ENSAYOS PRELIMINARES

Though there is disagreement among critics about whether J.M. Coetzee’s work is best classified as a type of modernism or, instead, of post-modernism, there is no disagreement that British and European Modernists have provided some of his most important influences and

references.78 _{He wrote a master’s thesis about Ford Madox Ford and a doctoral dissertation about}

Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt; Franz Kafka is a touchstone; his nonfiction frequently discusses Modernist writers. Coetzee’s interests are not at all confined to Modernism (Cervantes, Defoe, and Dostoyevsky are as important to his writing as Beckett and Kafka), but the form and purpose of his work would be utterly different without Modernism, as much of the critical writing on Coetzee has acknowledged. Derek Attridge opens J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading with a chapter on “Modernist Form and the Ethics of Otherness”, and argues that Coetzee “does not merely employ but extends and revitalizes modernist practices” (6), thus creating a “modernism after modernism” (5). David James picks up this categorization in Modernist Futures, writing of “Coetzee’s reprise of modernist aesthetics” (99), and then with Urmila Seshigari proposes what seems to me to be the least ill-fitting designation for Coetzee: metamodernism, a term for writers who “extend, reanimate, and repudiate twentieth-century modernist literature” (89).

Attridge pinpoints the usefulness of metamodernism for Coetzee: as an alternative to traditional realism, a metamodernism inflected with an awareness of poststructural philosophies of language and representation offers “a different literary practice, willing to reveal its own

78 _{Attridge and James both argue strongly against Coetzee as a postmodernist, even under loose definitions of} postmodernism. My sympathies are with their analyses, mostly from a dissastisfaction with the inevitable vagueness and imprecision of the term postmodern, though even if I were more comfortable with postmodern, I would still be reluctant to apply it to Coetzee because metamodern is so much more meaningful and clear with regard to his relationship to British and European Modernism(s). Dominick Head offers a more positive analysis of Coetzee as a writer strapped to three posts: poststructuralism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism (Cambridge Introduction to J.M. Coetzee 23-36), though Head does admit that Coetzee’s work “illustrates very well how the ‘post’ in

postmodernism can be quite properly taken to indicate an extension of modernism, as well as a challenge to it, and to the dynamic of modernity. Indeed, without such an understanding, the historical complexity of a writer like Coetzee is difficult to define” (33-34). In A Singular Modernity, Fredric Jameson argues for a “late modernism” that extends, rather than breaks with, earlier modernism (his exemplars being Nabokov and Beckett), and thus is separate from anything identified as “postmodern”, for which there must, by his definitions, be a break from modernism. As early as 1992, David Attwell proposed to Coetzee that his work was a type of “late modernism” (Doubling the Point

198), and Coetzee only objected in that he detected “the qualifier merely late-modernist hanging in the air” (200). Jameson’s late modernism is to some extent accurate for Coetzee, but metamodernist remains for me a better label, for all the reasons I have stated previously and for the principles developed in David James’s writings, which I find convincing.

dependence on convention and its own part in the exercise of power” (17). Such a literary practice provides methods by which “otherness is engaged, staged, distanced, embraced,” and “manifested in the rupturing of narrative discourse” (30).

The desire to use such methods may have been Coetzee’s regardless of his country of origin, but it is clear from Dusklands through Disgrace that his analysis of power and his need to press against the limits of language and representation stemmed from his experience as a white South African — indeed, a white South African who initially tried, and failed, to escape South Africa.79 _{The inescapability of his context as a South African writer during the apartheid years}

created a tension within Coetzee’s writing between his desire to write from a position of more freedom and his recognition of historical situatedness. In discussing his Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, Coetzee noted that the previous winner, Milan Kundera, devoted his own acceptance speech to Cervantes, and had once said that “when politics have become religion, I see the novel as one of the last forms of atheism.” Coetzee said,

There is part of me too that longs to be an atheist à la Kundera. I too would like to be able to go to Jerusalem and talk about Cervantes. Not because I see Kundera or indeed Cervantes as a socially irresponsible person. On the contrary, I would like to be able to say that proof of their deep social and historical responsibility lies in the penetration with which, in their different ways and to their different degrees, they reflect on the nature and crisis of fiction, or fictionalizing, in their respective ages. But […] I can’t do what

Kundera does (or, to be fair to him, what he says he is doing). (Doubling the Point 67)

79 _{For the fullest available account of Coetzee’s years in Buffalo, New York (1968-1971) and the events leading to}

It is exactly the inability of the South African writer even to pretend to separate politics and literature that Coetzee made the subject of his own Jerusalem Prize speech, which he ended by saying: “We have art, said Nietzsche, so that we shall not die of truth. In South Africa there is now [1987] too much truth for art to hold, truth by the bucketful, truth that overwhelms and swamps every act of the imagination” (Doubling the Point 99). In the speech, he also identified one of the main concepts his novels through Disgrace explore, a concept that clearly builds off of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic: “In a society of masters and slaves, no one is free. […] The masters, in South Africa, form a closed hereditary caste. Everyone born with a white skin is born into the caste. Since there is no way of escaping the skin you are born with […] you cannot resign from the caste. You can imagine resigning, you can perform a symbolic resignation, but, short of shaking the dust of the country off your feet, there is no way of actually doing it.” The socio-political system of South Africa thus leads to “a banal kind of evil which has no

conscience, no imagination, and probably no dreams, which eats well and sleeps well and is at peace with itself” (96). A year before South Africa’s first open elections, David Attwell summed up Coetzee’s situation clearly, saying that “as a South African, and one who returned to the country after a prolonged but finally unsuccessful attempt to emigrate, Coetzee cannot avoid having to deal with his national situation” (J.M. Coetzee 3).

