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JM Coetzee’s archive sold to Texan university
The BBC reports that the archive of Nobel Prize-winning author JM Coetzee has been acquired by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre at the University of Texas.
The $1.5m (£960,000) acquisition includes 155 boxes of the author’s essays, manuscripts, notebooks, letters and speeches dating back to 1956.
Coetzee, a South African writer, who took Australian citizenship in 2006 and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003, said that it was “satisfying” that his papers would be housed at Texas, where he earned his doctorate in 1965.
The sale of this archive to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre at the University of Texas in Austin raises the question of where South Africa’s literary heritage should be preserved. Would it, one wonders, have been more appropriate for Coetzee to have housed his archive at the National English Language Museum (NELM) in Grahamstown, or in the archives of the University of Cape Town where he taught from 1972 until his retirement in 2002?
Thomas Staley, the director of the centre, quoted on BizCommunity.com said: “He writes brilliantly of his native home of South Africa, but the themes and conflicts he explores in his works are universal. We are delighted that his remarkable archive will be available for study at the Ransom Centre.”
Craig McKenzie, professor of English at the University of Johannesburg, writing in the Mail & Guardian asks, “Where were our local institutions? Why could Coetzee’s papers not have found a home where they belong - in the matrix that gave them birth? ... Will local scholars now be placed at a severe disadvantage in not having ready access to this trove? Is this another form of exploitation of the developing world by the rich West?”
Suggesting that there are no clear answers to these questions, he makes a number of arguments and counter-arguments.
In arguing for the Harry Ransom Centre to house the archive he notes: 1) that the centre already has the archives of a number of other prominent South African writers, including Herman Charles Bosman and Olive Schreiner; 2) it is well resourced and maintained and the archive will be preserved in optimal conditions for future generations of scholars; and 3) that the centre makes scholarships available to researchers from all over the world, enabling them to go to Texas to undertake research.
He counters his own argument with a series of questions, asking: 1) Will South African writers not be marginalised in the context of the holdings of more illustrious writers like Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf?; 2) Are there no local archives that could do as good a job of preserving the papers of South African writers?; and 3) If the papers were housed in South Africa, would local scholars not have them within easy reach at low cost, and they would still be accessible to international researchers?
Suggesting that Coetzee would have made the decision to sell his archive to the centre “on solid professional grounds”, McKenzie concludes that, “in the long run, perhaps South Africa’s reputation, as a breeding ground of talent that it profligately exports, benefits most from this arrangement”.
It’s an interesting debate!
Comments
As to the question of “where South Africa’s literary heritage should be preserved,” the obvious answer is at the National English Literary Museum (NELM) in Grahamstown, which was founded for that express purpose, and is perfectly capable of doing “as good a job of preserving the papers of South African writers” as is the Harry Ransom centre; and is without doubt the more appropriate home for such material.
With regard to the question, “Where were our national institutions?” in this sale, the first NELM heard of the sale was once it was publicly announced as a fait accompli, obviously brokered between Coetzee and the Harry Ransom centre without Coetzee giving any serious consideration to lodging the material in South Africa. Coetzee clearly feels a greater bond with Texas than South Africa, despite having made his name using South African social issues.
And yes, local scholars will doubtless be left at a disadvantage by this sale to a foreign nation: there can never be enough scholarships available from the Ransom Institute to cater for the literally hundreds of local scholars who research Coetzee’s work. Only an elite few will receive these benefits. And yes again, international scholars would have had ready access to this material at NELM; far readier than South African scholars will have to the material in Texas.
In any case, NELM could never have hoped to compete with the 1.5 million dollar purchase price which was presumably a prime motivator for lodging the material in Texas; for otherwise, surely it would have been donated, for the sake of posterity? It does seem something of a final stroke in the author’s severing of his ties with his erstwhile home.
McKenzie asks, “Is this another form of exploitation of the developing world by the rich West?”: Coetzee himself is perfectly capable of considering this question, especially so given the deep social awareness of his oeuvre. Lodging his material in Texas is a choice Coetzee has made, not one that was somehow put upon him; though of course we can consider that he now represents the rich West, rather than a developing South Africa.
There is also the question of whether this material should ever have been allowed to leave South Africa. Coetzee’s literary significance is as great as Irma Stern’s legacy to the art world.