Elusive JM Coetzee visits Cúirt 2005
No Interviews, no photographs, no question-and-answer session. Not exactly forthcoming, but then South African novelist JM Coetzee seldom arrives in person to collect literary awards either. His appearance at this year's Cúirt International Festival of Literature was more than a major literary event, it was a triumph of persuasion.
The Town Hall Theatre in Galway filled quickly on the evening of his sold-out reading. An intense man in a grey suit stood on the town hall steps, prepared to barter with each newcomer, "would you sell me your ticket?"
Many had arrived with their copies of Coetzee's work, intent on having them signed by an artist who, though personally remote, engages through narratives of extraordinary beauty and anger with the very souls of his readers. Two women debated the ethics of asking him to sign more than one book. "I have five, including two hardbacks," said one. "Well, I've got seven with me, and the essays," replied her friend.
Although an intellectual who mysteriously epitomises the novelist as artist in isolation yet denies having a philosophy of fiction, Coetzee is a philosopher of life and art. He shows, and appears set to continue to show us, what fiction can do, and how it can make us think. Just over 18 months have passed since he was declared the Nobel Literature laureate. Less autocratic but no less committed to the truth than his fellow South African laureate, Nadine Gordimer, the reticent Coetzee is enigmatic, far more subtle and has always been the greater artist. As Nigerian writer Helon Habila began his reading he admitted to being nervous about "sharing the stage with a Nobel laureate".
Coetzee, author of 10 novels, is a writer of genius whose eloquent rage has been determined by his awesome humanity. Few understand the plight of the individual and the effort of living as well as he does. For all the pain, the sense of hurt and failure, there is also the ironic, despairing humour which undercuts much of the fiction and asserts itself in his outstanding critical writing.
The Nobel Prize was not a surprise. Coetzee, a career academic, was named three years after a fellow prophet from the margins, Gunter Grass. It is an honour that carries the weight of endorsement, a life's work is acknowledged. Coetzee won at 63, a few years older than Seamus Heaney had been, almost a generation more than Joseph Brodsky. Coetzee was honoured two years after he had emigrated to Australia. Having been denounced by his long-time supporter, the ANC, because it resented the bleak, ugly post-apartheid South Africa presented by him in his masterpiece, Disgrace (1999), Coetzee, who had always regretted not having suffered official censure, suddenly felt its full weight when least expected.
While the literary world applauded Coetzee becoming the first writer to win a second Booker Prize, the achievement was ignored in South Africa. Coetzee had dared to write a sequence in which the farming daughter of the disgraced university professor central character, is gang-raped by black men. Elsewhere in the narrative, white farmers are violently evicted from their land by vicious black squatters. Such realism was not in keeping with the new South Africa cultivated by the ANC. Coetzee paid; he left Cape Town where he was born and, aside from some years studying in the US, had worked as a university professor and spent much of his time thinking, writing and appearing to remain true to the magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), who had decided "I wanted to live outside history. I wanted to live out the history that the Empire imposes on its subjects, even its lost subjects."
For so long ageless, he suddenly seems older, almost other-worldly. His open-necked shirts and leather jackets have given way to suits and a formal tie. He now slightly resembles the late Primo Levi. The good-looking face that smiles from the jacket of the 1984 US edition of Life & Times of Michael K, his allegorical fourth novel which had won him, the previous year, his first Booker Prize and established him internationally, is gone, replaced by one of increasingly medieval austerity.
In 1995, when I interviewed him in Dublin, he had seemed watchful, tense, wary if sympathetic, and well known for responding to questions with lengthy pauses. Last Tuesday, he seemed more gentle. The humour is still there, as is the caution. Above all, he gives the impression of someone aware of having become old, although he is only 65. His voice is soft, almost weary. Only the slightest trace of his South African accent remains.
Age, death and loss have often featured in his work. Elizabeth Curren, the central character of Age of Iron (1990) returns home on the day she has been told she is dying. For her, South Africa is "a bad-tempered old hound snoozing in the doorway taking its time to die". Curren's story, set during the 1980s, triumphs through her logic. Estranged from her child, the retired classics teacher facing death is human and believable.
Coetzee then looked to the life of Dostoyevsky in creating The Master of Petersburg (1994) in which the Russian novelist, haunted by complex guilt, returns from exile to investigate the sudden death of his stepson. Disgrace is a powerful portrait of a once sexually arrogant man who has been humiliated by a student's accusation of sexual harassment. Coetzee's own memoir, Boyhood, was written memorably in the third person as a novel, while Youth a novel, with its quality of unfolding experience, chronicles the making of an artist. Big issues and trauma have often shaped his narratives.
When introducing his reading, which was from a new novel, Coetzee pondered the stages of life - the dependence of the baby, the independence of youth and vigour, and "for those of us who live long enough, the return to dependence". The new novel, Slow Man, follows the narrator who, having lost his leg as a result of an accident, encounters the world of home medical care. Reading slowly, with an actor's sense of pace, Coetzee brilliantly caught the black humour of the piece. His narrator endures the ultimate horror, that of confronting himself as others see him; the loss of a limb equates with a loss of self.
The reading ended. Outside a long queue had formed of readers wanting their books signed. For all his detachment, he is politely formal and looks into the eyes of every person. Quietly and slightly unnervingly, JM Coetzee strikes one as an artist who has seen a great deal and battled to serve the truth.
