I discovered J.M. Coetzee late in life even though some of his novels had been lying on my bookcase for quite some time. It so happened that I accidentally came across Disgrace (1999) while I was looking for works which had been awarded the prestigious Booker Prize and which I could not peruse due to a variety of reasons. I confess that I was equally happy to find Anita Brookner’s Hotel du lac (1984) among these books. J.M. Coetzee first came within my notice way back in 1975. His first work of fiction Dusklands had come out of press the previous year.
The more I delved into his world the more I discovered that J.M Coetzee’s novels “are dense and filled with philosophical awareness of the plight of people living under oppressive circumstances”. Nevertheless, it is worth going through them because, despite everything, they do not depict a dismal vision of human life though they do not celebrate it either. Over the years many critics have taken an interest in his works and have expressed their appreciation thereof in uncertain terms.
The Arid South African Landscape
John Michael Coetzee was born in Cape Town on February 9, 1940. His grandparents were farmers who descended from a long line of White Afrikaners who had immigrated to South Africa in the seventeenth century. His father was an attorney, while his mother worked as a schoolteacher. He grew up in or around the Karoo desert which was to provide him with “many observations of the arid South African landscape” which find expression in his novels. In his book about Coetzee which bears the evocative title Countries of the Mind (1989), Allen Richard Prenner mentions that “the author spoke English at home and, after attending various English-language schools, also became knowledgeable in Afrikaans, Dutch and several other languages”.
His intelligence is reflected in his academic degrees, as well as in his publications in a variety of disciplines. He was awarded two bachelor of arts degrees, one in English and the other in mathematics from the University of Cape Town. In 1963, he also received an M.A in English from the same University. After his studies he joined the private sector in England.
In 1965, he started to work on his doctoral thesis at the University of Texas, Austin, under a Fulbright Scholarship. His dissertation was on Samuel Beckett. Even before the presentation of his thesis, he was offered a teaching position at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo in 1968.
Dusklands, his first novel, was published in 1974. It was followed by In Search of the Country which was awarded the South African Central News Agency (CNA) Award and the Mofolo-Plomer Prize. Both novels rely on first-person perspectives to convey the manner in which “the country has dehumanized its inhabitants”. The novels that followed also won critical acclaim for their portrayals of “introspective characters living in South Africa at various historical periods”.
1980 saw the publication of Waiting for the Barbarians, an allegorical account of the success of a ruling Empire, which also won the South African CAN Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. The enigmatic Life and Times of Michael K. (1983), with echoes of Fratz Kafka The Trial (1937), won two awards, the prestigious Booker- Mc Connel Prize from Britain in 1983 and the French prize, Prix Fémina Étranger in 1985. For his achievements, Coetzee received the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society in 1987.
Foe, a version of the Robinson Crusoe narrative by Daniel Defoe, was published in 1986. The Age of Iron followed in 1990. The two novels are narrated by women characters who, as their stories are progressively revealed, become deeply troubled and affected by their respective societies.
A Prolific Scholar
In addition to writing novels, Coetzee is a prolific scholar who has published essays on continental writers like Samuel Beckett, Fyodor Dostoevski, Leo Tolstoy, Fratz Kafka and Vladimir Nabokov. He has also written articles on Yvonne Burgess, Alex La Guma and Sidney Clouts.
More notable perhaps are his nonliterary essays which deal more specifically with his training in linguistics and mathematics. His numerous literary articles have appeared in noted journals like “PMLA”, “Comparative literature and Critique”, Yale University published his collection of essays, White Writing: On the Culture of letters in South Africa, which examines the literary production of his native country. The essays are as much a historical view of South African literature as they are political perspectives of those who write under a restrictive regime.
Coetzee’s novels are sometimes criticized for not taking a more overt stance against the commitment of South Africa to racist regime. Unlike Nadine Gordimer, the white South African writer, who has more directly reflected the political circumstances of the country in her novels, Coetzee has opted for a markedly different literary approach. Instead of holding a mirror to the devastation of South African politics in his novels, Coetzee has created fictional characters who express a wide spectrum of physical, emotional and psychological experiences. Very often the novels are construed from interior monologues in which the narrator appears to be speaking to himself or herself. The specifics of historical time and space are inferred from the characters’ plight. Coetzee allows the personalized experiences to speak the “truth” of the social and cultural situations.
Dusklands, a two-part novel, comprises two “reports” on the warfare the government has waged against civilians. The first report is narrated by Eugene Dawn, a specialist for the United States military, who is making a report to a supervisor named Coetzee on war against the North Vietnamese in the twentieth century. The second part is written by Jocobus Coetzee in the eighteenth century and it is translated by a Dr. S.J. Coetzee. By naming the supervisor of the first part and the narrator and translator of the second part, after his own name J.M. Coetzee “seems to be making an indictment against the white settlers who, centuries earlier, had migrated to South Africa”.
Isolation from Other People
The narrator of In the Heart of the Country, records her observations in the form of a journal. As the events emerge, there are apparent inconsistencies, which provide the reader with the essential clue to the ways in which isolation from other people might direct the narrator to behave in a different manner.
The theme of human isolation also appears in Waiting for the Barbarians. The Magistrate, like Coetzee’s other characters, is an introspective narrator who seems pitted against a variety of circumstances over which he has little control. Under the Magistrate’s watchful eye, the war between the unnamed Empire and the natives or barbarians (as the Empire refers to them) unfolds, and, as he observes, the Magistrate begins to sympathize more and more with the victims of the regime.
Coetzee’s novels always seem to provide two sides of the issue, as they focus on the cruelty all human beings seem capable of against one another. There are times when people opt to disappear from society altogether. This appears to be the case with the main character, a gardener named Michael, in Life and Times of Michael K. From birth, Michael is an outcast who spends his childhood in an orphanage.
Human survival is an important theme in Coetzee’s next two novels. Foe is narrated by the survivor, Susan Barton, who from a capsized ship went to a desolate island inhabited by Cruso (in contrast to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe) and Friday. She wants to survive so as to write about the experience. She returns to England with the mute Friday. There, he confronts the writer Daniel Foe and seeks his help to enable her to relate what occurred on the island.
In Age of Iron, Mrs. Currens tells her daughter who resides in America the story of a vagabond, Vercueil, who appears at her home one fine day. Mrs. Currens and Vercueil become involved in unravelling the murder of two young black boys in one of the townships.
What It Means to be Human
In Disgrace which was hailed as “a great novel by one of the finest authors writing in the English language today” by The Times, Coetzee “explores the furthest reaches of what it means to be human”. After years teaching Romantic poetry, David Lurie, middle-aged and twice divorced, has an impulsive affair with a student. He is willing to admit his guilt but refuses to repent publicity. He resigns and retreats to his daughter Lucy’s isolated smallholding. For a time, his daughter’s influence and the natural rhythms of the farm promise to harmonise his discordant life but he and Lucy become victims of a savage and disturbing attack which brings into relief all the weaknesses in their relationship.
Coetzee never allows his readers to forget that all existence comprises positive and negative acts. The novels are at times difficult to grasp because the subject matter and the characters that inhabit the devastated worlds do not lend themselves to easy simplification. Some of the situations he depicts highlight the drama of the existentialist dilemma we are confronted with in life.
Mithyl Banymandhub
Bibliography
- Ward, David. “J.M. Coetzee”. In Chronicles of Darkness. London Routledge and Keegan, Paul, 1989.
- White, Landeg, and Tim Couzens, eds. Literature and Society in South Africa. Longman, 1984.
- Wong, Cynthia. J.M. Coetzee. New York: Marshall Cavendish Corporation, 1983.