Introduction

World Literature, the opaque archive, and the untranslatable: J. M. Coetzee and some others

“… 10. Coetzee is here revisiting an assessment of the infertile local grounds for production of something that could ever be regarded as a “Great South African Novel” that he offered in Leadership magazine in 1983. He argued there that while conditions were not fortuitous, such a novel, in the European tradition at least — if not, as Zimbler (2014: 142) suggests Coetzee is arguing, in an expressly Lukácsian mode— stood “a better chance of coming into being in Afrikaans than in English” (Coetzee, 1983: 79). This was because Afrikaans, even as it stood in what he called “a peculiarly compromised relation to the soil […] of South Africa”, had a closer relation to the land, but it would have to effect “a clean break” with the “idea of the plaas ( farm )” that stood “somewhere in the not too distant past of every Afrikaner”, and which “haunted, even into our day”, writing by white writers in Afrikaans (Coetzee, 1983: 79). …”