An ‘international author,but in a different sense’: J.M. Coetzee and ‘Literatures of the South’

‘I want to go south again’

Seeking to become an ‘international author’ in the conventional sense, the protagonists of both Elizabeth Costello and Youth travel to London – ‘the great cultural metropolis for Antipodeans’ (Coetzee, 2003) – and aspire to lodge their first novels in what the imperial world-literary system has established as the ‘library that defines all libraries’ (Coetzee, 2002). ‘That was my great ambition’, Costello recalls: ‘to have my place on the shelves of the British Museum, rubbing shoulders with the other Cs, the great ones: Carlyle and Chaucer and Coleridge and Conrad’ (Coetzee, 2003). Her reference to Conrad underlines one of the titular allusions of Youth. When Coetzee’s autobiographical protagonist, John, applies himself to the task of ‘pass[ing] as a Londoner, perhaps even, in due course, as an Englishman’ (Coetzee, 2002), he sets himself on a path previously travelled by the Polish-born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski. In the story ‘Youth’ (1898), which he described as ‘a record of experience’ (Conrad, 1920), Conrad refracts his first command as second mate through the quintessentially English mariner Charlie Marlow. The young Marlow tests his mettle during a voyage on what Conrad elsewhere refers to as a ‘southern-going ship’ (see Samuelson, 2020b), thus earning his place in the exclusively English seafaring community of the frame narrative. John’s voyage north to ‘the heart of London town’ in Coetzee’s Youth is presented as markedly less successful: he comes to recognize that ‘he has not mastered London. If there is any mastering going on, it is London mastering him’ (Coetzee, 2002). Yet Coetzee has, of course, mastered Englishness – surpassing, perhaps, even Conrad in the validation he has achieved in the Anglosphere.

Coetzee’s retrospective kunstlerroman is, however, not simply the occasion for an arrived author to mock his youthful desire for the legitimation that the cultural metropolis would later confer. It suggests also an alternative orientation. While ostensibly ensconced in ‘the great, domed Reading Room’ of the British Museum to conduct research on Ford Maddox Ford (the subject of the Masters’ thesis that Coetzee submitted to the University of Cape Town in 1963), John ‘allows himself the luxury of dipping into books about the South Africa of the old days’ (Coetzee, 2002). He is particularly ‘captivated by stories of ventures into the interior, […] into the desert of the Great Karoo’ or what he glosses as ‘his country, the country of his heart’ – so much so that he begins to fear that ‘[p]atriotism […] is beginning to afflict him’ (Coetzee, 2002). Reading of Burchell’s travels through the Karoo, John is struck by an indexical sign: ‘real stars glimmered above his head […] It dizzies him to even think about it’ (Coetzee, 2002). His giddiness conveys the proprioceptive sensation of spinning around to face south. It is in this turn that he comes to find his purpose: Burchell’s Travels, he realizes, is the product of a northern gaze; if he were to write of the places depicted therein his prose would be ‘alive’ to them in ways that Burchell’s is not (Coetzee, 2002). ⁸

Whereas Ford and Burchell respectively represent the binary terms of a deracinated modernism versus the realism on which nationalist traditions are founded, both fail to model what Coetzee will later describe as the attempt ‘to see the South through southern eyes’ (Coetzee, 2015). A precedent in this project that he will come to call ‘Literatures of the South’ can instead be found in another formative influence that is highlighted in the kunstlerroman but which has gone largely unremarked upon in Coetzee scholarship: Pablo Neruda, whose poem ‘Youth’ (‘Juventud’) is also alluded to in Coetzee’s title. ⁹ ‘Youth’ is notably among the four poems from Neruda’s Canto General (1950) that the Nobel Foundation features in its entry for the Chilean winner of the 1971 Literature Prize; another is the poem that gives direction to his monumental song of the Americas: ‘I want to go south again: 1941’. ¹⁰

John is said to have read Neruda ‘in a dual-language text’ later identified as ‘The Heights of Macchu Picchu, in Nathaniel Tarn’s translation’ (Coetzee, 2002). This volume, claims Youth, provides the ‘lexicon’ from which John produces machine-generated poetry while working as a programmer on the Atlas Computer (Coetzee, 2002). The operation is carried out surreptitiously in ‘the dead hours of night’, in response to two concerns: that ‘the toy by which he earns his living […] will burn either-or paths in the brains of its users and thus lock them irreversibly into its binary logic’; and, his felt failure to write poetry ‘from the heart’ – a poetry, perhaps, capable of evoking the ‘country of his heart’ (Coetzee, 2002). A selection of the poems produced in this experiment are reportedly sent ‘to a friend in Cape Town who publishes them in a magazine he edits’ (Coetzee, 2002).

