White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa

by J.M. Coetzee

Essays discuss the white literature of South Africa, explain how white writings attempt to justify colonization, and look at the novels of van den Heever and Millin

Genres: Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, South Africa, Essays

193 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

J. M. Coetzee is a South African writer, essayist, and translator, widely regarded as one of the most influential authors of contemporary literature. His works, often characterized by their austere prose and profound moral and philosophical depth, explore themes of colonialism, identity, power, and human suffering. Born and raised in South Africa, he later became an Australian citizen and has lived in Adelaide since 2002.
Coetzee’s breakthrough novel, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), established him as a major literary voice, while Life & Times of Michael K (1983) won him the first of his two Booker Prizes. His best-known work, Disgrace (1999), a stark and unsettling examination of post-apartheid South Africa, secured his second Booker Prize, making him the first author to win the award twice. His other notable novels include Foe, Age of Iron, The Master of Petersburg, Elizabeth Costello, and The Childhood of Jesus, many of which incorporate allegorical and metafictional elements.
Beyond fiction, Coetzee has written numerous essays and literary critiques, contributing significantly to discussions on literature, ethics, and history. His autobiographical trilogy—Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime—blends memoir with fiction, offering a fragmented yet insightful reflection on his own life. His literary achievements were recognized with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003.
A deeply private individual, Coetzee avoids public life and rarely gives interviews, preferring to let his work speak for itself.

Reviews

[Chris Hebert · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really great book of criticism--while he lost me a little bit in the sections on art history and poetry, he more than made up for it elsewhere with his discussions of colonial travel-writing and racial ideology in novels by white South Africans.

[Stephen Hayes · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of essays on South African writing by white people. The essays are arranged roughly in chronological order by what they describe, though they were written at different times, and there is no thread of argument that links them together.

We discussed some aspects of the book at our literary coffee klatsch last week White writing, dark materials | Notes from underground, so I won't repeat that here.

The first essay. on idleness in South Africa, deals with the first European (ie Dutch) writers who described the local people when writing for people back in the Netherlands. Their overwhelming impression was of idleness, which offended their Calvinist work ethic.

There are three essays on the literary genre Coetzee calls the "farm novel" or plaasroman. He deals with the farm novels of C.M. van den Heever in some detail. These were mostly written in the period between the World Wars, and dealt with the urbanising of Afrikaners, Most of them have a kind of nostalgia for a vanished or vanishing rural way of life, where the city and urban life is seen as evil. They promoted an ideology of landownership. In this respect they dealt mainly with the farm owners of the family farm, and paid less attention to the bywoners (sojourners, sharecrioppers). or the labourers. One thing that struck me about this (though Coetzee does not say so explicitly) is the similarity of this ideology to African ancestor veneration. It is wriong to sell the family farm because the ancestors are buried there and so on. The villains are the money lenders who get the farmers into debt, and then try to take over the farms. Some are Jews, some are deracinated Afrikaners, but all have the taint of the city and its values.

Another essay deals with the rendering of foreign speech into English or Afrrikaans. Pauline Smith, who wrote farm novels in English, did this by rendering the dialogue of Afrikaans-speaking people with Afrikaans syntax, moving the verb closer to the end of the sentence. This was more common in 17th-century English, so it gives the impression of being slightly old-fashioned. Coetzee thinks that Smith got this speech pattern from the Authorised Version of the English Bible. For example, "Every bit of news that came to her of Klaartje and Aalst Vlokman Jacoba treasured."

Alan Paton does something similar in Cry, the beloved country when rendering the Zulu dialogue of a country priest into English. The priest has come to the city to search for his lost son, and here too the theme is of rural people going astray in the city. So Paton devises the dialogue to represent the innocence,/naievety of the country priest in the city.

The chapter I found most interesting was on Sarah Gertrude Millin. Though I had read a book she had written, a memoir Measure of my days, I did not think of her as an author, but rather as the wife of a judge. I read it when I was still at school, where I had been forced to drop History as a subject in favour of Latin, so for several years Millin's book was the main source of my knowledge of 20th-century South African history.

From Coetzee I discovered that Millin had written several novels, mainly between the wars, where one of the main themes was the evils of miscegenation and "tainted blood". Coetzee traces this concern to 19th-Century scientific theories, especially Darwinism, and the concept of superior and inferior races. In the 1920s and 1930s when Millin wrote her novels, such views were politically correct, especially in South Africa, though her novels were more popular overseas. But after the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials and the discretiting of Nazi race theories, such views became politically incorrect, except in ultra-rightwing circles.

[Carla · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the second collection of literary essays that I have read of J. M. Coetzee and it was great. The essays explore the literature of the Afrikaans within historical context. How do the Afrikaans write a 'national' literature within an intensely colonialist reality?

[Hanneke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Awesome scholarship. Confident, detailed where necessary. Political ass kicking all around.

[Wissenville · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a brilliant book of criticism that combines thoughtful and critical analysis of literature and South Africa history without sounding like a machine picking out academic terms in a hat.

[Megan Doney]

Hard to rate this one. It’s not quite what I thought it’s be but there was a good essay about cross-language writing that pleased our English-Afrikaans household.

[Salvatore · Rating 4 out of 5]

(2015) Coetzee investigates the white creation of their own mythologies in South Africa, how the European eye forced itself into the landscape of the country, how European words did not and could not appreciate the African world - an earth that is monochromatic, a sky that barely has a cloud, people who don't have the Protestant Work Ethic. Looking at linguistics, social behaviours, novel-writing choices, and representation (and lack thereof) of African natives, Coetzee presses these false myths and even compares them to what Europeans did in America. Fascinating.

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(2011) Unsurprisingly very well written, concise, and informative. I haven't read any of the books or authors (save Gordimer) Coetzee writes about in this collection; yet he was easy to follow and made topics, themes, and authors fascinating. There is a great deal of discussion regarding South African landscape and art theory, which was a nice surprise and perhaps the highlight of this title.

[Oisín · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really interesting approach to white pastoral writing. It merges colonial/postcolonial theory with ecocriticism, and approaches it from a historical perspective. It definitely helps you understand Coetzee's own South African pastoral writing.