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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