Coetzee did, in fact, publish a ‘Computer Poem’ in a Cape Town-based magazine called The Lion and the Impala in 1963. Fifteen years later, he published another titled ‘Hero and Bad Mother in Epic’ (1978) in a literary journal produced by the same small South African press as his first novels. He explicates the method in the article ‘Surreal Metaphors and Random Processes’ (1979), noting again that the lexicon used in his experiments was drawn from translations of Neruda. ¹¹ These experiments are of interest, inter alia, for how they anticipate the project of ‘writing without authority’ that has defined Coetzee’s oeuvre, and which he has explicitly related to his historical ‘situation’ as a white South African (Coetzee, 1992: 392). Summertime, which takes that project to its endpoint by staging the death of the author, refers again to Neruda, when the fictional interviewee Martin, with whom the deceased biographical subject of Summertime taught at the University of Cape Town in the 1970s, recalls that ‘John had the students read Pablo Neruda in translation’ (Coetzee, 2009). Notable attention is thus drawn to Neruda – and to John conveying the Chilean poet to Cape Town through ‘his Neruda poems’ and in the curriculum he introduced – in the two volumes of Coetzee’s fictionalized autobiography that present his formation and emergence as a writer and which are produced on either end of the decade in which he moved to Australia and won the Nobel Prize.

This emphasis is all the more striking for the anachronism that would prevent us from reading the account in Youth as mere ‘record of experience’. The edition of Macchu Picchu that John is said to have read in England was first published in 1966, the year after Coetzee had left London to enrol in a PhD programme at the University of Texas and three years after the publication of the ‘Computer Poem’ that Youth would have us believe was drawn from Tarn’s translation. The lexicon of ‘Hero and Bad Mother in Epic’ is indeed drawn from Neruda, but not from that edition: the words comprising it can instead all be found in The Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda (1961), a bilingual collection edited and translated by Ben Belitt. (The computer-generated phrases apparently quoted in Youth as well as the vocabulary of ‘Computer Poem’ can be found in neither of these two editions, although they may well come from other translated works by Neruda.) Why, then, does Youth pointedly identify The Heights of Macchu Picchu when it was not the source for those early experiments? And, what should be made of the obscured reference to Belitt’s edition, which evidently was a source that Coetzee was drawing on during his formative years as a writer?

The Heights of Macchu Picchu is a pivotal work in Neruda’s oeuvre. Written in 1945 after his visit to Machu Picchu two years previously and comprising the second part of Canto General, the poem realizes the retrospectively presented desire of ‘I want to go south again: 1941’. It is the work in which Neruda achieves and announces his identity and purpose as a poet of the Americas, simultaneously grounding what might be received as free-floating surrealism and expanding on his national identity. Neruda would later say of his encounter with ‘those glorious, scattered ruins’: ‘I felt Chilean, Peruvian, American’ (Neruda, 1977: 166); The Heights of Macchu Picchu manifests this hemispheric claim.

The subterfuge reported on and reiterated in Youth is also telling. Martin surmises in Summertime that ‘Neruda may have mattered a great deal’ to John as ‘a model – an unattainable model – of how a poet can respond to injustice and repression’ (Coetzee, 2009), but he observes that John failed to convey this import to the students to whom he presented the poetry. Martin accounts for this failure by suggesting that John ‘treat[ed his] connection with the poet as a personal secret to be closely guarded’ (Coetzee, 2009). However, in his own recollections of the course that Coetzee taught at the University of Cape Town, Jonathan Crewe, who identifies himself as a source for the character Martin, recalls, conversely, that Coetzee read from The Heights of Macchu Picchu ‘with evident feeling and consciousness of the South African setting’ (Crewe, 2016: 23).

