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There remains the
matter of getting past
Coetzee.
- ‘Dusklands’ (1974)
December 28, 2012 5:12 pm
Bodley Head/FT Essay PrizeBy Hedley Twidle
A winning piece written by a South African academic working in the shadow of the Booker-winning
author
There is an odd made-for-television documentary from 1997 which shows footage of JM Coetzee conducting a
guided tour of Cape Town’s southern suburbs. From the slopes of Table Mountain he points out the hospital
where he was born; the suburb of Plumstead where he lived as a young boy; the university campus where he
spent much of his academic career. A colleague recalls how Coetzee would not take calls from the Booker prize
committee because he was invigilating undergraduate exams: a measure of his professionalism. We visit his
Standard Three classroom at Rosebank Primary and the grassy common where he participated in school sports
days. He recalls taking gold in the running backwards race of 1948, as if enjoying a wry joke at the expense of
anyone who thought that such an exercise might grant some privileged insight into his work.
Ten years ago, I was commissioned by a famous poet-editor to write a profile of Coetzee for a London review. At the time, the offer was a
big break, and could have led to great things. I was fresh out of university and the editor was a high-up at Faber and Faber, a talent scout
for The New Yorker. But it never got written.
Instead of providing a controlled and judicious survey of the oeuvre, I found myself obsessed by minor details on the outskirts of his work.
The grim memoir Youth (2002) had just appeared and I wrote at length about the stockings full of clotting cheese that young “John”
hangs up in his kitchen – proof of his extreme thriftiness, in life as in prose. The fish fingers that he fries in olive oil in a London garret,
trying to emulate the Mediterranean diet of Ford Madox Ford: these finer points of domestic economy seemed laden with meaning.
And what did the two brooding initials say about his relation to high modernism, I wondered? To the T and
S of Eliot, the F and R of Leavis, the D and H of Lawrence? What did the “M” stand for anyway? Was it
Maxwell? Like Dylan refusing to sign autographs in the Pennebaker documentary, Coetzee had point-blank
refused to answer this question when interviewed. I combed obscure academic journals for more of these
duels, rejoicing in how he would not play the celebrity author game. The journalist Rian Malan described
how Coetzee wrote each question down on a notepad and methodically analysed the assumptions on which it
was based, “a process that offered some sharp insights into my intellectual shortcomings but revealed
nothing about Coetzee himself ... ‘What kind of music do you like?’ I asked, desperately. The pen scratched,
the great writer cogitated. ‘Music I have never heard before.’”
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… their talk, their
excessive talk, about
how they love South
Africa has consistently
been directed toward
the land, that is, toward
what is least likely to
respond to love:
mountains and deserts,
birds and animals and
flowers.
- Jerusalem Prize acceptance
speech (1987)
I have never seen
anything like it: two little
discs of glass
suspended in front of his
eyes in loops of
wire.
- ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’
(1980)
‘Hero and Bad
Mother in Epic, a poem’
the matriarch of
melancholy sleeps in the
tidal casino the
poisoned philatelist
gropes through its
symmetries his search
is perplexed where is
the seaborn matriarch?
without the seaborn
matriarch where is the
lucky fiction?in the final
symmetry of the casino
of solitude the poisoned
vegetable mounts the
sleeping matriarch
- JM Coetzee, Staffrider (March
1978)
Sometimes, as he
walked, he did not know
whether he was awake
or asleep. He could
understand that people
should have retreated
here and fenced
themselves in with miles
and miles of silence; he
could understand that
they should have wanted
to bequeath the privilege
of so much silence to
their children and
grandchildren in
perpetuity (though by
The Nobel Prize came and went; the time was ripe for a penetrating summation
of (what I should have deemed) “the major phase” – from Waiting for the
Barbarians (1980) through to Disgrace (1999) – followed by some measured
demurrals regarding the obtrusive postmodernism of “late Coetzee”, from
Elizabeth Costello (2003) onwards. But, in fact, all the assignment resulted in
was a series of politely worded rejection emails spanning several years. The
editor didn’t understand why I had spent quite so long speculating on the anal
carbuncle that plagues the murderous frontiersman Jacobus Coetzee in
Dusklands (1974). The pages and pages devoted to analysing Coetzee’s early,
algorithm-generated poetry were intriguing (he wrote), but perhaps only to the
specialist. It was somewhere at the edge of Lake Malawi, during an episode of
heatstroke on a long-distance cycling trip (made in honour of the Master of Cape
Town) that I finally gave up trying to explain what JM Coetzee meant to me.
