J.M. Coetzee's Austerities

Graham Bradshaw, Michael Neill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754668039
• eBook ISBN: 9781317111603
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Representing a wide range of critical and theoretical perspectives, this volume examines J.M. Coetzee's novels from Dusklands to Diary of a Bad Year. The choice of essays reflects three broad goals: aligning the South African dimension of Coetzee's writing with his "late modernist" aesthetic; exploring the relationship between Coetzee's novels and his essays on linguistics; and paying particular attention to his more recent fictional experiments. These objectives are realized in essays focusing on, among other matters, the function of names and etymology in Coetzee's fiction, the vexed relationship between art and politics in apartheid South Africa, the importance of film in Coetzee's literary sensibility, Coetzee's reworkings of Defoe, the paradoxes inherent in confessional narratives, ethics and the controversial politics of reading Disgrace, intertextuality and the fictional self-consciousness of Slow Man. Through its pronounced emphasis on the novelist's later work, the collection points towards a narrato-political and linguistic reassessment of the Coetzee canon.

Chapter 1
Coetzee’s Artists; Coetzee’s Art

Derek Attridge

So this is art, he thinks, and this is how it does its work! How strange! How fascinating!

(Coetzee, Disgrace, 185)

Although the question of art’s functions and responsibilities was at the centre of much debate during the apartheid years in South Africa, representations of artists are rare in the country’s fiction from this period. If characters with an artistic career are depicted, they are less likely to be painters or poets than journalists (like the would-be writer Mouse and her associates in Bessie Head’s The Cardinals (1995, but written 1960–62) or photographers (like the hero of Mandla Langa’s Tenderness of Blood (1987), committed to reflecting as directly as possible the injustices around them. One gets the strong sense that the lives and works of artists were not of commanding interest, and that the natural tendency for the writer to be concerned with his or her own profession, or its analogues in the other arts, was for the most part suppressed. There were, of course, exceptions, the most consistent probably being André Brink, who as a novelist and as a critic has, throughout his prolific career, been fascinated by the social and individual significance of story-telling. States of Emergency (1988) asks whether a love story can be responsibly written in a time of political crisis; The First Life of Adamastor (1993; Afrikaans version 1988) and On the Contrary (1993) continue this concern with the power of narrative in both its mythic and its literary forms. After the end of apartheid, Brink remained interested in the ways in which stories can both obscure and reveal the past – a topic given new urgency by the uncoverings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission – as evidenced by Imaginings of Sand (1996), Devil’s Valley (1998), The Other Side of Silence (2002) and Before I Forget (2004). There is an early example of a novel with a painter at the centre, Nadine Gordimer’s Occasion for Loving (1963), but not much is made of the fact that Gideon Shibalo is an artist other than the somewhat unusual lifestyle it allows him to adopt and the added interest it gives him as a character and an object of sexual passion. Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987) presents episodes in the life of a girl, then young woman, who by the end of the book has become a writer – the writer, it seems, of the earlier stories in the collection – but we learn little about this decision or what it entails beyond its impact on her immediate family.

Performers probably figure in fiction of this period more prominently than those who write, paint, sculpt or compose, especially when their lives are entwined with those of the community – examples would be the troupe of actors in Brink’s Looking on Darkness (1974) and Njabulo Ndebele’s descriptions of the ne’er-do-well Lovington’s trumpet-playing in his story “Uncle”. Interestingly, Ndebele includes a brief vignette of a visual artist in the story as well: “brother Mandla” draws Lovington in the act of playing, and the boy narrator, accustomed only to realistic representation, is surprised to see the distorted image he produces. But the collection in which “Uncle” appeared – Fools and Other Stories – was itself an exception in 1983, especially for a black writer: it turned away from scenes of racial conflict and political struggle to examine some of the trials and triumphs of daily township life. (And of course Ndebele himself argued influentially for a fiction of the ordinary.)1

Since the democratic elections of 1994, however, there has been a noticeable increase in depictions of artists, as if the lifting of the burden of apartheid and the obligation to deal with its daily ravages allowed writers greater freedom to turn, self-reflexively, to the production and purpose of art as issues worth pursuing in fiction. The result has not always been a happy one; Athol Fugard, for instance, who created some of the finest plays of the apartheid era, notably in collaboration with the Serpent Players, turned to sentimental rewritings of his own life as an author in Valley Song (1996), The Captain’s Tiger (1999), and Sorrows and Rejoicings (2002).