There is another twist to this account of how Coetzee both declares and conceals an affiliation to Neruda. The inaugural appearance of Elizabeth Costello – the Australian novelist who comes to haunt Coetzee’s oeuvre, returning in his first wholly Australian-set novel Slow Man and yet again in a subsequent book that has also debuted in Argentina – is in an address given by Coetzee in November 1996 under the title ‘What is Realism?’. ¹² Nested in the narrative is a lecture by Costello on the same topic that is said to be presented in the northern hemisphere spring of 1995 and thus at the very time in which Coetzee initiates the process that will culminate in his emigration to Australia in 2002. ¹³ One might conclude that Coetzee has invented the character in order to test what it might feel like to be an Australian novelist. But Elizabeth Costello's ‘arrival’ – to use the term with which Coetzee describes her iterated entries into the world (Coetzee, 2018) – may also have been occasioned by the particular series in which she debuts: the Ben Belitt Lecture Series at Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont. This very name and address appear in the signature appended to the Translator’s Preface of the edition of Neruda that is concealed in the reference to Tarn’s translation of The Heights of Macchu Picchu. Instead of marking a shift from a South African to an Australian authorial identity, and thus from one national framework to another, the arrival of Elizabeth Costello – like the ‘Computer Poem’ episode in Youth – might thus be seen to point more expansively to ‘the South’.

More than an accumulation of detail in service to verisimilitude, the scene in which Costello’s son, John, who is the focaliser of much of ‘Realism’, finds himself disoriented in the elevator of a hotel, wondering ‘[w]hich is north, which south’, signals a search for the bearings that would enable the ‘embeddedness’ that Costello will present as definitional of the kind of realism that she – and perhaps also her author – values (Coetzee, 2003). Like the autobiographical protagonist of Youth, the young man who starts writing in South Africa in the more recent account that Coetzee gives of himself also initially confuses the North with the ‘real world’. ¹⁴ So too does the John of ‘Realism’ when he associates the literary mode with ‘peasants frozen in blocks of ice’ and ‘Norwegians in smelly underwear’ (Coetzee, 2003). The realism of Elizabeth Costello/Elizabeth Costello, in contrast, proceeds by ‘making up a world’ and ‘[m]aking up an Australia’ for her characters ‘to move in’ (Coetzee, 2003), and it does so by ‘pin[ning] down in words [its] intuitions of what a life in the [real] South consists in’ (Coetzee, 2016, qtd. in Halford, 2019).

The emphasis that Youth places on reading Neruda (along with the Peruvian and Cuban poets César Vallejo and Nicolás Guillén) in ‘dual-language’ editions, and Coetzee’s decision to conduct his computer poetry experiment with text translated from Spanish rather than with any of the number of Anglo-American poets to which Youth also refers, is also notable. Among other things, it indicates a discomfit with the national ‘situation’ into which he was at the time moving. In a later letter to Paul Auster, Coetzee describes Australia as ‘far more “English” than [his] native South Africa’ (17 May 2009 in Auster and Coetzee, 2013). The observation would refer both to Australia’s determined monolingualism and to its persistent attachment to what Costello still calls the ‘mother country’ (Coetzee, 2003). ‘The effect on [him] of living in an environment so saturated with English has been a peculiar one’, writes Coetzee: ‘it has created more and more of a skeptical distance between [himself] and […] the Anglo weltanschauung’ (27 May 2009 in Auster and Coetzee, 2013). This distancing is anticipated in a telling echo between the two references to Neruda in Youth: in the first, John revels in the opaque language on the verso side of his dual-language edition, commenting that ‘Spanish is full of barbaric-sounding words’; in the second, his ‘Neruda poems’ make him ‘briefly notorious as the barbarian who wants to replace Shakespeare with a machine’ (Coetzee, 2002). Taking Neruda’s words into his mouth, as it were, Coetzee places himself outside the empire of Englishness.

This recursive reference returns readers to Coetzee’s third novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, and grants southern content to an otherwise indeterminate setting that is located in the northern hemisphere by a seasonal reference. It recalls also the bilingualism of his second novel, In the Heart of the Country. The ‘first South African edition’, published by Ravan Press in 1978 after the ‘English language edition’ was issued in London by Secker & Warburg in 1977, includes dialogue in Afrikaans, which Coetzee self-translated into English for international dissemination. Attwell notes that, ‘[d]uring the course of drafting, his practice became to write the text first with Afrikaans dialogue, and then later, while correcting the first draft, to add the English translation on the verso side of the book’ (2015: 89). Near the end of the narrative – and directly after her last failed attempt to achieve communion in a southern settler colony through a language ‘opaque to the outsider, dense, to its children, with moments of solidarity, moments of distance’ (Coetzee, 1978: 30) – the protagonist Magda importunes sky-people passing northward and southward in their flying machines in an improvised Spanish that she spells out in white stones upon the surface of the Karoo. Fearing that her initially clamorous appeals for connection might drive them away, she resolves ‘to build messages that were quieter, more cryptic’ (Coetzee, 1978: 132) and lays out ‘POEMAS CREPUSCLRS […] Intending CREPUSCULARIAS but running short of stones’ (Coetzee, 1978: 132). Neruda’s first collection, published in 1923, was notably titled ‘Crepusculario’. ¹⁵