This was a novelist who – and I had known this from the
opening lines of Waiting for the Barbarians, my first
exposure – was simply operating at (the only way I can
describe it) a higher pressure than any other from my native
land, that country “as irresistible as it is unlovable” – South
Africa. But this pressure – the pressure of a toxic history
that went far back before 1948, and would last for long after
1994 – was registered in a prose of negative space. While
other anti-apartheid writers turned up the heat, Coetzee lowered the temperature
until (to borrow from Seamus Heaney on the Polish poets) it began to burn, like the
strand of a metal fence gripped in winter.
This was a critic who had said everything about everything, with greater economy and less sentimentality
than anyone else (I couldn’t even look at a mountain or a desert or a bird or an animal or a flower without
his words getting in the way). Who had been (as Eliot said the artist should be) heterodox when everyone
else was orthodox, and orthodox when everyone else was heterodox. Who had, in fact, described the horizon
of my thought for my twenties; whose cycling clips I was not even worthy of attaching; whom I desperately
wanted to get past, even though the very idea of getting past Coetzee had already been anticipated in his
debut effort (damn him!).
...
Ten years later, I find myself a lecturer at the English Department of the University of Cape Town, in the very
corridors where Coetzee taught and wrote for so many years. His pigeonhole lingers on, even though he has
long since left for Australia, living out his eminent life under the bluegums near Adelaide. There are Coetzee
seminars and study groups, Coetzee research clusters and Coetzee collectives. There are posters of him tacked
on to doors: Malan’s “crocodile-eyed genius” stares out from New York Review of Books caricatures and the
occasional photographic portrait: the small mouth, the handsome, slightly lopsided face.
Droves of students arrive from Wisconsin and Ohio to spend a term abroad, filling
the Coetzee sign-up lists, while classes on new directions in post-apartheid poetry or
fictions of the Zimbabwean diaspora languish unattended. A steady stream of PhDs
and post-docs arrive from York, Auckland, Vienna, Granada and Oslo, ready to
present their work in progress.
During a conference last year, I was asked by a visiting academic from Bangalore to
take a picture of him standing at the lectern where JM used to teach, as if it were a
tourist snap in front of the Little Mermaid. The same lecture theatre – wooden,
antique, hidden in the middle of the ivy-clad Arts block – had been used in the
filming of Disgrace (2008). Our head of department (my boss) landed a role as an
extra, listening to David Lurie (John Malkovich) as he pronounces on Wordsworth’s
Prelude (while really ogling his student Melanie). But she (my boss) was caught
carrying a copy of the novel in shot – the Vintage edition with the mangy dog on the
cover. The director (Australian) deemed her a postmodern agitator and banned her
from the set. (Malkovich, though, was most impressed and invited her to brunch with him.)
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what right he was not
sure); he wondered
whether there were not
forgotten corners and
angles and corridors
between the fences,
land that belonged to no
one yet.
- ‘Life & Times of Michael K’ (1983)
THE WINNER
Hedley Twidle, 32, was born in
Johannesburg. He studied in
KwaZulu-Natal, then at Oxford and
York, and lived for several years in
Edinburgh before taking up a post as
lecturer in English at the University of
Cape Town. Between 2007 and
2012, Twidle worked on the
Cambridge History of South African
Literature, published this year. At the
moment he is teaching and thinking
about life-writing, essays and literary
non-fiction in Africa. More of his
writing can be found at
www.seapointcontact.wordpress.com.
Nevertheless he
fulfils to the letter his
obligations toward them,
their parents, and the
state. Month after month
he sets, collects, reads,
and annotates their
assignments, correcting
lapses in punctuation,
spelling and usage,
interrogating weak
arguments, appending
to each paper a brief,
considered critique.
Since Coetzee lodged his manuscripts in Harvard and now Texas, we have learnt that he wrote his major novels
almost entirely in University of Cape Town examination books. They have dull orange covers with instructions
printed on them: “Peak caps to be reversed”; “Answer only ONE question per booklet”. Recently I invigilated
an exam on his work, striding up the aisles, doling out extra books to diligent students who raised their hands.
But, of course, it is the less diligent answers that stay with you. Taking home a stack of scripts to mark, I read a
long account of how the protagonist of Life and Times of Michael K (1983) – the silent and harelipped gardener
of Coetzee’s greatest, most flawed work – had refused to join the “gorilla” fighters during the civil war, had
defended his pumpkin seedlings from the “gorillas”. Magnificent, in its way – a clear First.
