J. M. Coetzee
DIARY OF A BAD YEAR
231pp. £16.99.
978 1 846 55120 8
INNER WORKINGS
Essays 2000–2005
304pp. £17.99.
978 1 846 55045 4
Harvill Secker
We used to believe”, laments J. M. Coetzee’s fictional writer Elizabeth Costello, “that when the text said, ‘On the table stood a glass of water’, there was indeed a table, and a glass of water on it, and we had only to look in the word-mirror of the text to see them. But all that has ended.”
Quite. Coetzee has always avoided the flat mirror of realism in favour of the many-layered mise en abyme of metafiction, and his Elizabeth Costello (2003) is a case in point: not so much a novel as a series of infinitely regressed reflections on the nature of writing itself and the writer’s contract with the reader. Costello first appeared in 1997, in a journal article by Coetzee called “What Is Realism?”, later took centre stage in The Lives of Animals (1999) – quite literally, being Coetzee’s preferred voice for the Princeton Tanner Lectures on which that book was based – and has since featured as a deus ex machina author figure in his novel, Slow Man (2005), popping up to debate the interrelationship between the real and the literary with the book’s main character, Paul Rayment. The TLS printed a cartoon of Coetzee in drag (September 5, 2003), and even the most astute of his critics fell into the trap of accepting the outspoken Costello as a surrogate for the notoriously guarded Coetzee himself.
Reader, beware. Costello is a fictionalization not so much of Coetzee’s self as of what he does – as a novelist, that is. “It is not my profession to believe”, she explains, “just to write.” Coetzee himself does not deal in belief: the mise en abyme is a hall of mirrors that refuses to throw up final answers, a device by which he is able to take apart the very nature of conviction. But he would now seem to have taken an unprecedented step. As a writer, Coetzee is often accused of coldness, of remoteness, of an excessive sobriety. Yet in Diary of a Bad Year this most resolutely private of novelists, whose memoirs were written in the third person and who routinely refuses to respond in the first even when collecting literary prizes (take Coetzee’s elliptical Nobel Lecture of 2003, the scrupulously impersonal fable He and His Man), appears to enter the fictional frame in order to speak in what seems astonishingly like his own voice, offering us a series of “strong opinions” on precisely those subjects that have been the backbone of his fiction so far. It is all here, in a sequence of fiercely argued short essays on topics as apparently divergent as anarchism and the origins of the state, personal responsibility and ancestral guilt, eros and the writing life, Machiavelli and Tony Blair: the concern, which is one we have come to associate with Coetzee’s best work, with moral and pragmatic contracts, the nature of rights and obligations, and above all with the torsions of political, artistic and sexual power.
What is more, the hero is an ageing writer who bears a striking resemblance to Coetzee. His initials are JC; his first name is John, and like Coetzee he left his native South Africa some time ago to live in Australia, which is where the novel is set. His books are Coetzee’s books – Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) and the essay collection on censorship, Giving Offense (1996), are alluded to in passing. The temperature rises even further when it turns out that JC, too, had a father whose name began with Z (for Zacharias) and that he was educated by the Marist Brothers in Cape Town, details which will be familiar to Coetzee’s readers from Boyhood (1997). Can we take all this at face value? Is the guarded Coetzee really performing a striptease? Not only is this fictional JC eminent, there is also a hint that he has won the Nobel Prize, going by a tongue-in-cheek reference to a framed scroll on his bedroom wall “in some foreign language (Latin?) with his name in fancy lettering with lots of curlicues and a big red wax seal in the corner”. Swedish, not Latin, perhaps? But really – on the bedroom wall? If we care to look, there are other sly rufflings of the mirror’s surface: JC was born in 1934, rather than 1940; unlike Coetzee he once had a sister rather than a brother; he is childless; he lives alone. Look again, and the mirror cracks. Ceci n’est pas une pipe. JC is no more John Coetzee than was Elizabeth Costello. Now you see him, now you don’t: once again the author vanishes.
Yes, what is realism? The nineteenth century associated it with a trompe-l’oeil verisimilitude and with closure; we associate it with the absence of any claims to truth.Coetzee has always avoided realism in its simpler forms, preferring the sort of novel, as he once explained in an address in Cape Town, that evolves “its own paradigms and myths”. His early books were often unapologetically fabular or allegorical, making free use of nightmarish symbols and abrupt truncations, indicating a fundamental interest in narrative form, in the means by which the story-illusion is created and by which it can be disrupted (during the Apartheid years Coetzee’s novels were regularly passed by the South African censors not because they did not deal with material that might be construed as critical of the state, but because their potential threat was thought to be ameliorated by their sheer literariness). As Coetzee’s writing has evolved, however, his contract with the reader has changed. His more recent fiction, after Disgrace (1999), has a naturalistic surface, but its smoothness is deceptive. His prose is often described as stripped or blanched: the literary equivalent of furniture from IKEA, and as comfortless. This is another way of saying that he now displays his conventions even more knowingly: the narrative scaffolding is more than ever on display.
