to leave the country and fight with the anti-apartheid liberation movement, or engage in activist work closer to home. The novel questions the usefulness of the latter course of action. Of the regular meetings in the town that she attends, for example, Agnes (whose husband has been drawn into the Struggle) witnesses her fellow left-leaning whites in metaphorical contortions (they “do difficult tricks and swing from the chandeliers”), while coloured attendees insist on democratic methods (“demokratiese metodes”), and black attendees (“die swartes”), who apprehend clearly how little difference such meetings make to the situation on the ground, “say little and often don’t turn up” (“sê min en daag dikwels nie op nie”) (19). By contrast, the white women talk so much “their cheeks glow” (“Die witvroue het gepraat dat hulle wange gloei”) (25).

The account of Bets’s struggles with the vagrant Loe-wie is the most compelling of the various narrative lines. Indeed, the novel begins with her voyeuristic meditation on what might be going on in the hut he erects in her yard. Whenever Bets asks Loe-wie to leave, he merely disappears for a stretch of days before returning. She reports him to the police, though hesitates to press charges (21–22). ²⁰ When a police warning achieves nothing, Bets herself dismantles Loe-wie’s hut (30). After this destructive act, he disappears once more, but soon turns up again to sleep rough in the overgrown garden (44), before moving into the lean-to in which Bets stores her gardening tools (74). At her wits’ end, Bets drags Loe-wie’s bedding into the street and nails the outside toilet shut (80–81). Unlike in Age of Iron, this appears to be the end of the matter. Loe-wie returns only to claim his few possessions, before leaving the property for good (81).

Age of Iron is resolutely hibernal: it begins in August (3), and late in the text features reference to the vernal equinox, which occurs in mid-September in South Africa (174). By contrast, Erf includes several shifts of season. Its saturation with tropes of transformation seems connected always to a larger political context of which white characters cannot remain ignorant. Early in Winterbach’s novel, there is a suggestive comparison between beetle larvae, ensconced in decaying matter, and white South Africans who refuse to engage with the local:

Bets draai haar om in die koel huis in. Dit is somer. Die dorp is oorgegee aan homself, verlate. Die Europese kennis word in die bloedige hitte in die koel herehuise soos die larwes van die Coleoptera in humus en verrottende hout bewaar. In die herfs sal die kennis verpop, en in die winter sal dit volwasse word. (9)

[Bets turns and enters the cool house. It is summer. The town is given over to itself, abandoned. In the bloody heat, European knowledge is preserved in the cool mansions like the larvae of the Coleoptera is preserved in humus and rotting wood. In the autumn, the knowledge will pupate, and in the winter mature to adulthood.]

This might remind some readers of the memorable ways in which, in Age of Iron, Mrs Curren thinks about states of change: black children are denied childhood while white children are trapped in larva-like limbo, “spinning themselves tighter and tighter into their sleepy cocoons” (6), their “lives passed” in an “innocence of bee-grubs, plump and white, drenched in honey, absorbing sweetness through their soft skins” (6–7). Later, whites in general are like “grubs in […] swaddling bands” (85). Moreover, for Mrs Curren, metamorphosis is not necessarily in one direction: complicity and violence are causing whites to regress, “the colonists […] prepare to return to the deep” (116), and death might be the only permanent transformation or escape that remains. Living in South Africa “thickens our speech, dulls our feelings, turns us into beasts”, she observes later (95), thinking about how the schoolteacher Thabane must find her reactionary and regressive. Her soul, Mrs Curren speculates, might transform into a “white moth, a ghost emerging from the mouth of the figure on the deathbed” (118). Unlike Mrs Curren, Bets does not have cancer. However, late in Erf she does suffer an illness from which she emerges as if from a cocoon (83–85), though neither obviously to regret her treatment of Loe-wie, nor to take up more engaged activism (nor indeed to reveal greater self-acceptance). There is, then, neither resolution nor consolation in Winterbach’s novel, either.