Another candidate (who had obviously only ever listened to lectures) wrote a whole essay about “James
Coetzee”. James Coetzee – what total and pristine ignorance! How impressive, somehow, that this student had
contrived never even to see the Nobel laureate’s name in print. I gave the essay an A+, just for so totally entering into the spirit of the text
and its postliterate protagonist. It was 2am and I was going a bit mad. I found myself writing careful and lengthy critiques at the end of
each script, marginal comments that nobody would ever read – it seemed appropriately Coetzeean.
In his life of VS Naipaul, Patrick French remarked that it might be “the last literary biography to
be written from a complete paper archive”. I sense something similarly historical about
Coetzee’s achievement, a power of pre-internet concentration and application that has now been
eroded in Version 2.0 people. A mental discipline that can stay trained on things for longer than
other minds, without flinching; that can push thoughts, or sentences, one step further than they
would normally go.
A quality of, in a word, seriousness. Coetzee says somewhere or other that, for a certain kind of
artist, seriousness is an ethical imperative. So why do I find myself wanting to be so unserious in
his august presence? To dwell on all those things that cannot be related in the polite literary
profile, or the rigorous academic paper. Such as: what does it mean to be obsessed, perhaps
unhealthily obsessed, with an author? And: why don’t black South Africans read or talk about
Coetzee? And: why am I beginning to think that his work should not be taught at the University
of Cape Town – or at least that a 10-year moratorium on Coetzee studies should be declared?
The first answer to the last question is: because Coetzee is too
teachable. Or at least a version of Coetzee that has nothing to do with
the real Coetzee (I sound like a music snob who discovered a band
before it was famous). But seriously: the work lends itself easily,
perhaps too easily, to academic explication. The South African poet
Basil du Toit wrote that when you bite into a piece of fruit these days,
“you find that it has been half-expecting you”. Coetzee’s books have
the same GM quality for the literary scholar: they were clearly au
fait with various strands of theory during the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s,
leaving little Hansel and Gretel crumbs behind them, leading critics
on like the Pied Piper.
Malan described Coetzee in crocodilian terms; for the poet Breyten
Breytenbach he was more like a bird in dense undergrowth: “one
hears his allegorical song during certain seasons, but never sees him”.
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- ‘Disgrace’ (1999)
Interviewer: Would
you like to comment
further on the
importance which you
attach to the notion of
resistance? Coetzee: I
hope that a certain spirit
of resistance is
ingrained in my books;
ultimately I hope they
have the strength to
resist whatever readings
I impose on them on
occasions like the
present.
- Tony Morphet, “Tw o Interview s
w ith JM Coetzee, 1983 and 1987”
from TriQuarterly (1987)
JM Coetzee signs the authors' door of the Ransom
Center, University of Texas, May 2010
He has long ceased
to be surprised at the
range of ignorance of
his students. Post-
Christian, posthistorical,
postliterate, they might
as well have been
hatched from eggs
yesterday.
- ‘Disgrace’ (1999)
“To speak of this” – I
waved a hand over the
bush, the smoke, the filth
littering the path – “You
would need the tongue
of a god.” “This woman
talks shit” said a man in
Typically though, the best animal metaphor for describing Coetzee was coined by Coetzee himself: when the
crazed spinster Magda of In the Heart of the Country (1977) compares herself to a hermit crab. An apt totem
for a writer who inhabits and then abandons the shell of various genres: the explorer’s diary, the story of an
African farm, the confession, the campus novel. When teaching Coetzee, the result is a kind of airlessness, or redundancy. He has not only
provided the novels, but the secondary readings too. It all comes as a total, all-too-teachable package; a whole literary-critical
paraphernalia, which you then assemble together in class like a Lego set.
How canny of him to rewrite Robinson Crusoe like that, with a tongueless Man Friday and a female narrator. Wasn’t a book like Foe
(1986) just made to slot into a thousand postcolonial/feminist course outlines on “Rewriting the Canon”, alongside Wide Sargasso Sea and
Things Fall Apart? How methodical he had been in his assault on the Nobel – the novels, the serious essays about Kafka, Robert Musil and
the Russians, the measured not-quite memoirs – how strategic. Bravo JM!
But this is not really true, or fair, and not really the reason why I am becoming allergic to teaching Him. Some
books may smell of the seminar room (particularly the Australian ones), but the oeuvre goes far beyond this.
PhD students will no doubt go on following the crumbs, but the theory (if I can switch metaphors) was just the
ladder that he climbed up and kicked away from under him; in the same way that his training in mathematics
and linguistics (he said) allowed him to think thoughts that he would otherwise not have been able to access.