Indeed, in the course of Diary of a Bad Year, JC becomes exquisitely alert to what he calls “the impostures of authorship”. Having been asked by a German publisher to contribute a run of essays to a book on “what is wrong with today’s world”, he sets about recording his opinions on a dictaphone tape – JC, whose handwriting is deteriorating due to a loss of fine muscular control, is suffering from Parkinson’s disease. His assumptions about the world, and his magisterial writerly stance, are, however, undermined by his encounters with Anya, the exotic young Filipino-Australian woman he meets in the laundry room of their apartment building, lusts after, and swiftly enlists as his typist. Anya not only types up the great man’s thoughts, but takes it on herself to “fix them up too here and there where I can”, generating a subtle, ongoing comedy of conflicting perspectives, as well as some cruder malapropisms thanks to her undiscriminating use of her computer’s spellcheck function (in her typescript Brezhnev’s generals sit “somewhere in the urinals”). The three layers of the text – JC’s philosophical essays, his heightened reflections on his meetings with Anya, and Anya’s own more sceptical version of their unfolding relationship – are presented in exactly the same order each time on successive pages, so that the novel resembles one of those segmented children’s books in which you end up with the head of a gorilla, the torso of a policeman and the legs of a ballerina (it is possible to read the different narratives discretely from start to finish, but not advisable, as each ligament of this hybrid is held in a weirdly elegant tension with the rest).
JC is every bit as beguiled, amused and irritated by Anya’s ineptness and her presumptuousness as we are. Anya assumes that he comes from South America rather than South Africa, and his ambiguous status in the book as Señor Juan, or even “Señor C, the Senior Citizen” is a running joke (in fact Diary of a Bad Year differs from almost all of Coetzee’s earlier fiction in being laced with a dry, self-deprecating humour – Anya complains, for instance, that JC’s “know-it-all-tone” as a writer “really turns people off”). Anya is far from empty-headed, however, having a shrewd insight into JC’s melancholy yearning for her, the awkward loftiness of his self-imposed isolation, and his increasing self-doubts about his work and his reputation vis-à-vis posterity. His annoyance at her philistinism reveals less about her than it does about his own hieratic pretensions: “if you are prepared to hand it over to spellcheck to run your life”, he scolds her, “you might as well throw dice”. Like God, JC the distinguished writer is not the dice-throwing sort, pontificating grandly that there is “nothing like the feel of words coming into the world”. What Anya brings him, of course, in a twist that turns this potentially purely exploitative relationship on its head, is a painful apprehension of his own mortality.
It is an ironic inversion that is familiar from Coetzee’s earlier work: like Susan Barton’s subtle domination of Foe (Foe, 1986), or Vercueil’s lugubrious pressure on Elizabeth Curren in Age of Iron (1990) Anya’s erotic hold over JC is something that he is utterly unable to resist. Coetzee is not really interested in sex, but in power: not just the old question of what power the state can or should wield over the individual, which is something that JC manages to consider at length in these short pieces, but in the power of the strong over the weak, of men over women and women over men; the power of the novelist over his creation, and vice versa. As Coetzee puts it in his new essay collection, Inner Workings, “the stories we set about writing sometimes begin to write themselves, after which their truth or falsehood is out of our hands and declarations of authorial intent carry no weight”. It is Paul Rayment who really haunts Elizabeth Costello, rather than the other way around, and it is Anya who speaks the final valedictory words in Diary of a Bad Year, over the dying JC, just as it is the fictional JC who, with terrible clear-sightedness, delivers this final, cutting verdict on the novels of J. M. Coetzee: “I was never much good at evocation of the real”, he admits.
Whatever art has come from my hand in one way or another expressed and even glorified in this disengagement. But what sort of art has that been, in the end? Art that is not great-souled, as the Russians would say, that lacks generosity, fails to celebrate life, lacks love.
