in which authorial intent is not at issue. First published in New York in February 1948 (and in London the following September), Paton’s most famous novel provides a compelling example of the implication of a South African novel in these global economies. By the mid-1950s it had been dramatised, filmed, abridged, condensed and incorporated into school curriculums; it had become a multimedia phenomenon for a global audience, despite what many South Africans may have thought of its Christian humanism (see Van der Vlies 2007, 71–105). During the final quarter of 2003 it was chosen as the second novel to be featured on Winfrey’s revamped Book Club, and the literary academic drafted in to serve as the expert to answer online questions posed by Oprah’s readers was Rita Barnard, one of the most astute contemporary critics of South African cultures and the global sphere. In response to my invitation to contribute to a 2004 journal special issue, Barnard offered an insightful account of her experience with what she calls the Oprah “megatext”, exploring the implications of Oprah’s selection of Paton’s novel both for the history of the novel’s reception and for “the international consumption of South African literature and of ‘South Africa’ as mediascape at the present moment” (144). Barnard argues that Cry, the Beloved Country’s co-option by Oprah presents a new departure in its reception history in which it becomes one narrative among many, including of Winfrey herself (and her charitable activities in South Africa), “under the auspices of a well-meaning (if commercially driven) ethic of emotional similitude” (155). Barnard concludes polemically, speaking to the imperative for book history to consider transnational audiences and sites of commodification, and that nations may well “come to signify in a new way—as mediascapes, occasions for certain kinds of stories and … certain kinds of touristic experiences” (155).13
The potential methodological suggestiveness of the essays in this section of the present volume is clear: not only do they remind us that we should pay attention to which version of a work we are reading (students and even some scholars of modern literature in particular still need to be reminded of this fact rather too frequently), but they point to the presence of ideological exigencies in the ways in which texts come to have unpredictable afterlives. It matters that one is reading the version of Mittee first published in the United States rather than the one that appeared in Britain, particularly if a paratext (like Coetzee’s), which refers to one version, is reproduced in an edition that uses another. In a more recent example, a discussion of the ethics of representing and appropriating narratives of trauma, and especially of the place of fiction in a work ostensibly of non-fiction, would play out very differently in a classroom whose students had read the American rather than the South African and British version of Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull, as Laura Moss has illustrated so convincingly (2006; see also Sanders 2007, 160).
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How attentive we ought to be to the location, material conditions and textual variations among versions of a text is worth considering in relation to the writer who is arguably South Africa’s most famous literary novelist (even if he is no longer resident in the country), but whose work’s contested designation as “South African” itself demands book-historical scrutiny. I am referring, of course, to Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee, with reference to whose autre-biographical Boyhood this introduction began. On the occasion of accepting the CNA Prize, one of South Africa’s most prestigious literary awards, for his third novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, Coetzee (1981, 16) mused on whether it was a “good idea”, even “a just idea” to regard South African literature in English as a “national literature, or even an incipient national literature”. The country existed in relation to Western Europe and North America, the “centres of the dominant world civilization”, like that of “province to metropolis”, he suggested polemically. South African writers were not “building a new national literature”, he continued, but should instead resign themselves to contributing to “an established provincial literature”. This was not to admit mediocrity, he was quick to point out, but rather to embark on a project of “rehabilitating the notion of the provincial” (Coetzee 1981, 16). How has Coetzee’s work itself negotiated the tensions between being provincial and metropolitan or local and global? The next three essays in this collection all consider the vexed question of the category of the national in relation to writing like Coetzee’s, exploring whether book-historical consideration of his works’ material histories might add to an understanding of particular works, of his oeuvre in general, and of local and global institutions of literature (and literariness) in the globalised marketplace for fiction. The novels discussed are In the Heart of the Country (Chapter 4.1), Foe (Chapter 4.2) and Slow Man (Chapter 4.3).
In my discussion of Coetzee’s second published novel, In the Heart of the Country (1977; 1978), I explore the material predicaments of a work that, significantly, has two textual versions: one almost wholly in English, published in Britain and the United States (making it the first of Coetzee’s works to be published outside of South Africa); the other, a local South African edition published by Ravan Press, with long passages of untranslated dialogue in Afrikaans. I ask what the fact of the novel’s multi-textual history contributes to an understanding of Coetzee’s oeuvre and what its material history suggests about his engagement with the idea of a national literature. This essay includes much of the text of a chapter from my 2007 monograph, South African Textual Cultures, substantially rewritten to take account of new work by Hermann Wittenberg and Peter McDonald.
In the second essay of this Coetzee cluster, Jarad Zimbler discusses the South African publishing contexts of Foe, suggesting that metropolitan readers who did not have access to the local Ravan Press edition of the novel necessarily experienced it differently to readers in South Africa who were aware of the implications of its publication by a radical press. Derek Attridge (1992, 217) suggests that as soon as a work is regarded as being part of a canon, it risks becoming dehistoricised: the canon can “dematerialize the acts of writing and reading while promoting a myth of transcendent human truths and values”. Foe famously draws attention to its own intertextual relation to a “canonical” text. By exploring issues of marginality, it (and Coetzee’s oeuvre more generally, Attridge argues) reveals and challenges the silences in and of the canon. Zimbler’s essay seeks to perform a similar operation, suggesting that Foe has, ironically, suffered a fate not unlike that which it is concerned thematically to undermine. A failure to pay proper attention to “Foe’s relationship with the South African cultural and literary fields” has, he argues, “prevented the novel from ‘saying’ certain things and limited its significance to a broad, theoretical concern with cultural production and the position of the sexual and racial ‘other’” (195-6).
Patrick Denman Flanery’s essay attends not to the publication contexts of a Coetzee novel as such, but rather to the contexts of publication of two fragments of his 2005 novel, Slow Man: excerpts that appeared in an anthology in aid of the victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami; and a heavily edited section of the novel (then forthcoming) that appeared in The New Yorker magazine in June 2005. Both instances signify Coetzee’s determined distancing of himself from attempts to label him exclusively a “South African” writer, Flanery argues, but they also shed fascinating light on the fates of post-colonial writing at the hands of institutions of global publishing and cultural validation, with wide ramifications for the study of literariness and globalisation. Flanery—who has elsewhere written about the textual history of The Lives of Animals and Elizabeth Costello (Flanery 2004)—brings to this examination (in addition to a novelist’s eye) a theoretical concern for the implications of adaptation and abridgement, both animating preoccupations of some recent book-historical and textual-cultural scholarship. Citing an email exchange with Coetzee, in which the novelist suggested that he considered “the first edition” to be “the definitive text” (“[p]re-published drafts or edited excerpts do not, from that point of view, count”) (quoted in Flanery’s chapter in this volume), Flanery takes issue with Coetzee’s privileging of the first-edition text:
Contributions to what has come to be known as “Book History” have taught us over the past decades that every instance of a text, every site of publication, including excerpts, serializations and later