It wasn’t until the caste system of South Africa was (legally, if not socially) abolished that Coetzee was able to shake at least some of the dust off his feet by moving to Australia in 2002. His reasons for moving were many, as J.K. Kannemeyer has most fully demonstrated, but inevitably the international press read the move through the lens of the coruscating portrait of South Africa in Disgrace or the controversies the novel faced in Coetzee’s home country on its

release (Kannemeyer 526-532). In December 1999, Coetzee wrote to David Malouf about his desire to apply to immigrate to Australia, noting that he was retiring from his academic career and saying that South Africa is a country “in a deeply interesting phase of its historical evolution. But it is not a good place to grow old in. Ever since I first visited Australia in 1991 I have felt a tug toward the country and its landscape” (qtd. in Kannemeyer 536). Kannemeyer interpreted Coetzee’s decision not as a move away from South Africa but rather as move to Australia. After reviewing many of Coetzee’s statements to friends and colleagues, Kannemeyer sums up:

Compared with South Africa, with its large number of people under the age of 25, Australia has more people over the age of 50 and fewer under the age of 20. The economy and the healthcare in a country with a demographic tendency to an older age group are just better attuned to the needs of that group than in a country with a

preponderance of young people. What strikes Coetzee about Australian politics is how trifling the issues are that are debated in parliament and elsewhere, especially compared with South Africa, where the big political themes involve meaningful national issues. In Australia the big issues are something of the past, and democracy has advanced to the point of a healthy cynicism about and contempt for politics and politicians. (541)80

It is difficult to forget, though, the many times Coetzee implied, and sometimes outright stated, that whites in South Africa have no legitimate claim to the land. As early as 1986, Stephen

80 _{Though he may have appreciated the relative “smallness” of Australian political questions, after moving to}

Australia Coetzee became more openly politically active than he had been in South Africa (though this may also be related to his greater international fame after Disgrace and, especially, after the Nobel Prize). He became a spokesperson for the animal rights group Voiceless, attended the 2016 Palestinian Festival of Literature (where he made a short, typically sly statement effectively comparing Israeli policies to apartheid), and signed a September 2017 open letter from Australian writers and artists advocating for same-sex marriage.

Watson could write in Research in African Literatures that the key to understanding Coetzee’s work is to recognize that he “is not only a colonizer who is an intellectual, but a colonizer who does not want to be a colonizer” (377). María J. Lopéz develops her entire book Acts of

Visitation around what she sees as Coetzee’s core (meta)narrative of the Europeans’ illegitimacy in South Africa, and she finds it expressed outright in Youth, where the Coetzee figure is

motivated by “his feeling that he is an illegitimate visitor both in South Africa (owing to his European ancestry) and in England (owing to his immigrant status)” (220). This idea was taken up by Coetzee’s neighbor Mariana Swart in an email Kannemeyer quotes at length: “I ask myself: What are you doing in Adelaide, Australia? I just don’t get it. I don’t understand why you have left. […] You should be settling down somewhere in the Karoo, and preparing yourself to write your last 2 or 3 (or whatever) books. Or is it maybe that you truly believe that whites have no place in Africa, and that you morally felt obliged to leave?” (542, bracketed ellipses in original).81 _{As I discuss below, the sentiment was also imputed to Coetzee by one of his own}

characters in Summertime.

On achieving Australian citizenship in 2006, Coetzee himself spoke about his new home in a speech at the Adelaide Writers’ Week, a speech that was then quoted on the Australian Department of Immigration and Border Protection website: “‘I was attracted by the free and generous spirit of the people, by the beauty of the land itself, and – when I first saw Adelaide – by the grace of the city that I now have the honour to call my home.’ […] ‘In becoming a citizen one undertakes certain duties and responsibilities,’ Mr Coetzee told the crowd in a rare public address. ‘One of the more intangible of those duties and responsibilities is no matter what one's

81 _{For an exploration of the connections between South African and Australian colonialism in Coetzee’s later work,}

birth and background, to accept the historical past of the new country as one's own’” (“John M. Coetzee”).

