Gordimer, born in 1923, was by then already a major figure on the world literary scene. Her first book was published in 1949, and by 1980 she had produced seven novels and nine volumes of short stories. She had won the Booker Prize in 1974, for The Conservationist. Coetzee, born in 1940, was a relative newcomer. His first novel, Dusklands, was published in 1974, and his first Booker win came in 1983 for his fourth, Life & Times of Michael K. Reviewing the novel in the New York Review, Gordimer complained that ‘while it is implicitly and highly political, Coetzee’s heroes are those who ignore history, not make it’. She went on: 

[T]his is a challengingly questionable position for a writer to take up in South Africa, make no mistake about it. The presentation of the truth and meaning of what white has done to black stands out on every page, celebrating its writer’s superb, unafraid creative energy as it does; yet it denies the energy of the will to resist evil. That this superb energy exists with indefatigable and undefeatable persistence among the black people of South Africa – Michael K’s people – is made evident, yes, heroically, every grinding day. It is not present in the novel … A revulsion against all political and revolutionary solutions rises with the insistence of the song of cicadas to the climax of this novel.

I don’t think the author would deny that it is his own revulsion … The organicism that George Lukács defines as the integral relation between private and social destiny is distorted here more than is allowed for by the subjectivity that is in every writer. 2

Coetzee is not combative. He does not seem to enjoy arguing, and prefers to leave interpretation of his work to others. He told Tony Morphet in 1983 that he had ‘no wish to enter the lists as a defender of Michael K’.3 However, he has responded directly to Gordimer’s objections:

What kind of model of behavior in the face of oppression was I presenting? Why hadn’t I written a different book with (I put words in her mouth now) a less spineless hero?

To a reader taking this line, much of the text of Michael K is just one fancy evasion after another of an overriding political question: how shall the tyranny of apartheid be ended? … How do I respond to such readers?

One writes the books one wants to write. One doesn’t write the books one doesn’t want to write. The emphasis falls not on one but on the word want in all its own resistance to being known. The book … in the heroic tradition, is not a book I wanted-to-write, wanted enough to be able to bring off, however much I might have wanted to have written it – that is to say, wanted to be the person who had successfully brought off the writing of it.

What, then, do I want-to-write? A question to prospect, to open up, perhaps in the present dialogue, but not to mine, to exploit. Too much of the fictional enterprise depends on it. Just as it is not productive to discover the answer to the question of why one desires: the answer threatens the end of desire, the end of the production of desire.4

Coetzee is clear that he has no argument with those who cleave to the heroic tradition. He has always admired Gordimer. In 1978 he said, ‘I read Nadine Gordimer because I think she’s extraordinarily accomplished’,5 although he has reservations about her difficulty in accepting ‘that stories finally have to tell themselves, that the hand that holds the pen is only the conduit of a signifying process’.6 He told David Attwell that he regarded it ‘as a badge of honor to have had a book banned in South Africa, and even more of an honor to have been acted against punitively … This honor I have never achieved nor, to be frank, merited.’7

Nevertheless, in his most direct contribution to the debate of the 1980s, his 1987 address in Cape Town entitled ‘The Novel Today’, he complains that ‘in South Africa the colonisation of the novel by the discourse of history is proceeding with alarming rapidity’8, owing to the ‘intense ideological pressure’ of the time. He is at pains to point out that storytelling and history are both discourses, neither of which has any monopoly on the representation of reality, and:

no matter what it may appear to be doing, the story may not really be playing the game you call Class Conflict or the game called Male Domination or any of the other games in the games handbook. While it may certainly be possible to read the book as playing one of those games, in reading it in that way you may have missed something. You may have missed not just something, you may have missed everything.9

There is a connection between Coetzee’s preferred open-mindedness and the kind of open-minded not-questioning he regards as a necessary condition for the ‘fictional enterprise’ in his discussion with Attwell above. As a superb literary critic himself, he knows the enterprise from both sides and is wary of confusing the two roles. The deadening hand of reductionism in reading has its twin in the author’s attempt to self-censor or to direct stories towards a moral or political goal rather than letting them ‘tell themselves’.