Thus is the Spanish in which the characters of the Jesus novels are said to be speaking marked early in Coetzee’s oeuvre as a language of the South, as it is again in his later kunstlerroman. A portion of Summertime is also ostensibly translated from what is distinctly marked as Brazilian Portuguese, ¹⁶ much of it detailing the character’s conviction that John Coetzee was a poor excuse for an English teacher. Such linguist conceits have seen Coetzee’s writing being claimed by Rebecca Walkowitz (2015) as exemplary of ‘the born-translated novel’ of the ‘age of world literature’. Novels that ‘build translation into their form’ in the manner that Coetzee’s do, she argues, ‘[refuse] to match language to geography’ and instead attribute their ‘aesthetic and spatial origins to planetary circulation’ (2015: 7, 47). Coetzee has indeed presented a figure of planetary circulation earlier in his oeuvre: his fifth novel, Foe, which partly rewrites two works by Defoe, the founder of the English novelistic tradition, concludes with a stream flowing from the character Friday that ‘runs northward and southward to the ends of the earth’ (1986: 157). The narrator of this final sequence is conveyed to ‘the home of Friday’ by Susan Barton’s narrative (1986: 157), which transfigures into the rowing boat on which she was first castaway and transports him across the ocean in which Friday reposes. As the narrator slips overboard, this craft is left to drift away, ‘drawn south toward the realm of the whales and eternal ice’ (1986: 155). ¹⁷ What this early novel that notoriously eschewed the national context of South Africa suggests, then, is a ‘planetary circulation’ propelled by alterity rather than by the market, along with a southern orientation.

While declaring itself neither beholden to ‘the business of the world’ (1986: 24) that is carried out across the surface of the sea nor contained in geopolitical borders, Coetzee’s writing does thus maintain a geographical situation and even ‘match[es] language to geography’. If it does so while indicating fluidity and transportability, these qualities are shown to implicate it in the geophysical properties and histories that constitute the South rather than to elevate it into the transcendent circuits of World Lit.

Writing from ‘the far edges’

The Elizabeth Costello of ‘Realism’ is judged to be ‘a major world writer’ and the narrative revolves around her receipt of ‘one of the larger literary prizes in the United States’ (Coetzee, 2003). But her son, John, establishes that ‘the Stowe Award is hers only because 1995 has been decreed to be the year of Australasia’. The fate of being ghettoized even within her hard-won reception as an ‘international author’ is underlined by the distance she has had to travel to accept her prize (‘across half the world’), and the inference that she is, as one of her interviewers puts it, ‘reporting from the far edges’ (Coetzee, 2003). Costello responds sardonically to this assumption while admitting that the phrase ‘has a certain meaning’: ‘We’re not a country of extremes […] but we are a country of extremities’ (Coetzee, 2003). The revised term that she proposes expresses the marginality ascribed by a global literary market that would locate the South as its periphery, and which Coetzee sees as having a disorienting effect on literature that is consequently compelled to circuit through the North in order to achieve ‘international’ standing. ¹⁸ At the same time, it articulates also the geophysical and historical conditions of the southern hemisphere that, for Coetzee, grant it presence in itself and which provide the spatiotemporal coordinates for ‘Literatures of the South’.

‘The Novel in Africa’, which comprises the second chapter/lesson of Elizabeth Costello, ¹⁹ extends the southern reflections of ‘Realism’. The story stages an encounter between two writers – the Australian Costello and the Nigerian Emmanuel Egudu – who are drawn respectively from the geographical South and the Global South, while referring to what Coetzee will later identify as an exemplary projection of the ‘mythic South’ in Edgar Allen Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) (Coetzee, 2015). The situation in which this encounter is embedded is one in which both writers have been appointed to present lectures as part of the entertainment program on a cruise ship traversing the Southern Ocean. The aptly named SS Northern Lights presents a microcosm of the world-system in which ‘it has been allotted to Africa to be the home of poverty’ (Coetzee, 2003). In this global marketplace, the Nigerian novelist is obliged to peddle himself as a ‘postcolonial exotic’ (Huggan, 2001) in order to remain in circulation. He addresses himself to the distorting effects of this market in his lecture, asking how the African novelist might ‘be true to his essence as a writer when there are all these strangers to please’ and ‘remain unaffected by all the pressure […] to produce for them what they think he should produce?’ (Coetzee, 2003). Costello remarks smugly that Africa could learn from Australia in developing a ‘home-grown literature’ for a local market (Coetzee, 2003), but her own experience with the Stowe award in the preceding story, along with the requirement that she perform the role of ‘famous Australian writer’ on this pleasure cruise through southern waters and southern literatures, would qualify the distinction that she draws: Costello as much as Egudu is subject to the northern market and what Emily Apter identifies as the ‘tendencies in World Literature towards reflexive endorsement of cultural equivalence and substitutability, or toward the celebration of nationally and ethnically branded “differences” that have been niche-marketed as commercial “identities”’ (Apter, 2013).

