In the Heart of the Country
In 1977, J.M. Coetzee, a white South African writer, published his novel In the Heart of the Country in English-language. The novel consists of 236 numbered paragraphs written as a journal. The narrator’s life of exclusion is watched by this ferocious and yet zealous novel set in a South African farm. The farm is located in a deep remote area, and it is a home for Magda, her father and servants Hendrik and Klein-Anna. Hendrik is Klein-Anna’s husband. The protagonist, Magda, is an unmarried fifty-year-old white woman. Her father becomes a widower after Magda’s mother passes away and grabs the prospect to marry a new bride.
A major conflict between Magda and her callous father ignites when he begins a relationship with an African woman. Besides her father’s ignorance towards her, his servants scorn and fear her. She lives almost an isolated life from slight interaction with humans. This leads her to have a different perspective of life; her life takes the course of her slated seldom exchanges she had mustered. She turns out to be a vicious brainy woman whose outward docility masquerades a distressed firmness not to be one neglected in antiquity. Since depression and incoherent thoughts are part of her, her sanity gets in place by the affirmative conversations between her and Klein-Anna, Hendrik or her father. The feelings of seclusion that she has are amplified further by a number of impolite words in the novel. Hand in hand, a favourable standpoint on the country and sanguine plans for her life surface by a natural chat. In this scenario, Magda bases the fluctuation of her attitude towards her life on the nature of communication that transpires between her, Klein-Anna, Hendrik, and her father. Father’s regards turn out to be the most influencing her subsequent moods. Her resentment eventually leads to reprisal, ferocity, and the distortion of her relations with Africans. Therefore, the novel explores racism and class in South Africa.
Through Magda’s eyes, the narrow line in the midst of reality and insanity gets blurred. However, the reader gets exposed to an unreliable narrator as the thrusts between daily life and articulate dreams are speedy. As opposed to recounting on the occurrences, the narrator recounts on her wishes, which are often fantasized. Magda is jealous of her old father’s wife, who also happens to be the servant of her servant’s wife. By reading the very first page, the reader quickly discovers that Magda’s disappointment by her father’s new bride, the African woman with plump bones, voluptuous slinky and lazy nature (Coetzee, 1977). Just after having control of the text, Magda’s experiences are recounted by the use of journal entries, which serves to test the reader. For instance, a challenge comes to the reader when the content of the novel blurs at the context of her father’s death. Firstly, it appears as if Magda kills her father and his African partner using an axe. The narrator informs the reader on how she took the life of her father (Poyner, 2009). Her first person narrative voice characterised by loneliness tells the reader how she killed and buried her father. However, this turns out to be fantasy with her father’s reappearance at the end of the story.
The repugnance Magda feels together with her greedy desire to have sexual intercourse with a man, conveys her dissatisfaction relentlessly. She impolitely says that she is a farm girl who knows about the hole that exists between her legs and has never been occupied (Coetzee, 1977, p.41). This clearly shows that her frustration is coupled with her state of still being a virgin at the age of fifty years. She goes further to describe her unemployed body as being unsavoury, dry and dusty. Magda’s obsession leads her to invite Hendrik to her bed. She tells the reader of how Hendrik raped her and how she had sexual encounters with him. At the end of the story, her mind gets lost for she is lonely at her home. Even then, her displeasure still haunts her. She says that she is a child and tells Hendrik that she is an old child despite her age – a sinister old child filled with stale juices, and a man should make a woman of her, penetrate her for the old juices to run (Coetzee, 1977, p.86).
The novel brings to light the presence of an unreliable narrator – whether on literal grounds or from the perspective of a writing style – thereby leaving a bigger task for the reader. For the whole picture to be created, the reader has to combine the pieces from the events in the plot. Nevertheless, every interpretation builds itself around imagination, leaving room for diverse outcomes from keen comprehensions. The novel exposes the reader to wide thinking with regard to discerning the true events and those, which are merely eloquent clarifications of the truth. As opposed to embodying the narrator’s physical being, the reader gets obliged to embody the narrator’s mind.
References
Coetzee, J.M. (1977). In the heart of the country. Penguin
Publishers.
Poyner, J. (2009). J.M. Coetzee and the paradox of postcolonial authorship. Farnham, England: Ashgate.