This is the odd quality about Coetzee’s books. They are at the same time both highly abstract – artificial,
allegorical, self-conscious – and shockingly actual. Just when the Marxists were taking aim at him for not being
sufficiently engagé (one hot-under-the-collar critic even accusing him of providing little more than “a kind of
masturbatory release, in this country, for the Europeanising dreams of an intellectual coterie”), he delivered
Age of Iron (1990) – perhaps the most scorching account of South Africa during the late-apartheid states of
emergency ever written. And think of that moment when the inscrutable vagrant Vercueil responds to one of
the narrator’s cerebral tirades by gobbing a big lump of phlegm – “thick, yellow, streaked with brown from the
coffee” – on to the pavement in front of her. For all their intellectualism and abstruse methods, they restore us
to the real; we come back to the material world with a jolt.
I see this strange doubleness play out in my desire to make little literary pilgrimages to various sites in Cape
Town, even while knowing how ridiculous this is. Coetzee’s entire oeuvre works against the kind of sentimental
attachment to place implied by the Dickens walking tour of London, or the Ulysses pub-crawl of Dublin.
Nonetheless, I cannot but help recall: the “dim agapanthus walks” where Michael K goes about his gardening in
De Waal Park; the gated Greenpoint complexes where Lurie meets the escort Soraya for their
weekly appointment – “like the copulation of snakes: lengthy, absorbed, but rather abstract”;
the underpass on Buitenkant Street where Mrs Curren collapses in Age of Iron, street children
poking sticks into her mouth to check for gold teeth.
Further down Buitenkant is more evidence to suggest that he is
widely read beyond the corridors of academe. In the Book Lounge on
Roeland Street – Cape Town’s best bookshop – there are no works by
Coetzee on the shelves. A little sign tells you to ask at the counter, as
if for 19th-century pornography. Coetzee, the staff informed me, is a
regularly shoplifted author. This makes him part of an exclusive club
that includes William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Gabriel García
Márquez ... and Paulo Coelho. Those manning flea-market stalls at
Greenmarket Square know that these literary goods can be shifted
quickly (and I am pretty sure that it is not only the exchange
students from Wisconsin who are buying). It is the same kind of back-
handed compliment paid to Salman Rushdie when pirate booksellers
in Mumbai sent him greetings cards in appreciation for all the money
they made from Midnight’s Children.
Perhaps you might say that my reluctance to teach Coetzee is just petulance and possessiveness: resentment at
having “my Coetzee” interrupted and interfered with by the world out there (the barbarians). When you feel
that a writer is talking just to you, with special insights into your cultural formation, you don’t want to be
reminded that thousands of other people (American people, Australian people) feel the same way. But it is
more than this: an anxiety that the meanings of these texts – wild, fickle, unmanageable – might solidify, might
coagulate for ever.
To lecture on the books, to hear yourself say the same things about them from year
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the crowd. He looked
around. “Shit” he said.
No one contradicted
him. Already some were
drifting away.
- ‘Age of Iron’ (1990)
As a writer I am not
worthy to loose the
latchet on Kafka’s
shoe.
- ‘Doubling the Point: Essays and
Interview s’ (1992)
That was my great
ambition: to have my
place on the shelves of
the British Museum,
rubbing shoulders with
the other Cs, the great
ones: Carlyle and
Chaucer and Coleridge
and Conrad. (The joke is
that my closest literary
neighbour turned out to
be Marie Corelli.)
- Elizabeth Costello’ (2003)
... the Coetzees,
drinking tea and
gossiping on the
farmhouse stoep, are
like swallows, seasonal,
here today, gone
tomorrow, or even like
sparrows, chirping, light-
footed, shortlived.
- ‘Boyhood’ (1997)
As time goes by we
drift away from the great
texts, the finished works
on which an author’s
reputation is built,
towards the journals,
diaries, letters,
manuscripts, jottings.
This is not simply
because, as an author’s
stature grows
posthumously, the fund
of published texts
becomes exhausted ... It
is also because we want
to get nearer to the man
or woman who wrote
these books, to his or
her being. We crave an
to year – it becomes a kind of horror. Do I even want to reread the books of the
“major phase”? Tackle Barbarians again? Not really. The meanings of Coetzee to
me now reside in all the odd details, offcuts and out-takes that I have tried to
enumerate in this essay. So I hope that all this is coming from a deeper, more
interesting problem: one that arises when the obsessive-compulsive, often childlike
and bizarre relations we have with the one or two authors that really (if I can
breathe life into this old cliché) mean the world to us must be disciplined,
formalised, professionalised.
