Coetzee’s first novel exploring rape was his second highly experimental nouveau roman In the Heart of the Country.  His female protagonist narrates her transgressive consciousness to subvert the Afrikaans pastoral (plaasroman) that was so popular in the 1930’s and 1940’s and perverts the fantasy of African farm life, the Karen Blixen and her adoring houseboys that digest so satisfyingly on the silver screen.  Magda is an obedient spinster daughter who lives in isolation on a remote farm serving her tyrannical father alongside the farmhand, Hendrik, and his young wife, Anna.  She characterizes herself as a  “a mad hag… spinning out sentences without occasion, gaping with boredom because nothing ever happens on the farm” who “cracks and oozes the peevish loony sentiments that belong to the dead of the night when the censor snores.”  Magda says what we are not supposed to say and the truth of her tale is always suspect because it exists only in her mad consciousness.  She recounts two different versions of killing her father, once when he is in the arms of his new bride, once when he is essentially raping Anna.  This rape is mirrored, perhaps even avenged, later when, after Magda inherits the role of the farm’s white master and it descends into disrepair, Hendrik violently rapes her because she cannot pay him as she promised.  This crime, too, is told in different versions.  It becomes impossible to find any truth, so we must accept these crazed fictions for what they are, must allow the twisted narrative to confuse us and hold us in its uncomfortable grip.  What is most disturbing about this rape is that, despite the trauma Magda experiences, she invites it.  She allows Hendrik to come to her bed every night thereafter, even begins to anxiously await his rough and disinterested sexual use of her and becomes hurt and humiliated when his visits become shorter and shorter, when he refuses to tell her what he wants.  Even before the rape Magda’s narrative suggested an underlying sexual tension between her and the novel’s other characters. It is present when she enlists the help of Hendrik and Anna to hide her murderous deeds, when she spies on her father’s sexual relations (with his wife and Anna), when she spies on Anna and Hendrik, when she speaks of her own unappealing sexuality. This sexual tension accompanies a need to reach out, to communicate. Magda cannot communicate with Hendrik so she lets him rape her instead.  Sex, even violent rape, becomes a perverse way to reach across the racial, social, and cultural divide that separates those who work the land from those who own it.  Most critics argue that the nouveau réalisme of Magda’s narrative represents both fantasies of colonial history and fantasies of subversion, a bond with complicated Afrikaner history and a rupture. But, this theory seems merely to impose a digestible rationalization on an irrational narrative spun by a crazed, violated woman, who, with her bony knees raised as she pathetically both invites and avoids rape, still haunts me.