Here we go (yet) again. I wrote some time ago about a misguided South African attempt to echo Margaret Thatcher’s invocation to the British public to ‘rejoice” at Britain’s all-too-predictable victory over Argentina over the disputed territory of the Falkland Islands. I translated the Iron Lady’s ringing exhortation to the sons and daughters of John Bull to a cry to rejoice about all the things that
were wonderful about South Africa, rather than bemoaning all the terrible things that were still so wrong.
Chastised as I was by angry liberals at the time, I reserve the right to remain critical about my own country. Being constructively critical about the country in which you live (rather than beating a hasty retreat to London or Perth) is the very stuff of liberty, democracy and even, dare I say it, spiritual growth.
Now we have Professor André Brink, eminent and prolific author and essayist, invoking the same phrases — this time chastising the great South African public for not being sufficiently grateful to the Swedish Academy for awarding fellow South African novelist Professor JM Coetzee this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature.
Writing in the Sunday Times, Brink says that the awarding of the Nobel Prize to a South African novelist ‘a mere 12 years after it was given to Nadine Gordimer is an honour almost unrivalled in the long history of the prize”. It is a pity, he goes on, that this singular distinction for the New South Africa should be ‘marred by the mud-slinging of some petty minds whose vilification of the author appeared to have been inspired more by personal reasons (real or imagined slights to overblown egos, misreadings, the obtuseness of arrogance) than by literary ones”.
He then goes on to cite at length the virtues of Coetzee’s considerable
body of work. No quibbles here, necessarily, particularly in regard to Coetzee’s ground-breaking early novels. We do not need to be beaten over the head with reminders of how powerful an effect Coetzee’s spare, subtle writing had in a literary world that was inclined to deal with apartheid South Africa either with an awkward, unsophisticated bludgeon, or with terrified, liberal evasion.
Coetzee’s understating of the issue, keeping the brutal mechanism of the system on the periphery and yet bringing its awful influence into the lives of isolated individuals locked in the heart of the country, as it were, is what gave those early novels their exceptional authority.
What happened to ordinary people was what mattered. Race and politics were an ever-present subtext, but no more than that. When their names were suddenly invoked in a throwaway line, the effect was all the more powerful for the shock of their intrusion into the victims’ numbed, accepting lives.
Thus far Brink and I agree.
Where we start parting company, and where probably many of Coetzee’s critics dared to voice disagreement with the decision of the Swedish academy, is that Coetzee’s later works do not necessarily fit into the mould of his earlier works. And, to take the argument further, the later works represent a period when national and international consciousness of South Africa’s reality was, and is, rapidly changing. The writer’s style was shifting accordingly — no harm in that.
It is no surprise that The Life and Times of Michael K, which went on to win Coetzee his first Booker Prize, marked something of the emergence of Coetzee from the brooding, silent cocoon of the earlier works into the more public-conscious, self-absorbed butterfly of the later works.
Michael K was published in the mid-1980s — a time when, inside the country, there was a simultaneous explosion of liberation rhetoric and confidence on one side, and increasingly brutal repression on the other.
Outside the country, the world was finally waking up to what was at stake, and increasingly had the gory truth of the situation thrust under its nose.
It became far harder to be caught sitting on the fence. Enigmatic silences, the pregnant beats between carefully chosen words, were out.
There was also, of course, the commercial imperative of an artist, consciously or unconsciously, having to perform to the demands of a different public, with different sensibilities — and fatter chequebooks.
The current period, which we self-indulgently like to label the ‘post-apartheid” period, has brought on another shift. In some ways the arguments are no longer as black and white as they were before. In others, they are more starkly black and white than ever.
No one has quite put their finger on the kind of world we are living in, and the kind of language it takes to describe it. Coetzee has tried — and not everybody is happy with his approach.
His critics have the right to question his shifts — just as he has the right to make them. Indeed, if our tone did not shift with changing times we would be dinosaurs, rather than sensitive, fallible members of human society.
I’m not sure precisely what it is that all of these critics have articulated to make Brink take such umbrage against us as a whole — probably a whole range of differing criticisms from differing perspectives.
I have my own criticisms of Coetzee’s later work — in terms of style as much as of content. This does not in any way diminish my admiration for the fine novels of the earlier period.
However, I do take umbrage on my own account when Brink thunders at us that ‘the Swedish Academy deserves the joyful gratitude of all South Africans to have recognised — such a talent”.
First of all, very few South Africans read anything at all, least of all the works of Coetzee. Secondly, however good Coetzee’s work might be, in whole or in part, it surely does not need to be lumped together with rugby, cricket, game safaris, five-star golf courses, Zulu dancing and Nelson Mandela to prove that we should indeed be proud to be living in the greatest country on Earth.
South Africa now has a whole clutch of Nobel laureates. So do many other countries. That is no reason to exhort us all to dance down Louis Botha Avenue and drunkenly celebrate the anointing of yet another of our amaNobela-Nobela.
Viva, having minds of our own, viva!