J.M Coetzee

 

John Michael Coetzee, winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize for literature, was also the first author to win the Booker Prize twice: in 1983 for Life and Times of Michael K. and in 1999 for Disgrace. Both novels, although very different, show Coetzee's interest in exploring the common ground between the personal and the political, and the devastating effects the bigger social picture can have on individual lives.

 

Coetzee is a South African author, English is not his first language (although it was his mother's language) In this respect he has something in common with the British author of Polish origin Joseph Conrad, and the American author of Russian origin, Vladimir Nabokov. Like them, he became a master of style in an acquired language. His decision to write in English rather than Afrikaans came partly through education, and partly through his awareness that English, with its rich literary history and wide usage, opens doors to thematic inter-culturalism.

Coetzee's novels frequently establish dialogues with various historical ages and territories. In Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), the imaginary setting and time, filtering reality through allegory, clearly allude to the racist South Africa of which he has first-hand experience, and which is the main focus of his writing. Similarly, although the setting of Life and Times of Michael K. (1983) is unspecified, the novel tells the story of a group of characters living at the time of the fall of the apartheid regime. For the young gardener Michael K., who takes his mother back home through a country devastated by war, her death on the journey is a more overwhelming tragedy than the brutal macrocosm in which he lives could ever be.

Coetzee's novels are replete with complex intertextual allusions, and an omnipresent metafictional commentary which won't let us forget that he is also a professor of literature. In Foe (1987) and The Master of Petersburg (1994), he establishes stylistic dialogues with Defoe and Dostoevsky, his favourite authors, on whose work he draws heavily. Historical allusion is used on the level of form as well as content, as Coetzee reads the contemporary human condition through postmodern stylistic pastiche.

 

 Disgrace, Coetzee's most famous novel, and the most powerful on apartheid, dispenses with the refined erudition of earlier novels and presents difficult issues, such as cross-racial and intra-racial relations through the personal experience of the characters. The blurred distinction between the conflicts to which such issues give rise reinforces the awareness that there is no way to exclude historical and political forces from the private lives of individuals.

In Disgrace, before facing the shock of his daughter Lucy's rape by three black men. Professor David Lurie has himself committed a comparable moral transgression. The action which triggers his dismissal from the Cape Town Technical University, his affair with a student, makes him guilty not only of a loss of a sense of reality, an attempt to conflate real life and the work of Romantic poets which he teaches and writes about, but also of taking advantage of his privileged position as a professor.

 

Having lost his university job, Lurie finds refuge with his daughter, at her farm in Salem, Eastern Cape. In this forsaken place he discovers new meanings to existence, as he contemplates the similarities between human destiny and that of the dogs which, at the vet clinic. Lucy's best friend Bev Shaw puts to sleep when they can no longer be saved.


Coetzee's intention in Disgrace was not to write a political manifesto, but to portray a real life experience which, even if atypical, presents an optimistic view of the future of a country long divided by conflict. It can be read as an alternative way to express the damage done, by prejudice, to people's lives. Happiness may come from the satisfaction of being able to put an end to suffering, as Bev Shaw does for the dogs. But apart from death, Coetzee seems to say, there are few absolute truths.

Elizabeth Costello (2004) seems to mark a return to the intellectual sophistication of Coetzee's earlier work, and a setting aside of his commitment to the South African arena. With its biographical and philosophical over tones the novel challenges its own status as a novel, by breaking through the boundaries of the genre with bursts of complex intellectual discourse. There are many similarities between the heroine and her author: a reluctance to accept literary celebrity and its world of false self-appraisal, and a fear of prejudice, of fixed beliefs that will not lend themselves to change. A plea for thinking and open-mindedness, this novel is ultimately, faithful to Coetzee's overriding philosophy that prejudice is the most serious danger humanity has to face.