| The Nobel
Prize in Literature for 2003 awarded to the South African
writer John Maxwell Coetzee  "who
in innumerable guises portrays the surprising involvement
of the outsider".
J.M. Coetzee’s novels are characterised by their well-crafted
composition, pregnant dialogue and analytical brilliance.
But at the same time he is a scrupulous doubter, ruthless
in his criticism of the cruel rationalism and cosmetic morality
of western civilisation. His intellectual honesty erodes all
basis of consolation and distances itself from the tawdry
drama of remorse and confession. Even when his own convictions
emerge to view, as in his defence of the rights of animals,
he elucidates the premises on which they are based rather
than he argues for them.
Coetzee’s interest is directed mainly at situations
where the distinction between right and wrong, while crystal
clear, can be seen to serve no end. Like the man in the famous
Magritte painting who is studying his neck in a mirror, at
the decisive moment Coetzee’s characters stand behind
themselves, motionless, incapable of taking part in their
own actions. But passivity is not merely the dark haze that
devours personality, it is also the last resort open to human
beings as they defy an oppressive order by rendering themselves
inaccessible to its intentions. It is in exploring weakness
and defeat that Coetzee captures the divine spark in man.
His earliest novel, Dusklands, was the first example of the
capacity for empathy that has enabled Coetzee time and again
to creep beneath the skin of the alien and the abhorrent.
A man working for the American administration during the Vietnam
war dreams of devising an unbeatable system of psychological
warfare, while at the same time his private life disintegrates
around him. His reflections are juxtaposed with a report on
an expedition to explore the country of the native Africans,
which purports to have been written by one of the 18th-century
Boer pioneers. Two forms of misanthropy, one of them intellectual
and megalomaniac, the other vital and barbaric, reflect each
other.
One element in his next novel, In the Heart of the Country,
is the portrayal of psychosis. A careworn spinster living
with her father observes with distaste his love affair with
a young coloured woman. She has fantasies of murdering both
of them, but everything seems to indicate that she decides
rather to immure herself in a perverse pact with the house
servant. The actual sequence of events cannot be determined,
as the reader’s only sources are her notes, where lies
and truths, crudeness and refinement alternate capriciously
line by line. The high-flown Edwardian literary style of the
woman’s monologue harmonises strangely with the surrounding
African landscape.
Waiting for the Barbarians is a political thriller in the
tradition of Joseph Conrad, in which the idealist’s
naivety opens the gates to horror. The playful metanovel Foe
spins a yarn about the incompatibility and inseparability
of literature and life, told by a woman who yearns to be part
of a major narrative when in reality only one of minor importance
is offered.
With Life and Times of Michael K, which has its roots in
Defoe as well as in Kafka and Beckett, the impression that
Coetzee is a writer of solitude becomes clearer. The novel
deals with the flight of an insignificant citizen from growing
disorder and impending war to a state of indifference to all
needs and speechlessness that negates the logic of power.
The Master of Petersburg is a paraphrase of Dostoevsky's
life and fictional world. To die in one’s heart away
from the world, the temptation that Coetzee’s imagined
characters face, turns out to be the principle of the unconscionable
liberty of terrorism. Here, the writer's struggle with the
problem of evil is tinged with demonology, an element that
recurs in his most recently published work, Elizabeth Costello.
In Disgrace Coetzee involves us in the struggle of a discredited
university teacher to defend his own and his daughter’s
honour in the new circumstances that have arisen in South
Africa after the collapse of white supremacy. The novel deals
with a question that is central to his works: Is it possible
to evade history?
His autobiographical Boyhood circles mainly around his father’s
humiliation and the psychological cleavage it has caused the
son, but the book also conveys a magic impression of life
in the old-fashioned South African countryside with its eternal
conflicts between the Boers and the English and between white
and black. In its sequel, Youth, the writer dissects himself
as a young man with a cruelty that is oddly consoling for
anyone able to identify with him.
There is a great wealth of variety in Coetzee’s works.
No two books ever follow the same recipe. Extensive reading
reveals a recurring pattern, the downward spiralling journeys
he considers necessary for the salvation of his characters.
His protagonists are overwhelmed by the urge to sink but paradoxically
derive strength from being stripped of all external dignity.
The Swedish Academy
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