David Attwell observes that ‘the provenance of the [Costello] stories was their author’s global mobility’ as Coetzee’s growing international profile was met by a steady stream of invitations to lecture abroad, with the ‘inevitable consequence’ that ‘his life and career were becoming unmoored from South Africa’ (2015: 214). The term that he uses – ‘unmoored’ – is notably evocative given the setting of ‘The Novel in Africa’ along with Costello’s reappearance in Slow Man, and its resonance with the earlier figure of a drifting craft ‘drawn south’ at the end of Foe. When the protagonist of Slow Man seeks Costello out in a public library in South Australia he finds her novel classified as Australian fiction (and thus not rubbing shoulders with Conrad et al. after all). Removing it from the shelf, he notes that the author photograph on the jacket presents ‘a younger Elizabeth Costello wearing a windbreaker, standing against what appears to be the rigging of a yacht. Her eyes are screwed up against the light, her skin is deeply tanned. A seawoman?’ (Coetzee, 2005). The classificatory code and photograph that frame the book might be seen to pull in two directions, encoding her respectively as a grounded national writer and as a free-floating international one. Rather than contradictory, however, the two ultimately support one another. Intent on being ‘an international author, but in a different sense’, Coetzee would have us look beyond the frame to that medium into which the narrator of Foe descends in order to apprehend the ‘blue southern hemisphere’ (Samuelson 2018).

I identify this hemisphere as ‘blue’ because one of its most distinguishing features is its relatively greater proportion of ocean to land: the ratio is 4 to 1 in the South; in the North it is a mere 1.5 to 1. ²⁰ The ocean settings in which Costello and Egudu – and their predecessors Susan Barton and Friday – are situated are thus the very substance of what Coetzee calls ‘the real South’. When conceived of as neither marginal nor other to the North, but as that which has presence in itself, the South might then be imagined as a littoral condition: the real South that Coetzee and some of his readers inhabit is comprised of relatively dispersed strips of land extending into relatively vast oceanic spaces. To think of it thus is to recast the sense of living at ‘the far edges’ from the pejorative expression of peripherality to a more ambiguous and unstable state.

It is notably the littoral that John summons as figure of the homeland that he has abandoned for the North in Youth. The single instance in which he yearns for the country he had sought to leave behind occurs during a bitter English winter when he imagines being back in South Africa where ‘it is summer’: ‘[i]f he were there he could be on Strandfontein beach, running over mile after mile of white sand under a great blue sky’ (Coetzee, 2002). While promising an expansive release from John’s apprehension that his South African background is a ‘handicap’, this encoding of the South does not evade the history of invasion and settlement that has constituted it – and the southern temperate zone in particular. Youth thus identifies the littoral as the setting for the inaugural invasion of what is now South Africa by ‘a handful of Hollanders [who] waded ashore on Woodstock beach and claimed ownership of foreign territory they had never laid eyes on before’ and whose descendants ‘now regard that territory as theirs by birthright’ (Coetzee, 2002). Earlier in the narrative, before John leaves for England, he walks with a friend to a house by the beach and reflects on how they ‘are here on this earth, the earth of South Africa, on the shakiest of pretexts […] the ground beneath his feet is soaked with blood and the vast backward depth of history rings with shouts of anger’ (Coetzee, 2002).

These passing yet pointed references to the littoral in Youth – and indeed across Coetzee’s oeuvre – are given further weight when the narrative reports that John’s first ‘experiment with prose’ is a story set on ‘a lonely beach’ in South Africa (Coetzee, 2002). He decides not to publish it because ‘[t]he English will not understand it. For the beach in the story they will summon up an English idea of a beach, a few pebbles lapped by wavelets. They will not see a dazzling space of sand at the foot of rocky cliffs pounded by breakers, with gulls and cormorants screaming overhead as they battle the wind’ (Coetzee, 2002). Rather than unique to South Africa, however, this is again a southern scene that, for instance, reappears across Neruda’s poems.

