Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa. Andrew van der Vlies

this introduction began. On the occasion of accepting the CNA Prize, one of South Africa’s most prestigious literary awards, for his third novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, Coetzee (1981, 16) mused on whether it was a “good idea”, even “a just idea” to regard South African literature in English as a “national literature, or even an incipient national literature”. The country existed in relation to Western Europe and North America, the “centres of the dominant world civilization”, like that of “province to metropolis”, he suggested polemically. South African writers were not “building a new national literature”, he continued, but should instead resign themselves to contributing to “an established provincial literature”. This was not to admit mediocrity, he was quick to point out, but rather to embark on a project of “rehabilitating the notion of the provincial” (Coetzee 1981, 16). How has Coetzee’s work itself negotiated the tensions between being provincial and metropolitan or local and global? The next three essays in this collection all consider the vexed question of the category of the national in relation to writing like Coetzee’s, exploring whether book-historical consideration of his works’ material histories might add to an understanding of particular works, of his oeuvre in general, and of local and global institutions of literature (and literariness) in the globalised marketplace for fiction. The novels discussed are In the Heart of the Country (Chapter 4.1), Foe (Chapter 4.2) and Slow Man (Chapter 4.3).

      In my discussion of Coetzee’s second published novel, In the Heart of the Country (1977; 1978), I explore the material predicaments of a work that, significantly, has two textual versions: one almost wholly in English, published in Britain and the United States (making it the first of Coetzee’s works to be published outside of South Africa); the other, a local South African edition published by Ravan Press, with long passages of untranslated dialogue in Afrikaans. I ask what the fact of the novel’s multi-textual history contributes to an understanding of Coetzee’s oeuvre and what its material history suggests about his engagement with the idea of a national literature. This essay includes much of the text of a chapter from my 2007 monograph, South African Textual Cultures, substantially rewritten to take account of new work by Hermann Wittenberg and Peter McDonald.

      In the second essay of this Coetzee cluster, Jarad Zimbler discusses the South African publishing contexts of Foe, suggesting that metropolitan readers who did not have access to the local Ravan Press edition of the novel necessarily experienced it differently to readers in South Africa who were aware of the implications of its publication by a radical press. Derek Attridge (1992, 217) suggests that as soon as a work is regarded as being part of a canon, it risks becoming dehistoricised: the canon can “dematerialize the acts of writing and reading while promoting a myth of transcendent human truths and values”. Foe famously draws attention to its own intertextual relation to a “canonical” text. By exploring issues of marginality, it (and Coetzee’s oeuvre more generally, Attridge argues) reveals and challenges the silences in and of the canon. Zimbler’s essay seeks to perform a similar operation, suggesting that Foe has, ironically, suffered a fate not unlike that which it is concerned thematically to undermine. A failure to pay proper attention to “Foe’s relationship with the South African cultural and literary fields” has, he argues, “prevented the novel from ‘saying’ certain things and limited its significance to a broad, theoretical concern with cultural production and the position of the sexual and racial ‘other’” (195-6).

      Patrick Denman Flanery’s essay attends not to the publication contexts of a Coetzee novel as such, but rather to the contexts of publication of two fragments of his 2005 novel, Slow Man: excerpts that appeared in an anthology in aid of the victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami; and a heavily edited section of the novel (then forthcoming) that appeared in The New Yorker magazine in June 2005. Both instances signify Coetzee’s determined distancing of himself from attempts to label him exclusively a “South African” writer, Flanery argues, but they also shed fascinating light on the fates of post-colonial writing at the hands of institutions of global publishing and cultural validation, with wide ramifications for the study of literariness and globalisation. Flanery—who has elsewhere written about the textual history of The Lives of Animals and Elizabeth Costello (Flanery 2004)—brings to this examination (in addition to a novelist’s eye) a theoretical concern for the implications of adaptation and abridgement, both animating preoccupations of some recent book-historical and textual-cultural scholarship. Citing an email exchange with Coetzee, in which the novelist suggested that he considered “the first edition” to be “the definitive text” (“[p]re-published drafts or edited excerpts do not, from that point of view, count”) (quoted in Flanery’s chapter in this volume), Flanery takes issue with Coetzee’s privileging of the first-edition text:

      Contributions to what has come to be known as “Book History” have taught us over the past decades that every instance of a text, every site of publication, including excerpts, serializations and later critical editions (which, with Coetzee, seem an inevitability), influences its afterlife. What this particular case of the changing shape of Coetzee’s text—which we know most conventionally as Slow Man—demonstrates is that the author, even the critically lauded and globally garlanded author, ultimately is not, and cannot be, entirely in control of his own text(s) (220).

      A focus on work by J. M. Coetzee is not intended to suggest that his work is necessarily exemplary (except insofar as the attention paid in the three essays included here to the circumstances of publication of three texts from different stages of this author’s career), but provides three models for the kinds of work on writers’ careers that might be attempted on a number of South African authors—of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and drama. Reassessment of writers’ works should, in other words, take a form other than the hagiographic, biographical or New Critical, these essays suggest.

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      The next section includes three quite different studies, each attending to the uses of books in a productive and distinctive manner. All, however, share a concern to show how books—and collections of books—evade the designs of monologic interpretation. They are portable, they invite unsettling readings—and they are not always what they purport to be. One such imposter is the subject of Lize Kriel’s lively chapter (Chapter 5.1): Malaboch or Notes from My Diary on the Boer Campaign of 1894 against the Chief Malaboch of Blaauwberg, District Zoutpansberg, South African Republic to which Is Appended a Synopsis of the Johannesburg Crisis of 1896, by Colin Rae, an English priest, published in Cape Town and London. Rae worked for six years in Kruger’s Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek and based his book on his experiences as chaplain to the English members of a commando raised against the unfortunate Kgoši Kgaluši, or Mmalebôhô (Rae’s Malaboch). Despite being increasingly recognised as flawed, unreliable and even plagiarised, Rae’s text continued to be treated as a reliable source in historiography on the Boers’ campaign against Kgoši Kgaluši’s people. Kriel asks “why historians, normally priding themselves on the authority of their narratives on the grounds of their close scrutiny of ‘the facts’, failed to detect the flaws in the Rae text for so long” (228), and in so doing offers a consideration of the textual imperatives of representations of racial conflict in Southern Africa. Her essay poses challenging questions about the use of sources by historians and historiographers of colonial-era Southern Africa—with resonances for historiographic projects in other colonial contexts.

      Archie Dick is interested in quite different books and their uses. His essay (Chapter 5.2) offers an engrossing account of the operation of the Books for Troops scheme in South Africa during the Second World War, which saw the South African Library Association (SALA) exploit an opportunity “to promote the democratic values of books, ideas and libraries” (in Dick’s paraphrase). It was perforce neither as extensive nor successful as the American Armed Services Editions (see Rabinowitz 2010), but nonetheless promoted reading to many black soldiers, while also promoting to white soldiers the possibility of “an inclusive South African national identity” (249). Dick’s essay points the way to more engaged and less descriptive work in library and information studies, sheds light on the reading and collecting tastes of South Africans at mid-century, and is an important contribution to a growing field of enquiry.

      Hedley Twidle’s sophisticated and provocative essay (Chapter 5.3), written specifically