Zinato approaches Magda, the Afrikaner protagonist 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 she 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.
Seeing Where Others See Nothing: Coetzee's Magda, Cassandra in the Karoo
Susanna Zinato
2019-01-01
Abstract
Zinato approaches Magda, the Afrikaner protagonist 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 she 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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