Whatever Coetzee’s reasons for moving to Australia, the change in his location correlates with a change in his novels, particularly in their relationship to fictionality. From Dusklands (more a collection of two novellas than a novel per se) through Disgrace, most of the novels at least draw their impetus from the situation of South Africa.82 _{It’s possible to read the post-}

Disgrace novels as abandoning the sort of postcolonialist concerns that many readers have seen in Coetzee’s work up to that point — indeed, in J.M. Coetzee and the Paradox of Postcolonial Authorship, Jane Poyner does exactly that, saying that the novels Coetzee wrote while living in South Africa “address themes and issues pertinent to the (post)colonial and apartheid situations […] the later works largely leave behind a specifically postcolonial paradigm” (1). The key words, though, are “specifically postcolonial paradigm”, because most of the concerns that Coetzee’s early work explores — particularly of authorship and authority — carry through to his later work, and that later work is shadowed by the violence and oppression of colonial states and cultures, even if colonial violence is no longer foregrounded. David Attwell paraphrases

Coetzee’s own feeling that “it is the experience of his particular generation of settler-colonials to live out the end of Empire and decolonization”, a decolonization that is “is a form of profound disembedding” (“Coetzee’s Postcolonial Diaspora” 10). To Attwell, the effect of Coetzee’s move to Australia on his writing is to remove its sense of historical engagement: “It is the geography of

82 _{Aside from Waiting for the Barbarians, Foe, and The Master of Petersburg, all of Coetzee’s novels through} Disgrace are set in South Africa, and Waiting for the Barbarians drew much of its inspiration from the murder of Steve Biko and from other tortures inflicted by the South African police and military (Attwell, J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing 93-95). Further, it seems unlikely that Coetzee would have written Foe had he not been a citizen of a settler colony. (The Master of Petersburg is an anomaly, but the anomaly is easily explained by Coetzee’s long fascination with Dostoyevsky and especially by the fact that it was the novel Coetzee wrote after the death of his son.)

Australia that has made its mark on Coetzee, not its history (or rather, it is the idea of Australian geography that has influenced him rather than its particularity) whereas in South Africa, as the essays on land and landscape of White Writing reveal, geography and history are, in a certain sense, indistinguishable” (10).

While the decoupling of geography and history in the novels’ settings and the characters’ concerns affects the text’s content, the disembedding Attwell identifies finds form in the deeper unsettling of the texts’ fictionality. This is one of the primary features of the texts that leads (usually hostile) critics to say the books are not novels, not fiction, too didactic or allegorical. Those criticisms may derive from various causes, particularly the dominance of scene-based fiction in the U.S. and U.K. from roughly the early 19th century onward, a dominance that conditioned readers of both popular and literary novels to expect and desire mimetic physical description, psychologically-familiar character development, and conversational dialogue that adds up to a reality effect (even in highly fantastical novels; such books require even more determined tools of verisimilitude so as to aid the reader in suspending disbelief). But some of the complaints about Coetzee’s later work may also be artifacts of established postcolonial reading conventions that Alok Yadav has identified, applying narratological approaches to postcolonial texts to show that

as readers, our default assumption about fictional discourse is that it conforms to the criterion of historical falsifiability. It is only where and as it marks a departure from the world of actuality—that is, where and as we notice such a departure—that we enter (or not) into a willing suspension of disbelief. […] [I]n the absence of contextual information

to the contrary, we tend to allow fictions to fill in or at least color our understanding of the world of actuality. (194)

Yadav applies his ideas to postcolonial theory and, particularly, the controversy over Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, but the ideas are useful for Coetzee’s work as well, especially the later books. Yadav calls fictional texts “consensual affirmations”:

One cannot force the fictitiousness of a fiction on someone. If they refuse to engage in a willing suspension of disbelief, one cannot insist on the “objective fact” that a given discourse is fictional to dismiss their response to the discourse in the very mode of nonfiction. A reader for whom the “blasphemy” or “sexism” or “racism” of a given work destroys its approachability in the spirit of collaboration cannot legitimately be chided for failing to take the fiction as a fiction. (195)

This statement seems to me to push too far toward an unhelpful relativism, since it negates any possibility of better and worse readings, but the insight at its core is useful: because novelistic discourse contains both the fictional and nonfictional, the fictional status of a novel is always a possible site for disagreement between readers. Gayatri Spivak has speculated that the changes in Coetzee’s novels after Disgrace might result from the ways Disgrace was read in South Africa; specifically, she sees Summertime as “a rewriting of Disgrace, making the persona of the located South African who wants to claim South Africa as also his country a different one. […] Here, the author-function is put aside, but not let go as in Disgrace, in favor of an older technique of unreliable narrator, that bad readers cannot notice. Here, the author-function is present, and

everyone is in character” (Readings 125). Regardless of whether this was Coetzee’s own goal, the development Spivak outlines is clearly present: Disgrace proved easy to read for less complex meanings than an analyst like Spivak interpreted it to offer, meanings that make Coetzee seem like a grumpy old white man with racist tendencies. Such readers were, to use Yadav’s terminology, ones Coetzee’s text could not collaborate with. Or, to use our own frame, these were readers for whom the book’s pedagogy, whatever it might be said to be, was

ineffective (a rejection of a book is generally a sign of a rejection of its pedagogy). The later books foreground problems of reading and interpretation not only for the characters, but for the reader as well, and they do so by making historical falsifiability into an overt problem that

readers must find a way to solve if they are to make sense of the text at all. It is certainly possible for readers to criticize and reject the post-Disgrace novels, and many have, but it is difficult to