There are other points of similarity between tropes of limbo and transformation in these texts. For instance, each draws on the contrast between heaven and hell. In Erf, Bets dreams of setting her clothes on fire (3), while in Age of Iron, Mrs Curren fantasizes about self-immolation (104, 106, 128, 163–64), regards South Africa as metaphorically aflame (36), and is paranoid about fire on her property — “No fires”, she instructs Vercueil (6). Erf features heralds or guides, not unlike Vercueil; in Agnes’s narrative, we meet Patience, a black woman from the Cape Flats whose house has been demolished and whom Agnes and her husband take in for several days (26). There is also Ezekiel, who, not unlike the schoolteacher Thabane in Age of Iron, brings news of the townships to concerned white folk in the suburbs, serving for Bets as prophet and herald of unease (14).

In Age of Iron, the metaphorics of paradise and inferno, stasis and transformation, are expressed in relation to the classics, of which Mrs Curren is a retired teacher (176). Vercueil is compared to Odysseus (128), Mrs Curren to Circe (77), and there are references to lotus-eaters (111) and “infant souls whose eternal whining Aeneas mistook for weeping” (85). The Cape Flats, to which coloured South Africans were removed after the 1960s and where shantytowns catering to migrant black South Africans sprang up, is compared with Aornos, site of Alexander the Great’s last great siege (83). There are multiple references to the Styx, including in a quotation from book 6 (lines 327–30) of the Aeneid. The passage describes how Aeneas, approaching the underworld river, sees the unburied dead, rejected by Charon and refused passage to the other bank, doomed to roam for a century without rest (176). Mrs Curren imagines herself and her white compatriots trapped in similar fashion, although the idea of the uncrossable threshold is echoed throughout the narrative.

Virgil’s text also features prominently at a key moment in Erf. As he carts off his belongings after his first eviction from Bets’s property, Loe-wie is given lines from book 7 of the Aeneid:

Goede nagrus Meddim, sê Loe-wie. Hy sit sy kep op, tel die soetkys en die togbag op en wink vir die vrou. Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo. As ek die hemele nie kan buig nie, dan beweeg ek die hel, dink hy en hulle vertrek die skemerte in. (39)

“Rest well tonight, Madam, Loe-wie says. He puts on his cap, picks up the suitcase and the togbag and winks at the woman”. The Latin is translated for us: “If I can’t bend the heavens, then I’ll move hell”. We are told that Loe-wie “thinks” these lines, before he and his companion “depart into the dusk”, like underworld shades. More strictly, the quotation might run: “If I cannot deflect the will of those above, I shall move the River Acheron”. The lines are Juno’s, and they come at a moment at which Aeneas and the Trojans have landed in Latium hoping to establish a new Troy. Aeneas is offered the hand of King Latinus’s daughter, Lavinia, to confirm peace between indigenes and settlers. Juno, still raging against the Trojans, sets Furies against them to disrupt their plans, and vows to act alone if no other gods will join her. At issue here are questions of settler-colonialism and resistance, and what it might take to break a stalemate or fight what appears to be a losing battle, all of which resonate with Erf’s concerns in complex ways.

These lines from the Aeneid, however, also serve as the epigraph to Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. The fact that Bets is reading Freud throughout Erf suggests they might be understood as her interpretation of a less highbrow curse offered by the departing Loe-wie. Like Mrs Curren, then, Bets casts the world around her in terms whose classical origins suggest both incommensurable worldviews (European, African), and bathos. Immediately after the lines from the Aeneid’s book 6 come to Mrs Curren’s mind in Age of Iron, she thinks Vercueil, Virgil to her Dante, is about to tell her something, but holds back as if he “was at a threshold he could not cross” (177). The point of connection with Erf is surely a condition of stasis from which the indigene cannot save the settler, or from which the settler cannot break except by joining the armed struggle. Classical references, and especially Latin ones (as here), serve as markers of something cosmopolitan but also belated. They are suggestive of so many tropes that are activated in both novels for symbolic effect — not least the indictment of South Africa’s white minority by implied association with an imperial elite, and their politics with that of empire. The invocation of a set of intertexts that are nearly opaque (and in some cases, in Coetzee’s text, not fully translated) also serves as a neat emblem for the idea this article explores of a virtual archive hiding in plain sight, one that is illegible to many, at the verge of an apprehension of which some (perhaps many) readers stand, as do the shades before a river across which they cannot be translated.