But other writers have been more inventive. In Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying (1995), the hero, Toloki, is not just a performer, offering his services as “Professional Mourner”, but a visual artist as well, winning a national art competition as a boy and helping to make the shack he builds with Noria, his childhood acquaintance, a colourful collage that would be “at home in any museum of modern art”2 – the shack that they then cover with beguiling images from Home and Garden magazines. But the role of art in this novel is not only to provide pleasure and solace in the midst of suffering; in Toloki’s father, Jwala the blacksmith, Mda gives us a less comprehensible and comforting image of the artist – a man whose iron figurines surprise even the creator himself and baffle those who see them. The ending of the novel leaves the significance and fate of these puzzling works of art, now bequeathed to Toloki, challengingly uncertain: they may be sold to an art dealer for a significant sum or kept to entertain local children. In The Madonna of Excelsior (2002), Mda again makes visual art a significant presence, mediating his narrative of the Free State village Excelsior from apartheid to democracy through descriptions of actual paintings by the Belgian-South African artist Frans Claerhout, and making visits to Claerhout’s studio an important part of the fictional life-story of the central characters Niki and Popi. Another fine writer who has turned his attention to the production and consumption of art in post-apartheid South Africa is Ivan Vladislavić. In one of the four stories that make up The Exploded View (2004), ‘Curiouser’, Vladislavić depicts a successful visual artist, Simeon Majara, who is caught in the compromising toils of the art market in a way that would have been highly unlikely – for a black artist – during the apartheid years. Vladislavić’s sardonic representation of the changed relation between art and politics reveals the newly complex context in which the artist has to work, now that the old simple binaries have disappeared.

Other indications of this turn in post-apartheid South African fiction would include the artists in two novels originally published in Afrikaans: Etienne van Heerden’s solitary sculptor Jonty Jack Bergh in The Long Silence of Mario Salviati (2002; first published as Die Swye van Mario Salviati, 2000), who is visited by a gallery curator anxious to purchase a mysterious piece called “The Staggering Merman” for her “rainbow” collection of contemporary South African art; and, in a very different key, Marlene van Niekerk’s epileptic Lambert Benade in Triomf (1994), who dedicates hours to painting and repainting an epic mural representing South Africa overlaid with many of his private demons. The figure of the writer comes to the fore in Zoë Wicomb’s complex novel David’s Story (2000), one of the most important post-apartheid novels, in which the narrator faces the task of piecing together – and elaborating on – the fragmentary details of an acquaintance’s experiences as a member of the ANC during the guerrilla campaign and then in the transitional period.

The most striking example of this shift is in J.M. Coetzee’s oeuvre, although it would be difficult in his case to ascribe it to an instrumental view of art challenged by the ending of apartheid. It is not surprising that Coetzee – one of the finest critics of South African literature in English and Afrikaans – should have raised in his fiction the question of the writer’s function and authority at a time when most other novelists in the country were concerned with questions of political and military power and resistance to it. I’m thinking in particular of Foe (1987), which goes back to the beginnings of the English novel to explore the processes whereby certain narratives become canonized while others fail to gain a foothold. But the eponymous writer in that novel, better known as Daniel Defoe, is an inscrutable figure we see from the outside; the novel’s focus is on Susan Barton’s attempt to gain access to the authority of authorship rather than on the author himself, and the writing for which he is known is understood as true reporting rather than fiction. Barton, too, is concerned with truth, not fiction, though one could certainly see her as an artist in spite of herself.3 It is not until the year of the first democratic elections themselves, 1994, that Coetzee publishes a novel – his seventh – that gives us the immediately present consciousness of a professional writer, and no less a writer than Fyodor Dostoevsky, the “master” of The Master of Petersburg.

Whether or not it has anything to do with the ending of apartheid, from then on the figure of the artist is never far away from Coetzee’s most important writing. The two memoirs, Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002), track, with a certain degree of licence, the early years of the writer himself, and thus cannot escape being read as studies of the artist in embryo. In the former, it is only at the very end of the work that the possibility of a writer’s vocation announces itself; in the latter, gleams of a future as a writer of fiction shine through the dismal tale of John’s futile efforts as a poet. Disgrace (1999) follows the fortunes of a teacher of literature whose creative energies are devoted no longer to criticism but to an opera. In the lectures of The Lives of Animals (1999) and the book within which they were later incorporated, Elizabeth Costello (2003), we find Coetzee foregrounding – like Fugard and Brink – the successful but now aging writer, and in the latter work the question of art’s role is raised in several different ways. Two short fictions, the Nobel Lecture “He and His Man” (2003) and “As a Woman Grows Older” (2004) continue this probing of the artist’s life, and Slow Man (2005) explores at length the relationship between a writer (Elizabeth Costello once more) and the character she is creating. Most recently, Diary of a Bad Year (2007) features an elderly writer who has engaged on a series of opinion pieces as he feels he no longer has the strength to write a novel (54).

