Imagine: On J.M Coetzee
Some critics, including Nadine Gordimer, saw in Disgrace a simplistic portrayal of black characters; others decried the “pessimistic” view it offered of the new South Africa. (The novel was published only five years after the end of apartheid.) The African National Congress took the unusual step of excoriating the author for representing, “as brutally as he can, the white people’s perception of the post-apartheid black man.” But Coetzee was writing from the perspective of an old white man set in his ways—precisely the kind of man who would have difficulty adapting to the post-apartheid era.
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In the beginning, Lurie does not notice that his views of women are retrograde (“A woman’s beauty does not belong to her alone…. She has a duty to share it”) or that his relationship with his undergraduate student is objectionable. He flatly refuses to apologize when he is brought before an academic panel investigating sexual impropriety. Only later, after his daughter’s rape on the farm, does his self-deception begin to dissipate. To his former student’s family, he offers this: “I am sorry…. I ask for your pardon.” He drops to his knees and touches his forehead to the ground.
* * *
After Disgrace, Coetzee steered away from parables and began to experiment with form. In Elizabeth Costello, published in 2003, an Australian novelist is invited to give lectures at African, European and American universities. In the past, Costello has enjoyed great literary success—in fact, she bears a striking resemblance to Coetzee himself—and now she is brought out before audiences like “an old, tired circus seal,” to accept awards or to speak on subjects of her choosing: freedom of speech and literature, for instance, though her most passionate lectures are on animal rights. Costello is horrified by the slaughter of millions of animals every day, which she compares to the Holocaust.
Because these claims are presented in a lecture wrapped inside a fictional story, Coetzee was spared any of the accusations that might be made, and indeed are made, against Costello: that her comparison between animal slaughter and the Holocaust is offensive, that she minimizes the suffering of millions of people, that she is more concerned with the suffering of animals than of her fellow humans. The use of another writer’s voice allowed him to explore the idea of the human consumption of other animals to its bitter conclusion, even if that conclusion was offensive, and even if it was not one he himself has ever publicly espoused.
Four years later, Coetzee published another experimental novel, Diary of a Bad Year, in which each page gives us three different voices: the first is an essay by a writer named Señor C, the second is his diary, and the third is Anya’s, his typist. Like Coetzee, Señor C is a South African–born novelist now living in Australia. “If I were pressed to give my brand of political thought a label,” Señor C writes, it would be anarchism, quietism and pessimism: “Anarchism because experience tells me that what is wrong with politics is power itself; quietism because I have my doubts about the will to set about changing the world, a will infected with the drive to power; and pessimism because I am skeptical that, in a fundamental way, things can be changed.”
It might be tempting to draw biographical inferences here, but Coetzee is not nearly as despairing as his characters. He regularly adds his voice to campaigns on behalf of human rights, whether for the release of political prisoners like Liu Xiaobo, or for freedom of the press in South Africa, or for the inclusion of books and literature in disaster relief efforts. Recently, he called on the Spanish government to abandon its plans to protect bullfighting as part of its national heritage. This doesn’t sound like quietism to me.
Whatever the mode, one uniting thread in Coetzee’s work is a calling into question of power in all its forms. In Waiting for the Barbarians, he examined the power of an empire against its subjects in the colonies; in Life & Times of Michael K, the power of the state against the simplest and meekest of its citizens; in Disgrace, the power of academics over students and men over women; in Elizabeth Costello, the power of human beings over animals. Is it possible, Coetzee asks again and again, for someone to have power without abusing it? What happens if we consider the world through the perspective of the powerless? And what happens when someone who has long benefited from a particular advantage is suddenly stripped of it?
In the new novel, he has approached this idea from an entirely different perspective, creating a place where there is no power and no hierarchy of any kind. No individual in Novilla can claim to be special or different: no one is richer, no one is smarter, no one is more powerful. Will Simón and Inés, these people who have been “washed clean” of the past, stop looking for greatness in someone?
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It is a fascinating premise, though not a particularly dramatic one. Coetzee is known for his spare prose, which highlights beautifully all the excesses of power about which he writes so often and so intensely. But in this new novel, his brief, clinically precise sentences only draw more attention to the tediousness of a peaceful, but inefficient, vegetarian and sexless world. Still, his great talent has always been to make the reader (or this reader, at least) feel as though he is writing for her alone, challenging her to ask herself the same questions he puts to his characters.
After a mishap at work, a mishap caused by his own desire for more efficiency, Simón is taken to the hospital for a few days. His spirits are low, and he complains to a co-worker: “Something is missing, Eugenio. I know it should not be so, but it is. The life I have is not enough for me. I wish someone, some saviour, would descend from the skies and wave a magic wand and say, Behold, read this book and all your questions will be answered.”
There is, of course, no such book in Novilla. In this best of all possible worlds, there are answers for everything, except for the most important of questions. Still, that doesn’t stop Simón from looking. Even in a society where no one is marked for greatness, Coetzee suggests, we would seek out someone greater than us—a savior. Perhaps we would find that greatness in a child and, before long, endow it with dominion over us and indulge all its desires, whether noble or not so noble. Imagine that.
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