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J.M. Coetzee
Inner Workings
Introduction
Why
might one be drawn to
read a collection of the book reviews and literary introductions of a
writer
known above all for his fiction? J. M. Coetzee's novels have won
acclaim across
the globe; two have been awarded Booker Prizes, and it was for his
fiction that
he gained the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. Some of his books
blend
fiction and non-fiction, and he has often used a fictional persona -
notably an
Australian author named Elizabeth Costello - to address issues of
current importance.
In Inner Workings, however, he speaks in his
own voice, continuing a prolific
career as reviewer and critic that has already seen the publication of
three
collections of essays.
There are two obvious
incentives for turning from the fiction to the critical prose: in the
hope that
these more direct compositions will throw light on the often oblique
novels,
and in the belief that a writer who in his imaginative works can
penetrate to
the heart of so many pressing concerns is bound to have much to offer
when
writing, so to speak, with the left hand. In particular, there is
always an
interest in seeing how an author at the forefront of his profession
engages
with his peers, commenting not as a critic from the outside but as one
who
works with the same raw materials. There is plenty of evidence that the
second
expectation is likely to be fulfilled. Coetzee's non-fictional and
semi-fictional writing taken as a whole represents a substantial and
significant contribution to the continuing discussion of literature's
place in
the lives of individuals and cultures. The interviews and essays
published in
Doubling the Point,
the studies of South African literature and of censorship
in White Writing and Giving Offense, and the 'lessons'
of Elizabeth Costello
explore, among many other topics, the relation of art and politics, the
continuity between the aesthetic and the erotic, the responsibilities
of the
author, and the ethical potential of fiction. That Coetzee's novels and
memoirs
stage similar issues is testimony to the wholeness and persistence of
his
understanding of the artist's vocation.
In 2001 Coetzee published
Stranger Shores, a
collection of essays dating from 1986 to 1999, the majority
of which were first published in the New York Review if Books. He has
continued
to write regularly for that organ, and the present volume is again
largely made
up of reviews produced according to its standards, both generous and
exacting,
together with a selection of other essays, mostly written as
introductions to
reprinted literary works. Although the chapters in these two books wear
the
garb of the occasional piece, they continue in another mode Coetzee's
investigation
of the place and purpose of literature - and, it must be stressed, of
its
pleasures as well as its challenges. Where the reader of the original
reviews
was primarily invited to consider them in isolation, the reader of this
volume
is encouraged to view them in relation to one another.
Most of the chapters that
follow offer a portrait of the artist as the context for the specific
book or
books being discussed, and taken together they illustrate vividly the
variety
and unpredictability of writers' lives in the twentieth century. (There
is one
nineteenth century writer, Walt Whitman, a poet out of his time as well
as very
much of it.) The first seven - Italo Svevo, Robert Walser, Robert
Musil, Walter
Benjamin, Bruno Schulz, Joseph Roth, and Sandor Marai - form a closely
interrelated cluster: all their subjects were born in Europe
in the late 19th century and experienced as young or middle-aged men
the
upheavals of the First World War, many living through, or into, the
Second
World War as well. In spite of their different national and ethnic
origins
(Italian, Swiss, Austrian, German, Polish, Galician, and Hungarian),
the
different languages they wrote in, and the separate trajectories of
their
lives, there are discernible connections among them. All felt the need
to
explore in fiction the passing of the world into which they had been
born; all
registered the shock waves of the new world that was emerging. Their
bourgeois
backgrounds did not shield them from the trials of exile,
dispossession, and
sometimes personal violence. Four were Jews, two of whom died as a
result of
Nazi persecution. (Among the seven, the exception to this pattern is
one of the
Jews: Italo Svevo, who remained rooted in Trieste
until his death. The different course of his life is to be explained
partly by
the fact that he died in 1928: as Coetzee tells us, Svevo's widow spent
the war
years in hiding, and their grandson, who hid with her, was shot by the
Nazis in
1945.) What emerges from this group of essays is a Europe
in painful transition, and a series of literary works whose originality
is seen
as the artist's necessary response to far-reaching change. One obvious
figure
is missing (though he is mentioned in connection with several of these
writers): Franz Kafka, whose works seem to sum up in concentrated form
many of
the passions and plights explored at greater length by these seven
authors.
In a second group of writers,
we turn from Europe's mid century
crisis to
its aftermath. In these studies of Paul Celan, Gunter Grass, W G.
Sebald and
Hugo Claus it becomes harder to discern a pattern, as both national and
individual stories diverge more markedly, although Europe's
dark recent history remains a constant reference point.