As David Attwell (2015) has shown, the drafts of Coetzee’s fictions all evolved slightly differently, often after difficult starts, draft versions showing sometimes significant changes to voice, tone, setting, and even the gender or occupation of protagonists (both true of Age of Iron). Once these had been settled, Coetzee often read widely to expand and add subtlety to particular references. In the case of Age of Iron, this included texts to advance Mrs Curren’s classical allusions: the archive holds photocopies from editions of Cicero’s De Finibus Bonorum Et Malorum and of Tertullian. Coetzee also consulted texts that treat the motif of the guided journey through hell, including “The Demeter of Cnidos”, Stephen Bemrose’s 1983 essay on “Dante’s Angelic Intelligences”, and several works by Rilke — the eighth of the Duino Elegies, the fourteenth of the Sonnets to Orpheus, and extracts from Poems 1906 to 1926 (Coetzee, 1987d). None of this, however, reduces the significance of the coincidence of the classical allusions in Coetzee’s and Viljoen/Winterbach’s texts. Neither, however, am I necessarily suggesting a direct patterning. What, then, am I suggesting?

Attenuated borders, fragile ecologies

Asked in a 1978 interview by the poet Stephen Watson, then Coetzee’s colleague at the University of Cape Town, which South African writing had influenced his work, Coetzee answered with an assessment that South Africa’s was “not a great literature and there are no really gigantic figures in it”. He stated that he had little interest in writers “who are classed as gigantic, say Schreiner and Campbell”, and that he found few among contemporary writers fit to be “cannibaliz[ed]”. He continued:

As for people writing nowadays, in practice one can read only so much, and I read mostly the stuff that, crudely speaking, I can cannibalize. There aren’t many South African writers I feel like cannibalizing. If I want a good meal I go elsewhere. (Watson, 1978: 22)

In October 2011, in response to a query from the scholar Peter D. McDonald about whether there was “a particular Afrikaans book and/or author from which/whom” Coetzee thought he had “gained something important as a writer”, he responded: “The answer is no, but don’t take that as a judgment on Afrikaans writing” (McDonald, 2017b: n.p.). About his engagement with Afrikaans literary culture more broadly, though, Coetzee was a little more expansive, if no less sceptical:

From the time of my return to South Africa in 1971 I consciously kept up with what was being written in Afrikaans — I thought it was more interesting than what was coming out in English. I also had more to do with Western Cape Afrikaans literary circles than with English (which never went in for literary circles) […]. I was not (I think) in dialogue with any of them in my writing, but I certainly spent a lot of time talking to them. (McDonald, 2017b: n.p.)

Coetzee’s qualification — “I was not (I think)” — is telling. I have found no evidence for his having read Erf, no trace of reference to it either in Age of Iron’s manuscript materials or the author’s notebooks, though it is very likely that he would at least have known about it. Coetzee and André Brink included a translated fragment from Winterbach’s first novel, Klaaglied vir Koos (1984) (published, like Erf, by Taurus, under the pseudonym Lettie Viljoen), in their co-edited anthology, A Land Apart: A Contemporary South African Reader, in 1986 — the same year in which Erf appeared. ²¹ Even if Bets (short for Elizabeth) seems a potential prototype for Mrs Curren (whom Coetzee thought of as an Elizabeth, even if the name appears nowhere in the text of Age of Iron itself), ²² and even if Erf’s intransigent vagrant Loe-wie seems a forerunner of sorts for Vercueil (challenging and unsettling a white female character’s sense of self, whether sexual, racial, or political), I am not arguing that Winterbach’s is an intertext that Coetzee ought to acknowledge. Whether or not there is a direct relationship between the two (one of influence or inspiration) is ultimately less interesting than a suggestion that the evidence adduced might encourage us to think about lines of influence and inheritance that are elusive, evident only partially — and, even then, only to select readers.

The probability is that there are many intertextual conversations yet to be noted in Coetzee’s oeuvre. That said, the payoffs of such explorations, however satisfying, are limited, if larger implications are not held in view. Elsewhere I argue that Coetzee’s Scenes from Provincial Life might be read fruitfully alongside Gregor von Rezzori’s Memoiren eines Antisemiten (1979), published in translation as Memoirs of an Anti-Semite in 1981 (Von Rezzori, 2008). Points of comparison — formal, structural, and thematic — between these memoir-projects (like Coetzee’s, Memoiren might be described as a fragmentary autre-biography) are strong. However, as with Winterbach’s text, there is no direct reference to Rezzori’s work in Coetzee’s accessible archive. The fourth section of Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, originally written in English, did nonetheless appear in The New Yorker in 1969, while Coetzee was teaching in Buffalo, New York, where he might well have encountered it. Rather than making an argument for direct influence, however, I read the texts alongside each other for what is revealed reciprocally, arguing that Memoirs “offers a powerful analogy for the operation of irony in the redirection of dysphoria that is (also) crucial to Coetzee’s” work, and that the projects share a similar “ironizing of their respective protagonists’ apparently anti-political stances” (Van der Vlies, 2017: 73, 72; emphasis in original).