One thing that may be missed by readers looking for political ‘games’ or messages in Coetzee’s work is ‘a certain spirit of resistance’, which he hopes is ‘ingrained in my books’.10 This resistance to co-option or interpretation is linked to his feelings about freedom, which I take to be absolutely basic to all his work:

To be a herald you would have to have slipped your chains for a while and wandered about in the real world. I am not a herald of community or anything else … I am someone who has intimations of freedom (as every chained prisoner has) and constructs representations – which are shadows themselves – of people slipping their chains and turning their faces to the light. I do not imagine freedom, freedom an sich; I do not represent it. Freedom is another name for the unimaginable.11

The chains that his people have slipped are to a large extent representations imposed on them by others. Attridge points out that ‘the task Coetzee seems to have set himself is to convey the resistance of these figures to the discourses of the ruling culture (the culture that has conditioned the author, the kind of reader which the novels are likely to find, and the genre of the novel itself) and at the same time to find a means of representing the claims they make upon those who inhabit this culture’.12 The figures to which Attridge is alluding here are Coetzee’s ‘others’ – Michael K, the barbarians, Vercueil in Age of Iron (1990). However, resistance of those characters who might be plausibly identified with the author himself is no small part of Coetzee’s vision, especially in his most recent books. A consistent refusal to be enlisted into civil society on its own terms can be found in Disgrace (1999), Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Slow Man (2005), as well as in his two ‘memoirs’, Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002).

A memoir by a novelist of international stature must be intended to some extent as an account of his develop- ment as a novelist. What we see emerging in Boyhood is a consciousness that questions everything and – while admitting allegiance where it is absolutely unavoidable, to his mother, for example – does so grudgingly and with full awareness of the contradictions involved. His love for his mother is a ‘fierce and angry emotion … It is because he is so sure of her care that he is on his guard with her, never relaxing, never allowing her a chance.’ But he understands his cruelty: ‘Feeling her hurt … he knows he is in a trap and cannot get out. Love: this is what love really is, this cage in which he rushes back and forth, back and forth, like a poor bewildered baboon.’ He does take sides when he has to, but, for example, he chooses the unpopular Russians over the Americans in the Cold War: ‘He chose the Russians in 1947 when everyone else was choosing the Americans’, realising only later that ‘liking Russians was not part of a game, it was not allowed’. So he learns: from a childish, contrary urge at the age of seven to support the less popular side, he discovers that ‘whatever he wants, whatever he likes, has sooner or later to be turned into a secret’. It is significant, though, that this does not make him change his mind about what he likes, even though the original choice might have been made without much thought. He merely becomes like a trapdoor spider, ‘always … scuttling back into its hole, closing the trapdoor behind it, shutting out the world, hiding’. He doesn’t want to change: ‘In that case he would no longer be himself. If he were no longer himself, what point would there be in living?’

His identity is constantly in question. ‘He thinks of himself as English. Though his surname is Afrikaans, though his father is more Afrikaans than English, though he himself speaks Afrikaans without any English accent, he could not pass for a moment as an Afrikaner.’ But faced with ‘proper English boys, with English names’, despite ‘the English language which he commands with ease’ and ‘England and everything that England stands for, to which he believes he is loyal’, he realises that ‘more than that is required, clearly, before one will be accepted as truly English: tests to face, some of which he knows he will not pass’. His constant fear is that he will be relegated to Afrikaans classes at school because of his surname, and will be forced to share the classroom with the Afrikaners he shrinks away from, with their ‘surliness … intransigence, and, not far behind it … threat of physical force’. So his sense of racial identity, in a society where race is an integral part of everyone’s self-image, is confused: all he knows is that he doesn’t unequivocally belong with any group.

As for religion, his family is ‘certainly nothing’, which causes difficulties at school, where one must belong to one of the three categories, Christian, Roman Catholic, or Jew. Belonging is something that Coetzee gives himself to wholeheartedly only in respect to his uncle’s farm. He feels that he belongs on, and even to, the farm, though it will never belong to him and he knows ‘he will never be more than a guest, an uneasy guest’. He is conscious that his father’s family, whom he despises for their ‘life of dull, stupid formulas, of being like everyone else’, for reasons not entirely clear but the subject of brooding speculation, resents him and his mother, and that he is not completely welcome on his beloved farm, the farm which he knows will be lost to him forever one day.

All of this adds up to a sensibility with few certainties: a wary, prickly, preternaturally observant boy who has to hold himself constantly in check, and who questions the basis of everything. Although he has a romantic vision of himself as ‘different, special … waiting to be called’, the cause in which he is to be enlisted is obscure. Perhaps some hint of it is contained in the final pages of the novel. His great-aunt Annie dies, leaving behind a storeroom full of copies of her father’s book, which she had spent her life translating, publishing and trying to sell. John finds the book too boring to read, and knows that his great-grandfather, the author, was ‘a terrible old German, terribly cruel and autocratic’. Nevertheless, after Aunt Annie’s death, he wonders about the books, which everyone else has forgotten. ‘He alone is left to do the thinking. How will he keep them all in his head, all the books, all the people, all the stories? And if he does not remember them, who will?’ This is the end of Boyhood, and it sounds like the declaration of a vocation – a reluctant acknowledgment of a dedication to a cause which even he finds boring or unpleasant, but to which he has committed himself. In the same vein, in his essay ‘Remembering Texas’ (1984), Coetzee recalls his studies in so-called primitive languages. Finding that ‘every one of the 700 tongues of Borneo was as coherent and complex and intractable to analysis as English’, he wondered:

if a latter-day ark were ever commissioned to take the best that mankind has to offer and make a fresh start on the farther planets … might we not leave Shakespeare’s plays and Beethoven’s quartets behind to make room for the last speaker of Dyirbal, even though that last speaker might be a fat old woman who scratched herself and smelled bad?13