Costello’s term ‘extremities’, along with her voyage into the Southern Ocean in ‘The Novel in Africa’, recalls Neruda’s description in his Nobel lecture of Chile as a country reaching into ‘the extreme south’ (1971). It resonates also with another international southern author with whom Coetzee’s oeuvre has been in extended conversation: Jorge Luis Borges, who Beatriz Sarlo defines as ‘the writer of the orillas’, in all the term’s various meanings of ‘edge, shore, margin, limit’ (1993: 6, 20). ²¹ ‘Extremity’, moreover, offers a synonym for the term with which Ariel Dorfman would later name the commonality between Chile, South Africa and Australia in his introductory remarks to ‘Writing the Deep South’, a conference convened in Santiago in 1998 that is something of a precursor to ‘Literatures of the South’ in its intent to foster ‘exchange’ between three southern literatures:

Our countries have been constituted through encuentros, encounters. The encounter of humans with a nature that is turbulent and immeasurable and hard to tame; the encounters with the Europeans and their descendants meeting those who resided in our lands before the arrival of these foreigners; the encounters of our natures over and over with the outer world to the North that influenced and modelled and used and demanded and claimed us; the encounters with frontiers, always with frontiers. (Dorfman 2004: 227)

Registering the South’s situation in the global marketplace while refusing its consignment to the status of the exotic antipode, ‘extremity’ describes the geophysical and historical situation of what Coetzee terms ‘the South as home’ (Coetzee, 2015). Because this home is dominated by ocean and haunted by troubled histories, it might also be thought of as unheimlich (see Freud, 1919). ²² The play of concealment and revelation in the above-discussed allusions to Neruda is suggestive of the uncanny nature of ‘Literatures of the South’, as are the repetitions and doublings that have come to characterize Coetzee’s oeuvre and which are the most striking manifestation of his response to Borges. In a review of Borges’s Collected Fictions published in the same year as the first presentation of ‘The Novel in Africa’, Coetzee notably identifies Borges’s ‘Sur’ (‘The South’) as among the more ‘haunting’ of his narratives. ²³ ‘Realism’ explicitly locates the South as ‘uncanny’ when the character John (who is himself a figure of repetitive doubling in Coetzee’s oeuvre) thinks about his mother – another Coetzee double: ‘He does not hate his mother. (As he thinks these words, other words echo at the back of his mind: the words of one of William Faulkner’s characters insisting with mad repetitiveness that he does not hate the South)’ (Coetzee, 2003). Having thus substituted ‘mother’ for ‘South’, John experiences a shiver of uncanny dread when he observes his mother sleeping as they fly south, homeward bound: ‘He can see up her nostrils, into her mouth, down the back of her throat. And what he cannot see he can imagine: the gullet, pink and ugly, contracting as it swallows, like a python, drawing things down to the pear-shaped belly-sac. He draws away, tightens his own belt, sits up, facing forward. No, he tells himself, that is not where I come from, that is not it’ (Coetzee, 2003).

The sea that floods ‘the real South’ is, as Helmreich (2009) notes, an ‘alien’ environment to terrestrial life, and yet – like the maternal body in Freud’s account – this microbial soup is also familiar as our first home. The depths beneath the SS Northern Lights that Coetzee evokes in ‘The Novel in Africa’, and to which the Comaroffs refer in advocating for ‘theory from the South’, are thus a suggestive synecdoche of what Spivak describes as ‘the planet’ in her response to the ‘arrogance’ of ‘world lit. in translation’ and/or a world literary canon devised by and for northern interests. Spivak, who has long been a student of Coetzee’s writing and particularly of Foe, ‘propose[s] the planet to overwrite the globe’ and ‘to render our home uncanny’ (2003: 72–3). ‘The globe’, she observes, ‘is on our computers. No one lives there’ (Spivak, 2003: 72); it is the surface across which the fungible work circulates and is consumed. The planet, in contrast, like the depths in which Friday reposes, ‘is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it, on loan’ (Spivak, 2003: 72). Spivak suggests that the planetarity she proposes is ‘perhaps best imagined from the precapitalist cultures of the planet’ (2003: 101). Coetzee complements this with ‘Literatures of the South’ – a literature often produced out of the settler societies of the southern temperate zone by writers who ‘make up [their] worlds’ out of the edginess of ‘troubled histories’ and the ‘encounters with turbulent and immeasurable’ alterities that the frontier and littoral settings of his fiction repeatedly stage.