Magda As Narrator: Counter/Demytholography

The research paper titled “ Magda as Narrator: Counter/Demythologization in J.M Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country” tries to enquire into the ways in which J.M Coetzee has tried to present Magda, the woman narrator of his text In the Heart of the Country as a counter/de mythologizing figure. She communicates a counter mythical stance serving as a fused signifier for the African pastoral mythology on the one side and the dominant myth of colonialism. She is as much part of the dominant Afrikaner, settler society as much as the native Blacks whose rhythms she yearns for in an attempt to manage a language that would transcend the divide. She is also the voice of the woman well past its feminine, feminist limitations asserting the fluid female stance in a true development of the self.
Key words: Counter/Demythologization, female stance “I make it up in order that it shall make me up” (Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country 73)

Coetzee written in the year 1977. This has been often spoken as an allegory of decolonization, of the pastoral myth and of the woman’s question. The novel is in the form of an interior monologue by “a poetess of inferiority” (Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country 43) as the narrator herself claims. It represents the self cancelling dubious internal consciousness of Magda, the colonialist daughter caught in the throes of negation/ isolation occupying the liminal space of not being part of certitudes. The text is like an undated journal, a kind of diary entry running into several paragraphs, representing Magda’s life in the veld surrounded by the colonialist Afrikaner and the native black interface. There are two hundred and sixty six numbered sections and the notable aspect of the narration is that it is often contradictory and