He really shouldn’t be so hard on himself. Diary of a Bad Year proves that Coetzee remains the master of the brutal, the unpoetic, the relentlessly real, in the modern sense, unfailingly setting up an equation between the form of the prose itself and the desolation of the experience it describes. The absurdity of much of the so-called rational Western philosophical tradition, the tedium and the indignities of encroaching old age, and the perilous solipsism of the writing life are superbly suggested by the detached, constricted rhythms of JC’s meditations, reminding us that Coetzee has always been able to work against the limitations of spareness by developing the other dimension of language, its suggestiveness. In its skilful deployment of characters who have a rich significance beyond their individual function, its wry exploration of the failures of reciprocity between the self and the other, and its examination of philosophies of community, atonement and sacrifice, this generic cross-breed stands up well next to Coetzee’s previous books. Let us leave the last word, for what it’s worth, to Anya: “don’t allow yourself to get depressed . . . as for your writing, you are without a doubt one of the best, class AA”. Unsurprisingly – because for the fiction writer the real battle for intellectual authority, as Coetzee’s collaborator David Attwell has pointed out, will always be waged in the fiction itself – Diary of a Bad Year offers us a far more interesting, and provocative, handling of the material covered in Coetzee’s real-life critical and discursive essays than the latter themselves do. The title of Inner Workings might seem to promise a disinhibited dance of the seven veils, but the reality is cautious and chaste. Coetzee has an invitingly ample critical range. These essays sweep through European and New World literature from the late nineteenth century to the present: Italo Svevo, Robert Musil, Paul Celan, Günter Grass, Graham Greene, Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, Arthur Miller, V. S. Naipaul, and the doyenne of the South African realist novel, Nadine Gordimer, are all here, and Coetzee shows an assured grasp of the minutest biographical and textual detail in each case. He is equally at ease with Descartes, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Freud, Schopenhauer, Derrida; with Lukács, Aristotle and Tocqueville.
The result is a superbly well-informed and always lucid body of criticism that is never less than scholarly, but nevertheless fails to make the pulse race. Coetzee’s alertness to form as something that is crucial to the purposes of literature is as keen here as it is in his fiction, and he is unfailingly perceptive when pinpointing influences. Robert Musil is persuasively identified as being indebted to Nietzsche for his essayistic, sceptical prose, a prose that constitutes “a mode of philosophising, aphoristic rather than systematic”; while in the ramshackle edifice of Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk (the Arcades Project), with its decontextualized quotations and its catalogue of commodities, Coetzee detects the perhaps once personal hope that allegory “could take over the role of abstract thought”. At times, his urbane intimacy with his subject can be very seductive: the mordant lyricism of Beckett’s prose, for instance, is succinctly and evocatively anatomized as being based on French models “though with Jonathan Swift whispering ghostly in his ear”. As a practising novelist, moreover, Coetzee has an intuitive grasp of the erratic and unpremeditated nature of the creative process that enables him to keep the claims of academic jargon in perspective. Thus William Faulkner “became the darling of the New Haven formalists as he was already the darling of the French existentialists, without being quite sure of what either formalism or existentialism was”. It is as a linguist, though, that Coetzee is effortlessly brilliant. He has more than a passing knowledge of Italian, French, Greek and Latin and is clearly fluent in German: his carefully calibrated evaluation of recent translations of Joseph Roth and Paul Celan, and of the challenges posed to the translator by Celan’s struggles to reinvent his mother tongue after it had been brutalized during the Nazi era, show an exemplary sensitivity to the timbre and resonance of individual words.
This sensitivity is only rarely betrayed by moments of inattentiveness. It is not the case, for example, that Brighton Rock’s poorly educated thug, Pinkie, is able to “compose sentences in Latin”. The fragments he quotes, not composes, come from the old Latin Tridentine Mass and as such are memories of the Catholic childhood that Greene so painstakingly constructs for the character (how can Coetzee, alumnus of the Catholic St Joseph’s College in Rondebosch, have misread this?). There are other, more revealing instances of a surprising critical tin ear. Coetzee commends Bellow for his “racy prose” and Philip Roth for his humour, but the praise is automatic, not deeply felt.
It turns out that Coetzee in fact prefers the early, more buttoned-up Bellow of The Victim to what he primly dismisses as the “portentous rumination and gaseous language” and “lack of dramatic structure and indeed of intellectual organisation” of The Adventures of Augie March, while Roth receives a telling off for allowing himself to be “overwhelmed . . . of late” by the influence of Faulkner’s “heady prose”. It is a startling lapse in acuity: hyperbolic, carousing, overfull language is the very essence of the mature Bellow and Roth – and of Faulkner, for that matter. It is what we read them for. Coetzee’s real admiration is reserved for, and his ear attuned to, a type of minimalist writing that is “as clean and cold as a knife”, as he says admiringly of Naipaul’s Half a Life; for the later Graham Greene’s policy of “rein[ing] in the poetry when it became obtrusive”; for a Beckettian super-restraint (the ending of “The End”, tellingly, disappoints because of “an uncharacteristic dip into plangency”). Coetzee does not do plangency, just as he does not deal in belief. If he is not always able to keep a completely straight face in these essays – he is refreshingly alive to some of Walt Whitman’s worst absurdities – his overriding aesthetic is nevertheless one of a high seriousness, of a fastidiousness that prefers bones to flesh. But not too many bones: Gordimer, too, is efficiently dealt with, in an even-handed assessment of her recent fiction that finally registers a regret that “the devotion to the texture of the real that characterizes her best work is now only intermittent”. And here lies the greatest surprise of Inner Workings. The gourmet’s choice in metafiction grumbles at being served up too meagre a portion of realism.
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Elizabeth Lowry's novel The Bellini Madonna will be published by Quercus in 2009