And let’s be honest and say how bizarre these relations can be. In Nicholson Baker’s
U & I (1991), he at one point takes his chronic eczema as proof of kinship with his
hero John Updike, a fellow sufferer. He scratches and scratches in an orgy of
identification with his literary subject. In Geoff Dyer’s book about failing to write a book about DH Lawrence,
Out of Sheer Rage (1997), he burns a copy of the Longman Critical Reader about his hero, given to him by
some well-wisher who hears that he is “working on Lawrence”. Over its smoking ashes he asks a question that
all literary scholars should put to themselves on a daily basis: “How can you know anything about literature if
all you’ve done is read books?”
Let me confess now what went through my mind as I watched that 1997 footage of JM striding over his school
sportsfield. He was walking away from the camera and I found myself thinking: right, in a few seconds he is
going to have to expose his trousered backside. He will have to reveal those skinny shanks that were mentioned
in Youth, those glutei maximi that one of my colleagues (also an avid cyclist) had described seeing so many
times sheathed in Lycra, accelerating away in the early morning training run. But no! Coetzee was wearing a
low-cut linen jacket that reached down just far enough to cover that sensitive area: his buttocks remained
inscrutable. Standard-issue academic gear, of course. But that is the kind of level it gets to, as we review a
writer’s life for clues about how to live our own. And that is why I was wearing a low-cut linen jacket while
invigilating that exam, handing out the answer booklets, trying to be professional.
Excuse the frenetic tone, but time is running out. Two biographies are
forthcoming; one, by the late JC Kannemeyer, has already been published
in South Africa and Australia. My Coetzee – already threatened by all the
foreign students writing made-to-measure papers about the Ethics of the
Other (or the Otherness of the Ethical) – is about to expire, to be
dismantled by brute biographical fact. For years I have been deliberately
avoiding a physical sighting of him (even while looking for his tracks and traces everywhere I go). I
have taken evasive action so as not to meet him in person – I live in fear of (as happened to my boss)
bumping into him in a campus car park. But Teju Cole has posted photographs of himself with
Coetzee on Facebook – the end of an era. There is less and less space to make the writer (who makes us) what we need him or her to be:
mother, father, sibling, mentor, censor, fall-guy, straw-man, drudge, rival ...
So permit me one final detour, in which I will try to be serious – or at least serious
about my reasons for being unserious. In an early essay on “Idleness in South
Africa” (1982), Coetzee examines how early European mariners and colonists at the
Cape of Good Hope described the “Hottentots” that they encountered there – the
indigenous, nomadic, pastoral bands now called the Khoikhoi. Few peoples were so
extensively described, and vilified, during the European voyages of discovery. Their
complex click language, their practice of smearing animal fat on their bodies, the
different rhythm of their lives – all these were condemned as evidence of idleness,
incomprehensibility, barbarity.
In immaculately scholarly fashion, Coetzee shows how the categories and criteria
were European constructions, a matrix of cultural codes that worked to justify the
colonial argument that only those who worked the land had a right to it. So far, so
familiar. But then, crucially, he pushes his thought one step further. Written in hindsight from our all-knowing
position, such postcolonial revisitings of the colonial record can mislead us. For “in the very open-mindedness
we might like to imagine extending toward the Hottentot from the modern science of Man,” Coetzee writes,
“lies the germ of an insidious betrayal of the Hottentot”. Some things should properly remain opaque to us:
historically distant, recalcitrant, misunderstood.
I want to wrench this idea totally out of context and apply it to Coetzee’s own work: to sympathise too readily
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increasingly intimate
relationship with the
author, unmediated, in
so far as possible, by
the contrivances of art. A
curious reversal takes
place. The finished
works serve as prologue
to the jottings; the
published book
becomes a stage to be
passed through – a draft
– en route to the
definitive pleasure of the
notes, the fleeting
impressions, the
sketches, in which it had
its origin.
- Geoff Dyer, ‘Out of Sheer Rage’
(1997)
with his writing is to betray it. His writing has bred armies of apologists, explicators, imitators – all of them
following his highly serious lead. But the real task is to read and write against him as strongly as possible:
flippantly and unseriously. For our visitors from Wisconsin (and many other people abroad, I fear) Coetzee is
South African literature. But even though he was so right about the place, he was also so very wrong. What you
don’t find in his writing is the beauty of South Africa’s many Englishes, its humour and music, its body language
and tawdry brand names, its comedy and its soap operas (political and otherwise). The fact that it is a spoken,
rather than a written place; an outward place, and (the odd thing, given its history) a generous one, where
things are thrashed out in dialogues with others, rather than selves.
An earlier, Norwegian version of this essay appeared in the literary journal Bokvennen