J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) was a white South African novelist whose writings reflected strong anti-imperialist sentiments.
John
M. Coetzee, the son of a sheep farmer, was born in Cape Town in 1940 and was
educated in both South Africa and the United States. He earned his B.A. at the
University of Cape Town, and his Ph.D. from The University of Texas. After the
Sharpeville crisis in South Africa in 1960 he spent ten years outside the
country as a student, a lecturer, and an employee in a multi-national
corporation. Returning to teach English at the University of Cape Town in 1971,
he had a highly cosmopolitan outlook which tended to set him
apart from most white South African writers. Indeed, he felt that his writing
fit into no recognizably South African literary tradition and was more
influenced by the vogue of postmodernist writing in Europe
and America of the 1960s, which was also fired by a strongly anti-imperialist
commitment, prompted by opposition to the Vietnam War. Thus, though he listed
his interests as crowd sports, "apes and humanoid machines," and
images such as photographs "and their power over the human heart," he
remained a rather isolated figure in Cape Town, separated from his wife and
tending to shun human company. In 1984 he did not travel to
London to receive in person the Booker Prize for his novel The Life and
Times of Michael K.
Coetzee's
cosmopolitan outlook helped shape his first novel, Dusklands (1974),
which consists of two separate stories which skillfully interweave fact and fiction. Exploring the theme of the
western imperial imagination, the novel contrasts the experiences of Eugene
Dawn, an American government official put in charge of the New Life project to
transform Vietnamese society, who eventually goes insane, and the account of
the travels of Jacobus Coetzee into the interior of the Cape in the 18th
century. The novel embraces, however, a binding thread in the mental dualism between mind and body prompted by imperial
expansion and conquest and, through the ancestor figure of Jacobus Coetzee, the
author's search for his own roots in South African society and history.
The
publication of Dusklands caused a considerable stir in South African literary circles, as the
novel broke with many of the traditions of the colonial novel. Some radical
critics, however, charged Coetzee with only partially undermining the colonial conventions of literary realism
and taking the western vogue of exploration of the individual self to its
extremes.
The
publication of Coetzee's second novel, In the Heart of the Country, in
1976, however, confirmed his proficiency as a writer and developed especially the theme
of the violence and alienation at the roots of western white colonialism. The
novel is the first person account of a lonely white spinster, Magda, and of her solitude and incestuous relationship with her father on an isolated
Cape farm, sometime in the 19th century. There are many allegorical features to this story, which strips away the
thin western veneer behind colonial society to reveal its culturally
rootless quality. After being raped by the colored servant, who also kills her
father, Magda is left alone on the farm and invents her own metaphysical skygods to worship in the absence
of any other meaningful cultural symbols. The author's
rejection of the traditional mode of linear and teleological mode of writing
was reflected in the numbering of individual paragraphs, and there was no
obvious progress through time, but rather a state of mental and emotional
timelessness. The novel was received with considerable enthusiasm in both South
Africa and Western Europe and North America. It established Coetzee as a writer
of international repute.
In
1980 Coetzee published his third novel, Waiting for the Barbarians,
which continued his allegorical examination of the imperial theme through the
eyes of a benevolent liberal imperial official on the
frontier of an empire on the verge of collapse. An amateur collector
of historical records, the official is concerned to retain a memory of the
empire's history before it disappears at the hands of nameless and faceless barbarians who progressively intrude over the empire's borders. Though he tries
unsuccessfully to form a relationship with a blind woman barbarian taken prisoner, the official fails in this endeavor and, after returning her to her society, is
tortured by new militaristic imperial rulers who are trying to
shore up the empire before its final collapse. The novel clearly embraces many
themes at the heart of the South African condition, as well as universalizing
the dilemma at the heart of imperial conquest generally.
Coetzee
was received as a writer who had, in some measure, stepped outside the tight
limits of his own society, and his fourth novel, The Life and Times of
Michael K (1983), was eagerly awaited.
Life and Times
marked in some respects a new departure for Coetzee, for the story had far more
naturalistic qualities than his previous novels. The setting in Cape Town, in a
near future of riots and breakdown of law and order, had a strongly realistic
quality and was undoubtedly shaped by the unrest in South Africa. Michael K,
the central character, is a typically Coetzee character: lonely, isolated, and
stigmatized with a harelip. Interspersing Michael K's own thoughts within the
narrative, the novel follows the progress of its character away from Cape Town,
back into the rural terrain, as Michael K flees with his ill mother (who dies
on the way) and tries to survive in a situation of social breakdown. The novel
was significant for refusing to recognize any racial identities and was
concerned with the suffering and redemption of humanity as a whole. Michael K, though,
cannot escape the clutches of the disintegrating society and is captured on an
abandoned farm and accused of aiding guerrillas. Returning to Cape Town,
Michael is left alone, though finds solace in some human company and in the idea that he
is a gardener and has in some manner returned to the roots of his society. Concerned
to the end with revealing the essential truth about existence, the novel
manifested a more puritanical commitment to humanity in the
abstract than any particular contemporary political creed or ideology.
In
1987 Coetzee released his next novel, Foe, a clever reinterpretation of
Daniel Defoe's classic, Robinson Crusoe. Critics were divided in their
assessment of this somewhat unusual work from Coetzee. Some contended that the
material seemed a stylistic departure from his previous works, while others
held that the new novel was on a continuum with material such as Michael K. In Southern
Humanities Review, Ashton Nichols wrote, "Like all of Coetzee's
earlier works, Foe retains a strong sense of its specifically South
African origins, a sociopolitical subtext that runs along just below the surface of the
narrative."
Whereas
Foe dealt with South African political issues symbolically, Age of
Iron was Coetzee's first novel to address the South African political
situation directly. It is the story of Mrs. Curren, a retired teacher, dying of
cancer, who for the first time faces the reality of apartheid in her home country. At the end of her life,
she's forced for the first time to confront a system that she has never before
questioned. Sean French wrote in New Statesman and Society, "Dying
is traditionally a process of withdrawal from the world. … Coetzee tellingly
reverses this."
Coetzee
also delivered an impressive body of nonfiction, with works such as White Writing: On the
Culture of Letters in South Africa (1988) and Doubling the Point: Essays
and Interviews (1992). In 1996 he published Giving Offense: Essays on
Censorship to favorable reviews.
Coetzee
lectured at numerous universities, including the University of Cape Town and
Johns Hopkins University. He was distinguished by being a truly multilingual
writer, translating work into Dutch, German, French, and Afrikaans. He was the
recipient of numerous awards, including the Booker-McConnell Prize, CNA
Literary Award, and the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in
Society.
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