"Farm Novel and Plaasroman"
from White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa
(Yale University Press, 1988)
by J.M. Coetzee
This article addresses the genre of the plaasroman, a distinctly Afrikaans novel concerned with "the farm and platteland (rural) society, with the Afrikaner's painful transition from farmer to townsman" (63). Coetzee looks at the works of Olive Schreiner and Pauline Smith and whether or not they written "farm novels," or the English equivalent to the plaasroman. Reading Coetzee's critical piece alongside his novel just begs for comparison.
I still haven't made sense of Disgrace. I can't understand why Lucy shuts David out completely. Actually, I don't understand why Lucy stays. I think the difficulty that the novel is pointing out is the divide between universality and particularity. While some experiences are universal, like rape, it's impossible to understand some experiences of rape, like that in South Africa, if you have not lived it. I can't help but think back to Mbembe and Nuttall's call for commonality. I feel that Coetzee isn't subscribing to that idea in this novel.
What's most infuriating to me about the novel is how all of the characters are fairly unlikable. This may be because of the purposefully myopic narrator. So, when I read Coetzee's article, I found it difficult to not think about Disgrace, and how Coetzee handles some of the ideas that he raises in Schreiner's and Smith's works.
Coetzee points to the "silence about the place of black labour" which is common to the "Afrikaans plaasroman, and represents a failure of imagination before he problem of how to integrate the dispossesed black man in the idyll... of African pastoralism" (71-2). He goes on say that Smith's "selective silence about hired labour, the labour obligations of sons, and the problems of inheritance suggests that she has not thought her way fully through the dynamics of peasant economy" (72). I wonder, then, why Coetzee refused to give Petrus a voice. He had an opportunity to show Petrus' side, but instead focused his narrative perspective on an aging, and despicable, white man. Perhaps this says a lot about the role of silence and unheard perspectives in the novel, but it's still confusing to me.
I find some of Coetzee's claims a bit troubling. He says that typical features of peasant culture are "suspicion of the new, conformism, anti-intellectualism, narrow materialism" as well as homogenous and conservative vales (73). It would be interesting to look at how Disgrace addresses these ideas. In the novel, David Lurie seems quite stuck in the past, while Petrus seems to look ahead to the future (he uses new technology and is a good businessman). Perhaps this answers the question of representing "black labour." Interestingly, David has an idyllic view of the pastoral, while Lucy recognises the new, capitalist "notions of the value of land" (79).