The ramifications of the argument I have attempted to offer here are broader, for scholarship on Coetzee but also for World Literature as a discipline. Specific intertextual conversations like the one discussed above are, I have suggested, too often rendered illegible by some of the shared assumptions that structure World Literature as a field. If works like Coetzee’s are cast as arising less in a particular time and place but being rather somehow of no particular time, as global or “born translated” (as is the case no less in the Swedish Academy’s Nobel Prize citation than in the framing given Coetzee’s work by World Literature monographs and syllabi), they lose their charge as testimony to rich and complex literary environments, or, after Beecroft, “biomes”. The particularities to which we can attend through a Beecroft-like focus on specific local conditions are more difficult to discern in — or less interesting and useful for — models of World Literature that remain committed to the metaphor of border-crossing and the always translatable (or already translated). I am interested, in other words, in how we restore the need to look beyond the surface of the ostensibly born-translated text.

In Against World Literature, Emily Apter argues that “‘border-crossing’ has become such an all-purpose, ubiquitous way of talking about translation that its purchase on the politics of actual borders — whether linguistic or territorial — has been attenuated” (2013: 100). And in Artefacts of Writing, Peter D. McDonald observes that for all of what he calls Walkowitz’s “openness to conceiving ‘community as something we discover’ through each act of reading rather than as a pre-given ‘linguistic, territorial, or political entity concurrent with either author or reader’”, she “remains professionally committed” to the “version of ‘World’ literary studies” indebted to Damrosch’s model of border-crossing (McDonald, 2017a: 28; quoting Walkowitz, 2015: 86). McDonald argues that an alternative might pay attention to actual processes of interlingual and intercultural thinking that require us to grapple with frontiers and differences that remain, and to the unavoidable influences of institutions that cannot be wished away. As Emily Apter suggests in a return to the questions that animated Against World Literature, “I would replace the whole rubric of World Literature with a problem-based approach to ‘literatures of the world’ and attend to relations within communities” (2019: 198).

Here it seems worth mentioning Coetzee’s choice, in recent years, to publish some work in translation (including in Dutch or in Spanish) before its publication in English, in part to draw attention to the difficulties faced by publishers in languages whose educated readers are frequently able to read the English original and might therefore not wait for a translation into their own language. These publications, however, also challenge the assumption that work “born translated” should be assumed to be so born metaphorically, and in English. They evidence a willingness, as Baidik Bhattacharya argues, to “embrace other registers of nonreading, untranslatability, and illegibility” in service of commitments to other regional and linguistic affiliations (2020: 320). ²³

In order to apprehend the particular structures of feeling that a text like Age of Iron indexes and perhaps portends, we need above all to broaden our awareness of the tropes and allusions operative in a particular place in a particular historical moment. We should ask what this indicates about shared cultural references that might appear — retrospectively, and without adequate contextualization — to be (merely) exceptional, if they are noted at all. Attempting to reconstruct some of the specific particularities of the context in which important individual works like Age of Iron take shape, which is to say also in some senses coalesce, requires following intertextual references and allusive echoes that might have no trace in the physical archive as a way of beginning to understand the complex mutations of metaphor, and the ebbs and flows of homage and argument, that mark intellectual fields and structure the cultural imaginaries — and literary ecologies — of particular times and places. If we undervalue and marginalize methodologies that insist on complexity, that listen for the echo, what is lost may come to be forgotten, just as the unwitting complicity of certain modes of scholarly engagement overly invested in visible evidence (the turn to the archive) may in due course register as inevitable. In each case, such loss and such difficulty demand to be registered. In this impulse perhaps my essay evidences a fear not unlike Mrs Curren’s at the close of Age of Iron, as Vercueil’s arms close around her, that in certain embraces there is “no warmth to be had” (181).