In J.M. Coetzee’s essay “Idleness in South Africa,” Coetzee’s otherwise perceptive observations about the history of the Hottentot’s “idleness” as described by pre-20th century visitors to South Africa are interrupted by a rather perplexing interlude on the Hottentot as the proverbial Noble Savage. He writes:
“Nowhere in the great echo chamber of the Discourse of the Cape is a voice raised to ask whether the life of the Hottentot may not be a version of life before the Fall…a life in which man is not yet condemned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow, but instead may spend his days dozing in the sun, or in the shade when the sun grows too hot, half-aware of the singing of the birds and the breeze on his skin, bestirring himself to eat when hunger overtakes him, enjoying a pipe of tobacco when it is available, at one with his surroundings and unreflexively content. The idea that the Hottentot may be Adam is not even entertained for the sake of being dismissed” (18).
Here, Coetzee apparently falls into a sort of reverse of the projection of which he is accusing those early observers of the Hottentots. While they projected their own anxieties and obsessions with work and its relationship to the worth and spirituality of Man, Coetzee appears to be projecting – to some extent – an idealized vision of the Hottentot way of life. His description sets up a binary opposition between Western European civilization – or, as he describes it, the life of the ant (19) – and the Hottentot civilization – the life of the grasshopper (19). He takes pains to not make value judgments in the same way the travel writers did, but in suggesting that this figuring of the Hottentots as pre-lapsarian figures would have been favorable to the one given, he nonetheless reveals that he himself is unable to conceive of them outside of a projected, Euro-centric and inherited perspective. In a way, it seems to me, Coetzee falls into the same trap that those travel writers did; but instead of condemning the other in opposition to the self, Coetzee exoticizes it. He goes so far as to compare the descriptions of the Hottentots with those of the Native Americans, the Chinese, and the Turks (18 and 23), suggesting by extension that the exoticization of the other is preferable to the condemnation of it. This is troubling to me because it is clear that there is condemnation in the exoticization of the other, even if that condemnation is more subtle, insiduous. In this re-framing of the Hottentots as Noble Savages, does Coetzee not condemn them to this Euro-framed vision? Like Friday, the “savage” in Coetzee’s novel Foe, who cannot speak, cannot frame his own narrative, his own story, his own vision of himself, are the Hottentots just another set of savages with their tongues cut out?
I admit I find this essay of Coetzee’s troubling in light of Foe and even The Life and Times of Michael K. Or perhaps it is the other way around: that I feel my opinion of Foe and Michael K shifting in light of the subtle revelations in this essay. Is Coetzee simply trading the ugly savage for a “noble” one? Is Friday just another Noble Savage “at one with his surroundings and unreflexively content” (18)? And what of Michael K? Is their silence really a silence of dissent or is it a silence of absence – a void, a great O, filled in by the cacophony of imposed white voices, including Coetzee’s?*
*In writing this, I hear the echo of Spivak’s words in her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak”. It’s obvious that Coetzee is struggling with these issues in his novels, but this essay in particular strikes me as particularly unself-aware, which is surprising to me.