But Diary of a Bad Year marks a shift to Rothian procedures. "Señor C" is only what Anya, who mistakenly thinks he's South American, calls her employer. He signs his letter "JC," and Alan tauntingly calls him "Juan." "John C.," then, halfway toward his creator's "John Maxwell Coetzee." The parallels multiply. JC, like JMC, is a divorced South African novelist, critic and retired professor of literature living in Australia. JC, like JMC, has written many volumes, including a novel called Waiting for the Barbarians and, in the 1990s, a book on censorship. Both men gave a speech in 2005 at the National Library of Australia denouncing the new security legislation, and both were taken to task by the Australian, a Murdoch broadsheet. But there are differences. JMC was born in 1940, JC in 1934. JMC has had two children and lives with his partner. JC is childless and alone. JMC is a Nobel laureate and the only writer to win two Bookers. JC has "a modest reputation."

JC, then, both is and is not J.M. Coetzee, even closer to his creator than Nathan Zuckerman is to Philip Roth. In particular, he seems to represent the ascetic, taciturn, publicity-averse Coetzee's self-conception or inner reality: a little older than he actually is, a lot more solitary, not nearly as big a deal. So, are those "strong opinions," which make up the largest share of the novel and give the chapters their titles ("On democracy," "On intelligent design," "On Tony Blair"), Coetzee's own? Again, yes and no. The whole question of what it means to have opinions, of the relationship one has to one's opinions, is something Coetzee has been wrestling with for a long time, most conspicuously in Elizabeth Costello. There's a reason that book, for all its engagement with issues like animal rights and the responsibilities of art, is a novel about a writer who delivers lectures, not the lectures of a writer. "I have beliefs," its protagonist says, "but I do not believe in them." Opinions, for Elizabeth Costello and in Elizabeth Costello, are not positions but hypotheses, poetic ideas, arrived at more through the empathetic processes of storytelling than the logical procedures of reason. "She hates sentences that hinge on because," the narrator says. "The jaws of the trap snap shut, but the mouse, every time, has escaped."

It is a very modern thing, this business of having opinions, a need compounded of Protestant individualism and electoral democracy. It is only modern personalities who struggle to develop opinions that are correct and well informed, who define themselves and measure others by the opinions they hold, who read journals of opinion like this one. (I have a friend whose immigrant grandmother wanted to introduce her to a young man. "He's like you," the old woman said. "He's got a lot of opinions.") This "rise of opinions" can be traced across the literature of the last several hundred years. It makes itself felt in Middlemarch, for example, and in the difference between Mrs. Wilcox and the Schlegel sisters in Howards End. If it has a single point of origin, it is Montaigne, whose essays are Coetzee's clearest models in Diary of a Bad Year.

Coetzee's continuing examination of opinion-holding begins there with the tripartite division of the page, which, in the drama it embodies, enacts a kind of metaphysics of the self. At the top, the voice of analytical reason, authoritative, imperturbable, self-contained and utterly oblivious to what lies beneath it. Then, in the middle, the voice of emotion and need, vulnerable and confused, standing apart--literally, graphically--from these strong opinions. The ironies the juxtaposition creates are all too obvious, as Anya is happy to point out: "My guess is he unbuttons himself when I am gone and wraps himself in my undies and closes his eyes and summons up visions of my divine behind and makes himself come. And then buttons up and gets back to John Howard and George Bush, what villains they are." Opinions, in this view, are just a distraction from what's really going on, the animal making itself feel tall by getting up on its hind legs. Another way to put this is to see JC and Anya as together constituting an allegory of the self. If the text's upper registers represent the head and heart, Anya's voice, its lowermost stratum, represents her favorite body part, the bottom. Or more broadly, as in Rabelais and elsewhere, the body as such, with all its bawdiness, flagrant urges and wicked laughter--the part of himself that JC has lost touch with, the part that feels alien and even hostile to the pretensions of the opinion-making intellect. "His secret aria," Anya calls herself, punning on "segretaria." "His scary fairy."

Yet it is not finally JC's opinions that are being anatomized; it is Coetzee's. That is the ultimate significance of Anya's presence in the margins of these essays, this autobiographical fiction. JC is Coetzee, or a part of him, and so is Anya. If she weren't, he couldn't have brought her forth. "Writing is dialogic," Coetzee has said, "a matter of awakening the countervoices in oneself and embarking on speech with them." And that is exactly what arises, over time, between JC and Anya: a dialogue. At first, they can't even understand each other. He speaks his opinions into a tape recorder and she mishears him, returning transcripts that have "papers and papery" for "Papists and Popery" and "somewhere in the urinals" for "somewhere in the Urals." He thinks she's an ignorant child with her mind in the toilet; she, resenting his condescension, thinks he should write about something fun, like cricket. But gradually they begin to listen to each other. He even allows her to correct an idiomatic error: in Australia, she explains, it is not "talk radio" but "talkback radio." But when we'd come across the term several chapters earlier, it was already in the correct form, which means that that passage, and who knows how many others, already reflect her shaping presence. The phrases in question are emblematic: he talks to her, and she talks back. The "strong opinions" are Coetzee's, but they are conceived, as it were, collaboratively, the brainchild of his disparate voices.

All this helps explain why the essays Coetzee does publish under his own name are so much less interesting than the ones that appear in his novels. His latest collection, Inner Workings, gathers five years of literary criticism, most of it written for The New York Review of Books. Its twenty-one pieces, on a range of figures from, for the most part, the German and English cultural spheres--Robert Musil, Günter Grass, Graham Greene, Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer--are highly intelligent and formidably erudite, but they lack not only the imaginative engagement we might expect from the literary essays of a great novelist (and that we find so abundantly, for example, in Virginia Woolf's) but also the probing brilliance of Coetzee's early nonfiction, which was also much more wide-ranging in form, subject and idiom. The pieces in Inner Workings feel, above all, dutiful: a thumbnail biography, some notes on translation, a few pages of analytic summary, often illuminating, occasionally close to pedestrian, always reticent about passing judgment.

Not just dutiful: ostentatiously dutiful. Coetzee seems deliberately to frustrate our desire for rhetorical power and formal beauty, two qualities that literary criticism is capable of possessing in abundance, letting his essays peter out with a minor point or a few cavils about translation or a bibliographic note. If he seems to be writing criticism against his better judgment or at least against his inclination, that may be because he is. In Doubling the Point, which combined the early nonfiction with a series of searchingly self-analytic interviews, he complained about "the rather tight discourse of criticism." "If I were a truly creative critic," he went on, "I would work toward liberating that discourse--making it less monological, for instance. But the candid truth is I don't have enough of an investment in criticism to try."

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.