It is only a question, but implicit in the question is the resistance to cultural and social imperatives that surfaces periodically throughout his work. Of course, Coetzee is not a philistine. His resistance to received opinion is not a rejection of the objects of that opinion – of Shakespeare and Beethoven – although we see from Youth that he preferred the solitary savagery of Swift’s poetry and the austerity of J.S. Bach, at least when young. But tastes aside, this is a larger attitude that steps back and allows room to consider points of view that not only do not occur to most other people, but would be regarded by many with horrified distaste.

In Youth, the second volume of Coetzee’s memoirs, the ten-year-old who had shouted ‘I hate normal people’ at his mother has become a teenager so alienated from other people that he cannot form normal relations with anyone. At nineteen, he is living alone in Cape Town, a student precariously but stubbornly independent of his family. His only ambition is to be a poet, and his every thought is directed towards discovering the poet’s mode of being. Over the five years covered in Youth, in Cape Town and then in England, he gropes his way through life, guided only by literature. T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound are his principal mentors, and Ford Madox Ford, admired by Pound, on whom he is writing a dutiful but increasingly disenchanted MA thesis. Unable to establish any friendships, behaving shamefully to the women he sleeps with, he is immersed in misery: ‘if misery were to be abolished, he would not know what to do with himself.’ Luckily, there seems to be no question of that: he is occasionally ambushed by joy – the word is used twice in Youth – but misery returns to claim him soon enough. The few flashes of delight are sparked mainly by literature. Firstly, he discovers Joseph Brodsky, Ingeborg Bachmann and Zbigniew Herbert, who tell him ‘of what poetry can be and therefore of what he can be, filling him with joy that he inhabits the same earth as they’. Later, when he has begun to think that prose might suit his talents better, he reads Samuel Beckett’s Watt (1953), which is ‘so funny that he rolls about laughing’. Laughing. Nothing in the previous 150 pages has prepared us for laughter. Finally, he has found a model: ‘How could he have imagined he wanted to write in the manner of Ford when Beckett was around all the time? … Beckett is classless, or outside class, as he himself would prefer to be.’ Earlier, he had found books in the British Museum, accounts of ‘the South Africa of the old days’ that give him the idea of writing a book about South Africa, ‘a book whose horizon of knowledge will be that of … the 1820s’. Years later, this idea grew into the second part of his first novel, Dusklands (1974).

But the ‘ugly new South Africa’ still repels him. He left Cape Town for London in a rush to escape the draft, which he felt was impending after the Sharpeville massacre, and is under no illusions about the welcome to be expected in England by ‘forlorn South African whites cluttering their doorstep like orphans in search of parents’. His solution to the problem of South Africa is a Russian invasion: ‘They should land paratroops in Pretoria, take Verwoerd and his cronies captive, line them up against a wall, and shoot them.’ He is not concerned about what happens then: ‘Justice must be done, that is all that matters; the rest is politics, and he is not interested in politics.’ He attends a CND rally, but ‘fist-shaking and slogan-chanting, the whipping up of passion in general, repel him. Only love and art are, in his opinion, worthy of giving oneself to without reserve.’ But love and art must be taken seriously: he disapproves of flirting and throughout a course of dancing lessons ‘he remained rigid with resistance’. He seems above all afraid of losing control. The watchfulness he learned as a child can rarely be relaxed, though one Sunday afternoon in spring on Hampstead Heath he ‘sinks into a sleep or half-sleep in which consciousness does not vanish but continues to hover … At last it has come, the moment of ecstatic unity with the All!’ The ironic tone, though still lingering, abates for a moment: ‘If he has not utterly been transfigured, then at least he has been blessed with a hint that he belongs on this earth.’ From here, we might expect some improvement, and indeed John finds a computer programming job which he finds absorbing after the drab misery of his work at IBM. But disenchantment returns: he cannot get started with the writing that he believes will define his life, and love is as distant a prospect as ever. The novel ends on a passively suicidal note: ‘locked into an attenuating endgame, playing himself, with each move, further into a corner and into defeat.’

