There is a fascinating article in the latest edition of The English Academy Review, in which a schoolteacher, Michael Crampton, describes different classroom responses to JM Coetzee’s novel Disgrace. The novel has been widely prescribed for schools, and in Crampton’s account is admirably fulfilling its task, in that context, of getting pupils thinking about literature and about what the book might be saying about South Africa and the world today.
Crampton quotes and contrasts literary reviewers’ different readings of Disgrace, the responses of “brilliant minds” to a “brilliant mind”. But, as he says, “ordinary minds” must also respond to the work, and he details the responses of his pupils.
They obviously struggle with literary questions, and instead focus on the central character, David Lurie, as if he were a real person whose morals they are called upon to adjudicate. They are asked, in the old EM Forster formulation, whether Lurie is a “flat” or a “round” character.
One pupil condemns him as “flat” because he is “stubborn, arrogant and self-serving”, going on to describe him, as does another pupil, in terms that indicate clearly that he must in fact be a pretty “round” character — or there would not be so much to say about him. He would not have elicited such a complex response.
The fact that Coetzee obviously wrote Lurie this way, as a fictional nexus of complex ideas, and that in fact the author may be taking a critical perspective on his character, escapes these pupils.
Disturbingly, too, Crampton records how some pupils see Lurie’s seduction of one of his own students in the novel as a worse crime than the rape of Lurie’s daughter. And yet, Crampton argues, whatever these pupils’ deficiencies as literary critics, the fact that Disgrace allows such a spectrum of responses means it is a “truly ‘democratic’ text”.
What Crampton’s article shows most lucidly is how such readers have used Disgrace and Lurie himself as a kind of screen on to which they can project their own issues — their place in the new South Africa, their position in relation to social change and new power structures.
They “write themselves into” Disgrace. Which reminds one forcefully of the media responses to the announcement of Coetzee’s Nobel Prize. For the mass media in this country, Coetzee is, like Lurie, a screen on to which to project their own concerns and needs.
A week or two ago, I was asked to contribute to a programme on Radio 702 about Coetzee, and I agreed. When it came to the broadcast, though, I was informed that whatever I said would now form part of a larger idea, something along the lines of “Looking for JM Coetzee”, which would climax with someone impersonating the elusive Coetzee.
This was deemed an adequate response to the fact that 702, like the rest of the South African media, have failed to corner Coetzee and squeeze a comment out of him.
Thus I was asked in the course of the broadcast why Coetzee was so reluctant to be interviewed. I said he was probably trying to avoid precisely this kind of situation: one in which his words formed the raw matter of someone else’s performance, part of something he might not want to endorse as a whole.
For a person who cares about words, who wishes to be able to take honourable responsibility for what issues from his mouth or pen, it is alienating, even dishonest, to be placed in such a position.
But that is perhaps too difficult an idea for a voracious media machine looking for anything to fill the content void at its heart. I was also asked to respond to the charge that Coetzee is “hard to read”. How is one to reply? That golf is hard to play? That life itself is difficult? That most things worth doing, that are likely to enrich one’s life, are going to be hard going until some basic mastery is achieved? That the best things in life are hard?
In a culture in which the arts are expected to be a glorified version of a hamburger, instantly consumable and understandable, this is indeed “hard” to articulate.
Other responses to Coetzee have been slightly more intelligent, but still, it seems to me, off the mark. ThisDay meditated gently on why a sensitive person may choose to leave South Africa, as Coetzee, in his retirement, has done. The Sunday Times pawed over his “secret life”, as they called it.
The African National Congress hailed the Nobel achievement of this “son of the soil” (note the discourse of authenticity), only to be lashed by the Democratic Alliance, which pointed out that not so long ago the ANC was accusing Coetzee of presenting post-apartheid South Africa as a land in which “whites will lose their dignity”.
At least they are arguing about what Coetzee wrote, rather than treating him like a somewhat more enigmatic version of a Hollywood star whose marital problems are up for speculation.
As with Crampton’s school pupils, what has been said about Coetzee reveals more about the media’s needs and fantasies than it does about its ostensible subject. If there is resentment that Coetzee’s work may be more challenging than watching a cricket match, there is greater resentment that he has not fulfilled the media’s desperate need to be fed gobbets of self-explanatory verbiage — what Coetzee himself would characterise as an “alienated patter”.
The media’s basic need has been to find something to say about this big news story — one of our own, sort of, gets the biggest literary prize in the world. Unable to say anything meaningful about Coetzee’s work, the focus turns to the man himself. The culture of celebrity in which we are now enmeshed means that the Sunday Times needs to treat Coetzee as a personage whose “secret life” is now fit to be smeared across its pages.
As with the crassest of self-serving celebrities, his work is treated as if it were just the ladder to his fame, instead of an end in itself. Coetzee’s background and personal tragedies are now adduced as the real matter behind his work. His books are no longer works of art in their own right, but simply evidence of the sorrows and pathologies of the author.
This would perhaps be pardonable were Coetzee a public figure in the way a politician is a public figure. But a writer who, like Coetzee, does not choose to pontificate on the airwaves and the op-ed pages is not a public figure in this way: his or her work is the public figure.
A week or so before that Sunday Times piece, and before the Nobel announcement, there was another in its Lifestyle section, attacking Coetzee for being a “con man”. The author, Colin Bower, makes a strong case for his view of Coetzee’s literary deficiencies, but it’s hard to take seriously his argument that Coetzee is some kind of charlatan. Does Bower mean to say that Coetzee is faking the despair that often seems apparent in his work? (Bower ignores the hard-won gleams of hope.) Is Coetzee, for Bower, pretending to be a pessimist when he’s really an optimist?
