Shaun de Waal
WHO IS … JM COETZEE?
Who, indeed, is JM Coetzee? The question is made harder to answer by the refusal of the acclaimed South African author – who this week won the Booker Prize for an unprecedented second time – to be a public figure, to provide a packaged persona for our consumption. His reluctance to perform on that stage makes the very question seem impertinent.
He is thought of as a recluse who refuses to respond to interviews; he has been described as cold and forbidding. One hostess who dragooned him into a dinner party said he was an anti- social depressive, an incommunicative “black hole” who sucked all the energy from the room.
Something in his use of his initials rather than his first name to sign his works speaks of a certain reticence, a willingness to be “difficult”. Often, that impression seems to be reinforced by his work, by its analytical and ethical rigour, its refusal to ingratiate or mollify; by a prose that often seems to have been chipped, phrase by phrase, out of stone.
Yet friends paint a different portrait of John Maxwell Coetzee, who was born in 1940 and, apart from a decade overseas, has spent his life in the Cape and is now a professor of general literature at the University of Cape Town.
They speak of his great love of cycling long distances (he and a friend toured the Karoo by bicycle); his fondness for spicy Indian food, which he enjoys cooking himself. He is described as “humorous, warm and generous”, an affable host who will refill his guests’ glasses although he himself no longer drinks.
Still, they are constantly aware of his cool, observant intelligence. “He can make you feel nervous,” said one. “You’re aware of this person thinking, watching.” Students of his master’s degree in creative writing (conducted with almost no personal contact) attest to his meticulous attention to detail, conveyed in tiny handwriting. His relentless dedication to his work, to daily writing, clearly absorbs the bulk of his time and his energy.
Coetzee left South Africa at 21 to work and study overseas, “very much in the spirit of shaking the dust of the country from his feet”, as he put it in the 1992 collection of essays and interviews, Doubling the Point – referring to himself in the third person, as he does, too, in his 1997 memoir Boyhood. He worked “doggedly” in mathematics and computers, using them to conduct stylistic analyses of the work of Samuel Beckett (and to produce the odd surrealist poem). In the United States of the mid- to late Sixties, he could not help but draw parallels between what was happening in Vietnam and in his homeland, concerns which fed into his first novel (actually a pair of related novellas), Dusklands, published in 1974.
Though drawn to the political left, he admitted that “masses of people wake in him something close to panic. He … cannot and will not join, shout, sing: his throat tenses up, he revolts.” Yet it was his arrest at a demonstration in Buffalo, New York, that foreclosed his attempts to stay in the US and propelled him back to South Africa.
The work he has produced since then comprises one of the most impressive and important oeuvres in the literature of this country and the world. He has written on a broad range of academic and literary topics, as well as on rugby, comic books, advertising and censorship, constantly unpicking the discourses of authority. But these writings pale alongside his superb, sometimes daunting novels, from Dusklands through In the Heart of the Country (1976), Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Life & Times of Michael K (1983), Foe (1986), Age of Iron (1990), The Master of Petersburg (1994), to his new novel, Disgrace (1999).
He has won all the prizes: among others, he won the CNA Award three times in a row, with three consecutive books; he won the Jerusalem Prize, the Booker for Life & Times of Michael K, and now again for Disgrace. In the last days of apartheid, as Michael K refused the heroic gesture of joining a guerrilla band in favour of growing pumpkins, Coetzee was accused of lacking commitment to “the struggle”. He said in reply that fiction should resist being colonised by the discourse of history, should be faithful only to itself.
Yet in all his work he registers history’s pressure on human beings. His greatest achievement as a novelist has been to use the tools of postmodernism (often seen as a kind of disengaged late- capitalist game) to investigate and interrogate that history and its discontents. In Disgrace, when a white woman is gang-raped by three black intruders, her father, a disgraced academic, tells her, perhaps without wanting fully to believe it himself: “It was history speaking through them. A history of wrong.”
For Coetzee, “Stories are defined by their irresponsibility … The feel of writing fiction is one of freedom, of irresponsibility, or, better, of responsibility toward something that has not yet emerged, that lies somewhere at the end of the road.”
In his essay on Nadine Gordimer’s novel Burger’s Daughter, Coetzee examines the status of scenes of torture in South African literature and yearns for a time when “all human acts … will be returned to the ambit of moral judgment”, will be freed of their overdetermined ideological baggage.
IF THE END OF APARTHEID AND ILLEGITIMATE WHITE RULE SEEMED TO PROMISE THE BEGINNING OF THAT NEW ERA, THE UNREMITTINGLY BLEAK, UNFLINCHING DISGRACE POINTS OUT THAT IT HAS NOT YET DAWNED.