Gaming

The Hybrid Subject in JM Coetzee’s “Boyhood”

Throughout the 20th century, notions such as identity, the self and the other have been consistently constructed and deconstructed and have received new areas of interest. The notion of hybrid identity, for example, has been transformed from a technique to distinguish pure blood from infected (from a racial point of view, but not only), to one of the key elements of political correctness: nations are have become overvalued, while cultural and regional identities have gained ground.

In this essay, I take a closer look at the intersecting identity structures of an apartheid South Africa divided by race, religion, political and cultural views, etc. J. M Coetzee is, in effect, the typical result of this hybridization: he is an atheist Dutchman who lives in Africa and attends a Catholic school together with mestizos, Americans and Russians, not to say that he is a man among women. He is the result of the clash of histories: Dutch, Anglo-Saxon, Eastern European and African heritage have come together in an artifact of cultural identity.

As stated above, identity plays a leading role in the demonstration. It can be seen as a way to become aware of oneself and the other, but, throughout history, it has been used as a means of subjugation in the name of imperialism. Usually the self (the conqueror, the Empire) is the point of origin, the genesis of civilization, while the other is the exotic, the wild, which is interesting to the point of becoming dangerous for the paths of Power.

Postmodernism has brought about a change of roles, shifting the point of view from the center to the margins, from the Empire to its victims.

Power, seen by Foucault, is a way to dominate the weak. According to the French philosopher, “it has no structural relationship with a social whole nor does it presuppose an institution as the origin of its activities”, and “following Foucault’s archaeological analysis, it is also non-subjective” (Williams, 177), since it does not belong to a matter or any other. The self is now seen as a subject, as a representation of the subject-ed, as the controlled (left) or constituted (middle) in a Power relationship, that is, Power discourses of any kind constitute the subject (Butler, 50 -1).

Childhood… is the starting point of a series of autobiographical novels. It represents the struggle of a boy who cannot find his own identity, but gradually becomes a confused whirlwind of different and simultaneous versions of the same Coetzee. Each version is catalyzed by a different encounter with the other, that is, the self sees itself in the other’s mirror. It cannot exist without the other, it is the Frankenstein of imperialism. There is no egocentric “I”, there is no mirror in which you can say “I am this” or “I am that”. The mirror has become an ocean of percentages and trends.
Coetzee feels the need to maintain certain appearances to prevent her family from noticing the infection from outside elements:

He does not share anything with his mother. Her life at her school is kept a secret from her. She won’t know anything about what he decides, but only what appears in her quarterly report, which will be impeccable. […] As long as the report is impeccable, you have no right to ask questions. (5) The great secret of his school life, the secret he tells no one at home, is that he has become a Roman Catholic, which for all practical purposes “is” a Roman Catholic. (18)

But this other is not seen only from the child’s perspective. He has a very strong geographical and cultural valence, with a relationship between the elements that make up society, in this case, South Africa. These schizoid relations between groups cannot be ignored when it comes to post-colonial literature.

Not only does he keep his school/social life well hidden from his parents, but also his loyalties: he has hidden a series of drawings where he would show Russia’s naval victories, because “liking the Russians was not part of the game, it was not permitted”. He wasn’t allowed to mix either. Society is built so that each member plays a particular role, and the Power ensured that they were maintained through means such as propaganda:

There are white people and people of color and natives, of which the natives are the lowest and the most ridiculed. The parallel is impossible: the indigenous are the third brother.

[…] Although, in the exams, he gives the correct answers to all the history questions, he does not know, in a way that satisfies his heart, why Jan van Riebeeck and Simon van der Stel were so good while Lord Charles Somerset was so bad. […] Andries Pretorius and Gerrit Maritz and the rest sound like high school teachers or like Afrikaners on the radio: angry and stubborn and full of threats and talk about God. (65-66)

Coetzee is Afrikaner (Dutch), in addition to the majority of the South African population. There is a small English minority, “apart from him and his brother, who are English only in a way” (67). He sees himself as English, even if appearances say otherwise. Afrikaners are seen as dangerous:

They wield their language like a club against their enemies. In the streets it is better to avoid groups of them; even individually they have a truculent and menacing air. […] It is unthinkable that he would ever be thrown among them: they would crush him, kill the spirit in him. (124-5)

Aside from racial and national segregation, like any traditional society, South African women also have a greatly diminished status in society. Coetzee’s mother is not allowed to have a horse and, to replace it, she buys a bicycle, ignoring her husband’s categorical reproaches that women should not ride bicycles. She also cannot claim her possessions when her husband files for bankruptcy. She is the typical image of a woman’s social sacrifice, as she “spent a year in college before having to give way to her younger brothers”. (124). Coetzee finds himself caught between her parents during the fights, but although he supports his mother, he can only be a (future) man.

There is also a very strong sense of repression of sexuality: although her parents are quite open about it (her mother actually had a book about it), the school officials totally refuse to mention it. When he brings the book to school, it instantly becomes a study material for all the children, but when the authority discovers it, he is silently but nonetheless violently reprimanded:

[…] her heart is pounding as she awaits the announcement and the embarrassment that will follow. The announcement does not arrive; but in each passing comment by Brother Gabriel he finds a veiled reference to the evil that he, a non-Catholic, has imported into the school. (147)

Edward Said, in one of his most famous works, Culture and Imperialism, states that most of the Earth’s population has been affected in one way or another by the empires of the past (4). He adds that “imperialism did not end, it did not suddenly become ‘past,’ once decolonization set in motion the dismantling of classical empires” (341). Consequently, we are faced with a very complicated equation of History and Power:

If from the outset we acknowledge the massively knotted and complex histories of special but nevertheless overlapping and interconnected experiences – of women, of Westerners, of blacks, of nation states and cultures – there is no particular intellectual reason to give each and every one of them them an ideal and essentially separate state. However, we would like to preserve what is unique about each one, as long as we also preserve some sense of human community and the real struggles that contribute to its formation, and from which they are all apart. (sixteen)

Therefore, Coetzee is an eclectic result of a hybrid community, with its own identity, which does not belong to any individual group, but is part of all of them. Homi Bhabha defines this rhetoric of hybridity as “the location of culture”: hybridity is a limited paradigm of colonial anxiety. Thus, colonial hybridity is a “cultural form” that “produced ambivalence in the colonial masters and as such altered the authority of power.” Furthermore, Bakthin polyphony is a very popular element in folklore and anthropological studies. (Wikipedia, Hybridity).

Coetzee manages to create a distance between himself as a character and an objective viewer by referring to himself in the third person, but, at the same time, he cannot escape from himself. What he is may be impossible to define through introspection, but add the others into the equation and the result is likely to appear: JM Coetzee.

Works Cited

Coetzee, JM Childhood, Scenes from a provincial life. London: Vintage, 1998
Rohman Chris. The Dictionary of Important Ideas and Thinkers. London: Arrow Books, 2002
Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1994
Butler, Christopher. Postmodernism, a brief introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002
Williams Carolina. Contemporary French Philosophy. London: The Athlone Press, 2001
Hybridity. wikipedia link

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