Crossing the white country: J. M. Coetzee and postcolonial agency

The efficacy of postcolonial critiques depends to a large extent on the ways in which one defines the nature of colonial discourse. Fanon's formulation of the modality of the anti-colonial war provides one with a way to address the colonial discourse as an on-site production of a system of colonial representation. This system functions like what Henri Lefebvre describes as "an abstract space" that generates as well as structures the production of images with which the colonial apparatuses exercise their power. J. M. Coetzee's White Writing can be used to illustrate how the native landscape and the native's body are the primary sites in which colonial discourse carries out its asymmetrical transcultural inscription. Coetzee's Dusklands exemplifies this production of the colonial space by allowing the colonizing subject Jacobus Coetzee to inscribe the Calvinistic time on the alien space. With his brutal copulas of the devouring eye and the gun, he is able to cross (out) the discrepancy between these times and spaces. This colonial copulation thus creates a drastic compression of discrepant times and spaces, and this compressed, flat time and space comes to constitute a kind of colonial collage. Coetzee's other novels provide certain speaking positions from which this flattened space of the colonial collage can be opened to create a depth of field for postcolonial re-inscription. The "result" of this opening is not a recuperation of the repressed native essence, however. What is being opened up in these novels by Coetzee are rather more empty spaces where the silence of the repressed Other--the repressed other as silence--awaits future re-creation. What Coetzee's fiction enacts is therefore not a reproduction of the native space, but rather a cautious decompression of the compressed times and spaces that he calls "white writing."...