Of course Coetzee, more than most writers we label “South African”, is entirely at home in the tradition of the European novel, and it is here, rather than in previous South African writing, that his predecessors in the fictional representation of artists are to be found – not so much in the conventional Künstlerroman, with its pattern of growing maturity and final creative triumph, but some of the darker accounts of what it means to be an artist. The most obvious example is Thomas Mann’s exploration of the cost of creative achievement in Doctor Faustus and Death in Venice; while Coetzee’s interest in the faltering steps of the young artist bear a clear relation to the ironies of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. A more oblique heritage can be traced from James, Kafka, Woolf, Proust, Nabokov, and many others.

* * *

How, then, does Coetzee represent the practice of art, in terms both of its coming-into-being and of its role in the world once it is produced, in his post-apartheid fictions and what we might call his semi-fictions?

Let us begin with thirteen-year-old John in Boyhood, enquiring of his mother after the death of his great-aunt Annie, “What has happened to Aunt Annie’s books?”4 The books in question are the multiple unsold copies of her father’s – John’s great-grandfather’s – pious autobiography Ewige Genesing (“eternal healing”) that weigh down the shelves in her storeroom. He receives no answer, and can only ask: “How will he keep them all in his head, all the books, all the people, all the stories? And if he does not remember them, who will?” The memoir ends with these questions, with this first inkling that authorship is not something you choose but something that makes demands on you – understood by young John as the obligation to preserve and memorialize. It is not so much a door opening on an enticing prospect as a heavy responsibility which cannot be shared.

The sequel Youth opens with John now aged nineteen, living a life of willed austerity as he completes his university studies. We quickly learn that the early intimation of an artistic vocation evident in the first memoir has blossomed into a whole-hearted commitment, but the irony in Coetzee’s use of hackneyed Romantic rhetoric – though not evident to his young protagonist – cannot be mistaken by the reader:

For he will be an artist, that has long been settled. If for the time being he must be obscure and ridiculous, that is because it is the lot of the artist to suffer obscurity and ridicule until the day when he is revealed in his true powers and the scoffers and mockers fall silent.5

In place of a somewhat unwilling response to an obscure demand, John’s commitment is now all too deliberate. The caustic irony at his expense persists to the end of the book, lightened only by our knowledge that this John is – to some not quite verifiable degree – also the John who is writing the work we are reading, the internationally lauded novelist whose understanding of the artist’s calling is far removed from the naive romanticism assumed by his earlier self.

The conception of the artist that dominates Youth, then, is not one we are invited to endorse. Take, for instance, John’s belief, frequently reiterated, that for the male artist a key to creative release is a sexual connection with a woman (or sexual connections with a number of women). One of the many hilarious moments that arise from this conviction is his invocation of Picasso: “Out of the passion that flares up anew with each new mistress, the Doras and Pilars whom chance brings to his doorstep are reborn into everlasting art. That is how it is done” (11). But there are bleak consequences as well, since all the sexual relationships he embarks on are failures, and his notion that they serve the greater good of his art turns out to be a poor excuse for cowardice and selfishness.

Another belief that is made fun of is that huge tracts of the literary tradition can be ignored as worthless on the say-so of admired writers – in this case, Eliot and Pound:

On their authority he dismisses without a glance shelf after shelf of Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Meredith. Nor is anything that came out of nineteenth-century Germany or Italy or Spain or Scandinavia worthy of attention. Russia may have produced some interesting monsters but as artists the Russians have nothing to teach. (25)

Given the importance of Dostoevsky to the mature Coetzee, the last sentence in particular is brims with irony. Something else that John feels he has to dismiss is his own background: his attempts to write prose founder on his discovery that prose requires a specific setting, and the only one with which he is familiar enough is South Africa (62–3). This is a repeated pattern: again and again, we find John rejecting what will become important for J.M. Coetzee – he even tries reading Dutch poetry, and writes it off as worthless: but more than forty years later Coetzee will p...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction: After “Disgrace”: Lord and Lady Chandos in Cape Town and Adelaide
• 1 Coetzee’s Artists; Coetzee’s Art
• 2 Responses to Space and Spaces of Response in J.M. Coetzee
• 3 Coetzee on Film
• 4“The Language of the Heart”: Confession, Metaphor and Grace in J.M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron
• 5 Disgrace as an Uncanny Revision of Gordimer’s None to Accompany Me
• 6 “Scenes from a dry imagination”: Disgrace and Embarrassment
• 7 David Lurie’s Learning and the Meaning of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace
• 8 J.M. Coetzee and South Africa: Thoughts on the Social Life of Fiction
• 9 “The true words at last from the mind in ruins”: J.M. Coetzee and Realism
• 10 Pity and Autonomy: Coetzee, Costello and Conrad
• 11 Slow Man and the Real: A Lesson in Reading and Writing
• 12 Close Encounters: The Author and the Character in Elizabeth Costello, Slow Man and Diary of a Bad Year Barbara Dancygier
• Works Cited
• Index