MyWeku

He lives in Australia. His ancestry is European. Notoriously reclusive, he is hardly a poster boy for visible ubuntu, that connectedness with people that is celebrated across swathes of Africa. Still, few would deny J.M. Coetzee the status of African writer –  perhaps Africa’s greatest living writer, and one who ranks very highly on a global scale to boot.

If the Nobel Prize for Literature were available to individuals more than once, Coetzee might be the one to back to win it twice. This was a feat he managed with the Man Booker Prize  and literary admirers waited in anticipation to see if he would make it a hat-trick, with his fictional autobiographical novel, Summertime, shortlisted in 2009. It was not to be. No matter. Certainly Coetzee himself sets little store by these awards and the ceremonies that go with them. We all know that it’s the works that count – and Coetzee has endowed us generously.

Since his novelistic debut in 1974 with Dusklands Coetzee has engaged readers with his spare, crisp prose, a style well-suited to his often bleak themes. Many have, of course, been inspired by his native South Africa. The Life and Times of Michael K. (1983) portrayed the desolate landscape of a country torn by civil war, in which life and dignity are cheap and fragile. Foe (1986) examined the problems of writing as an African writer. Disgrace (1999) weaves together themes of exploitation and cruelty, power and impotence, shame and shamelessness in a newly ‘free’ South Africa.

If there seem to be glimpses of the author in some of these works (the protagonist in Disgrace is a South African English professor), then Coetzee’s more recent works also march decidedly in the opposite direction. The absent-present author appears cleanly drawn in Elizabeth Costello (2003), in which the eponymous character is some kind of alter ego of Coetzee himself. Elizabeth travels, lecturing on subjects as diverse as the study of the humanities in Africa and the lives of animals. There is no doubt that she conveys his views, but also is never quite Coetzee himself, but always at a literary distance.

Summertime, Coetzee’s most recent work, is usually classed as ‘fictional autobiography’ (or something similar), along with two earlier volumes, Boyhood and Youth (1997 and 2002; both subtitled ‘Scenes from Provincial Life’). But Summertime (2009), along with Diary of a Bad Year (2007), resist generic classification or placement in sequence with the author’s other works. Both create genre-crossing forms for fiction that is as much anti-autobiography as autobiography. In Summertime this reaches heights: the author, ever-present, is also absent. In fact he is dead. He exists only in and between the reminiscences of others – and they’re none too flattering. Here are familiar themes, encountered also in Boyhood and Disgrace: shame, and ethics; and familiar literary concerns, with writing itself.

What next? Every new offering by Coetzee is a treat. I am still recovering from Diary of a Bad Year, which made use of parallel texts arranged horizontally on a page and that demanded a strenuous new kind of reading process. Coetzee’s themes are no longer the African themes that engage me most, but have a more global ring to them. But I suspect that whether he writes about Australia or Russian literature or the contemporary novel itself, all his work remains that of a writer steeped in Africa, with one kind of African sensibility.

Coetzee is not young (he will turn 70 in February 2010) and his recent novels (including Diary of a Bad Year and Slow Man, published in 2005) portray an ageing writer. However, as a writer one can only see Coetzee’s powers continuing to expand, sharpening further, carving out new forms. What next? With Coetzee’s powers to amaze, there is no point in trying to guess.

Anne

Guest Writer

South Africa