That can’t be; elsewhere, Bower shows that he feels all too keenly the bleaker aspects of Coetzee’s vision. And it’s quite legitimate to call Coetzee’s work “depressing” — it often is. After I read Disgrace, brilliant though I thought it was, I felt the urge to reread the wildly inventive opening pages of Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel, just to cleanse my palate, as it were.
After the stony leanness of Disgrace, I wanted to read something almost absurdly overflowing with verbal exuberance. But that is perhaps only a way of saying that Disgrace did its job very well — after all, it is a novel, not a self-help manual. It is not there to make you feel better. At any rate, we need all kinds of writing, the bleakly minimal as well as the explosively joyful. The complexity of the world asks of us more than one kind of response. Sometimes it’s salutary to read something really scary, not just fantasy-scary like Stephen King.
It is also fair to accuse Coetzee’s work, as Bower does, of lacking in “laughter”. I’ve said before that the first line of Coetzee’s first novel, Dusklands (“My name is Eugene Dawn. I can’t help that”) is the first and last joke he ever cracked in a novel. But does everything have to be funny? Does every novel have to encompass the entirety of human life, as if it were trying to be an encylopaedia of feeling?
The vast, totalizing visions of the Victorian novelists, say, have begun to feel like pretensions to divinity, or at least dictatorship — not to mention the problem of speaking for the other, who necessarily has to be included in such visions. At any rate, Bower’s is a personal response. To which anyone is entitled, but Bower, as he realises, needs to go beyond that if he is to make a literary argument rather than just express his own distaste — or his yearning for something uplifting.
He rejects any “justifying intellectual model” that would make theoretical excuses for Coetzee’s way of writing, insisting that “the only thing that matters in respect of a novel is the experience of reading it”. As there were one single, unitary, natural “experience” of reading a novel, one common to all readers, one not coloured or informed by intellectual, social, political and personal concerns.
All we have, in the end, is Bower’s personal “experience” of reading Coetzee, his way of writing himself into Coetzee’s oeuvre, like Crampton’s pupils. And that “experience”, or the literary critique it gives rise to, reveals only Bower’s disappointment that Coetzee is not more of an old-fashioned realist trying to connect with the “world of lived experience”.
Are the abstract plays of power not part of our lived experience, how ever invisible they may seem? Bower sees language as purely connective, as a transparent window on experience and the world. He does not wonder whether Coetzee may, in fact, be contesting this naturalistic view, to ask whether language doesn’t mystify as much as it clarifies, to propose that language has its own power games.
Maybe we, like Coetzee’s characters, are more constructed by language and discourse than we like to think. Bower calls Coetzee’s characters “linguistic contrivances whose purpose is unknowable”. To me, that sounds like as good a description as any of us humans in general — we speaking, writing animals.
At least Bower isn’t whining that the books are too hard for him to understand or too much of an effort to read. He has read them carefully and has engaged with them from the position of his own subjectivity, rather than giving Coetzee the blank-screen treatment like Radio 702 did. I wisecracked on that show that Coetzee is the Greta Garbo of South African literature, which is a rather silly thing to say, and plays into the evasive-enigma stereotype, but it does have a serious point.
Roland Barthes wrote a famous essay on Garbo’s face, in which he said that she was such a powerful screen icon, especially in her silent movies, because her perfect impassivity allowed her face to function as a blank screen on to which the viewer could project his or her fantasies without restraint.
In the same way as the “democratic” text of Disgrace allows readers to project themselves into the hypothetical space of fiction and thus argue with it, Coetzee the mysterious person has become a sort of fictional space into which the media writes itself. The first activity is legitimate because that’s what good books do — help us think, help us feel. The second is not.
But Coetzee’s reticence and his refusal to set himself up as a public persona has, paradoxically, encouraged such projections. Doubtless his unavailability to feed the media’s hunger springs from personal temperament as much as literary strategy. One has only to read his latest book, Elizabeth Costello, to get some sense of why he might prefer silence. One has only to read the newspapers or listen to the radio to see that he is right.
Flaubert and Joyce saw the author as an invisible god taking a hands-off approach to his creations; ideally, he (and the author was always a “he” to them) effaced himself from the work, they said, and went off to pare his fingernails. Thus the work achieves its own kind of autonomy, its own life.
On one level, Coetzee himself performs this supremely modernist godlike gesture of self-erasure (and perhaps that’s what makes him a supremely suitable Nobel candidate). On another level, in the texture of the books, one of Coetzee’s persistent concerns is with the nature and exercise of authority — ideological and political authority as much as that embedded in the very role of author. That he chooses to exercise what authority he has within the pages of his works (while also in some ways undercutting it), and not as a talking head on TV or an alienated voice on the radio, is, in my view, admirable. We have enough verbal static to deal with.
One presumes that Coetzee also wants the books to speak for themselves. He refuses to “speak for” his fiction any more than he would “speak for” another person. Here, it seems, I have fallen into the media trap and found myself not only adding to the static but “speaking for” Coetzee. So let me say that I’m speaking here simply for myself, for one lone reader, one who would like us to forget about Coetzee the man, how ever fascinating his personal secrets, and look for what secrets his work may be whispering in our ears. To do some reading.
Also read
Nobel laureate lets his work speak for him (from the Chicago Tribune)
Colin Bower’s original piece on JM Coetzee (from the Sunday Times)