For the second half of the
volume, Coetzee is primarily concerned with works in English. (As he
relates in
Boyhood, he was
brought up speaking English as his first language, although his
parents were Afrikaans speakers; he is also at home in both Dutch and
German,
as his comments on works in these languages suggest.) Coetzee's
attention is
captured by the moral intensities of Graham Greene, the existential
intensities
of Samuel Beckett, and the homoerotic intensities of Walt Whitman. And
the
study of Whitman introduces another group, this time of American
writers, with
a quite different set of creative barriers and opportunities from those
of the
Europeans. Faulkner's biography, and biographies of Faulkner, are the
topic of
one chapter, and the story of wasted years spent writing hack Hollywood
screenplays seems a far cry from the struggle to write against a
background of
contending nations. In Saul Bellow's early novels, Henry Miller's and
John
Huston's film The Misfits,
and Philip Roth's historical fantasy
The Plot
Against America, we
have three more versions of twentieth-century America,
warts and all. One senses Coetzee's commitment both to art and to
ethics when
he offers, at the end of the chapter on The Misfits, a telling comment on
the
difference between the photographic image and the literary
representation: the
wild horses being rounded up in the movie were really traumatized.
Coetzee himself is usually
thought of as neither a European nor an American writer: for most of
his
writing life he has lived in South Africa, and half of
his novels take place in
that country. He now lives in Australia,
and his most recent novel, Slow Man,
is set in his adopted city, Adelaide.
The last three
writers in the collection share this non-metropolitan background, and
they also
share global recognition in the form of the Nobel Prize for Literature:
Nadine Gordimer, Gabriel
Garcia Marquez, and V S. Naipaul. Coetzee's focus is on particular
novels,
rather than the authors' lives: we read these essays not as
retrospective
appreciation but as an engagement with
contemporaries. Coetzee expects his own fiction to be judged by the
same
exacting standards he applies here to others.
One would not have predicted
it if one had read the novels alone, but Coetzee is an ideal reviewer.
He seems
to have read everything relevant to his subject, often obscure works in
an
author's oeuvre; he writes with easy familiarity of the historical,
cultural,
and political background, whether it be the Austro Hungarian Empire or
the American
South; he patiently summarizes plots so that busy readers can find out
'what
happens' in the most painless way. We have little sense of a
moonlighting
novelist: there are few literary flourishes, and no sign of that rather
grumpy
internal voice that has characterized much of Coetzee's recent fiction.
(We do,
however, sense a profound sympathy with the struggles of the writer to
be true
to his vocation against all odds.) He doesn't hesitate to make
judgments, but
he is a generous reader, open to a wide variety of styles and themes.
What of the second reason for
reading these essays, for possible illumination of Coetzee's fiction?
Is the
reader of this book likely to turn back to the novels and find them in
any way
different? One effect might be a sense of the inadequacy of the label
'South
African' (or now 'Australian') writer: Coetzee creates out of a rich
dialogue
with writers in a number of traditions. In particular, his evident
fascination
with the European novelists of the first half of the twentieth century
suggests
that, although he has never lived in continental Europe,
he is, if looked at from one angle, a deeply European writer. Equally
evident
is his absorption in the minutest questions oflanguage: the essays on
writers
who do not use English are studded with detailed examinations of the
translator's art. And, to take an example of a more specific
connection,
readers of Boyhood will be
intrigued by the comments on Roth's creation of an
autobiographical alter ego in The
Plot Against America.
However, many readers looking
for clues about Coetzee's own practice will be tempted to turn to the
only
chapter on a South African writer, where they will find an account of
Gordimer's 2001 novel The Pickup.
The question Coetzee poses to Gordimer cannot
but be read as a question he has posed to himself 'What historical role
is
available to a writer like her born into a late colonial community?'
Gordimer
was the author of a notorious review of Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K
in which she castigated her fellow novelist for his
failure to serve the
ethical and political needs of the South Africa of that time.
Coetzee,
who has shown some severity himself in his earlier accounts of
Gordimer's work,
is generous in recognizing the quest for justice as her consistent
overriding
principle; and in noting that The
Pickup, which he calls 'an astonishing book',
introduces a new, spiritual note into her work there is a sense that he
is
welcoming her into a domain he has inhabited, not always comfortably,
for some
time. For if there are gleams of transcendence in Coetzee's novels,
they are
not only hints of a possible justice, but of justice animated, as well
as
tested, by a more obscure demand that the word 'spiritual' can only
gesture
towards - a demand already adumbrated, from Dostoevsky on, by his
formidable
European predecessors.
Derek
Attridge
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