Abstract
Zinato approaches Magda, the Afrikaner narrator of J.M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country (1977) as a Cassandra figure. Focusing on audible echoes from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Euripides’ Trojan Women, Zinato draws attention to the text’s perceivable allusions to the tragic, wildly defiant seer possessed by Apollo and condemned by him never to be believed. Far from being tempted by any exotic antiquarianism, and far from bluntly assimilating Coetzee’s novel to the Greek paradigm, the critic’s evocation of Cassandra entails evoking engaging and compelling ways in which Attic tragedy may shed renewed light on Magda’s alleged madness, on her text’s discouraging a discourse of individual psychology, and, finally, on the essentially tragic features of Coetzee’s text as a whole.
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Notes
- 1.
See R. Seaford (1993), in particular, for enlightening pages on the ways in which the destruction of the household is linked to Bacchic frenzy.
- 2.
Cf. R.B. Rutherford, (2012: 344, 349).
- 3.
Cf., for instance, the trenchant indictment made by Vernant in the chapter ‘Oedipus Without the Complex’ (1990) against the blurred and simplistic anachronisms of psychoanalysis when applied to pre-Aristotelian tragic culture in which the concepts of subject, will, personal responsibility, agency are still in fieri on the stage.
- 4.
The specific reference is to Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of German Tragic Drama) and, on the notion of destiny in particular, to his essay ‘Schicksal und Charackter’ (‘Destiny and Character’).
- 5.
Cf. Elizabeth Curren in Age of Iron: ‘No, she [her daughter living as an emigrée in America] is not an exile. I am the exile’ (1990: 69).
- 6.
Cf. Coetzee, Summertime: ‘Our presence was grounded in a crime, namely colonial conquest, perpetuated by apartheid’ (2009: 209).
- 7.
It is impossible to refrain from thinking that Coetzee, in giving Magda these words to pronounce, must have been perfectly aware of the importance of the burial theme in Attic tragedy, in which the proper burial of the dead and the aftermath care of their burial place were fundamental and their infringement a crucial source of anxieties and conflicts.
- 8.
The ‘Eumenides,’ meaning something close to ‘the kindly/fair-minded ones,’ are soothed Furies/Erinyes—no more the dark goddesses of revenge, but the enforcers of true justice. The cult of the Eumenides is connected with the myth of Orestes: when, as Furies, they are pursuing him for his matricide, they appear to him black; when they have been appeased by his expiation, they change to white.
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Zinato, S. (2019). Seeing Where Others See Nothing: Coetzee’s Magda, Cassandra in the Karoo. In: Kossew, S., Harvey, M. (eds) Reading Coetzee's Women. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19777-3_11
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