In Boyhood and even more in Youth, the narrative is peppered with question marks. The young John’s uncertainty about what to feel makes him a continual questioner. Despite the relentless misery, the questions create a comic effect, the irony directed by the writer against his beleaguered younger self. Both books are written in the third person, increasing the ironic detachment the older Coetzee assumes. Even the hopelessness of the ending is comic, especially since the reader knows of the literary triumphs ahead. Choosing to end there, rather than earlier with one of John’s moments of surprised happiness, or later with the beginnings of success, is perhaps an artistic decision. A note of hopefulness at the end would not suit the book’s overall tone and would, strangely, undermine the humour, which is based upon the young John’s self-conscious resistance to anything that might interfere with his poetic vocation, or betray his dour self-image as heir to ‘the stubborn, mean lives that his ancestors lived, sweating in the heat and dust of the Karoo … It was not in the nature of those men and women to be gay and have pleasure, and it is not in his. He is their child, foredoomed from birth to be gloomy and suffer. How else does poetry come anyway, except out of suffering, like blood squeezed from a stone?’

Youth has an epigraph which might be read in several ways. It comes from Goethe: ‘Wer den Dichter will verstehen / muß in Dichters Lande gehen.’ Is the Dichter (poet) who is to be understood Coetzee himself? Are we, in Youth, to be taken into Coetzee’s ‘Lande’ in order to understand him, his ‘Lande’ being the territory of his mind? Or is it a statement of what the young John was trying to do – to enter the country of his favourite poets, Eliot and Pound, in order to understand them? Whichever way we take it, it is essential to remember that this memoir, and its predecessor Boyhood, were written years later; and that, however accurate their accounts of the time might be, they are shaped to a purpose. Self-revelation has never been a favourite activity with him, and exactly why Coetzee wrote them will probably always be something of a mystery on which one could waste endless speculation. But whatever their purpose or motivation, they show the development of that stubborn spirit of resistance which has nothing to do with politics, but which sometimes seems almost to amount to a rejection of life in all its variety, with the trust in others and oneself, and the compromises, which it constantly demands.

Resistance, in the sense of rejecting, or at least questioning, the claims of society that are unthinkingly followed by most people, is ingrained in Coetzee’s fiction. In the earlier books, it was assumed by most critics that this was a reaction to the political situation in South Africa. Most clearly seen in In the Heart of the Country (1977), Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Age of Iron and Life & Times of Michael K, this spirit of rejection, the impulse to slip the chains of what is expected even though the consequences might seem to be an even greater bondage, might be viewed, however obliquely, as a political stance. But what of David Lurie’s resistance in Disgrace? His refusal to defend himself or even to try to soften the consequences of his sexual misdeeds can hardly be regarded as a noble political crusade, although there is a certain obstinate nobility in the penance he submits himself to. From the beginning, he realises that ‘he must grit his teeth and pay, what else?’ for his brief liaison with his student Melanie. But he refuses to cooperate with the compromise suggested by the university’s disciplinary board, the ‘prudent’ approach that might save his job – undergoing counselling, making statements to ‘demonstrate his sincerity’, all the mealy-mouthed pieties of modern socio-psychology. He explains to his daughter: ‘It reminds me too much of Mao’s China. Recantation, self-criticism, public apology. I’m old-fashioned, I would prefer simply to be put against a wall and shot.’ So he loses his job, a matter of little regret in the rationalised university of the 1990s, where his interest in the Romantic poets was barely tolerated in the new discipline of Communications, which has replaced Classics and Modern Languages. He visits his daughter on her small farm, far from Cape Town, and at the end of the novel is working in an animal refuge, helping to put down unwanted dogs and to dispose of their remains in the way he regards as fitting: 

Why has he taken on this job? … For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing … Curious that a man as selfish as he should be offering himself to the service of dead dogs. There must be other, more productive ways of giving oneself to the world, or to an idea of the world … He saves the honour of corpses because there is no one else stupid enough to do it. That is what he is becoming: stupid, daft, wrongheaded.

Is it a penance, one which he can accept because it is self-imposed? Or does he identify with the dogs, disposed of because they have no place in the modern human world, with their natural but inconvenient desires? He tries to explain to Lucy: ‘One can punish a dog, it seems to me, for an offence like chewing a slipper. A dog will accept the justice of that: a beating for a chewing. But desire is another story. No animal will accept the justice of being punished for following its instincts.’  Nevertheless, he submits himself, perhaps unnecessarily, to ‘a state of disgrace from which it will not be easy to lift myself. … I am living it out from day to day, trying to accept disgrace as my state of being.’

So far, Disgrace has little to say directly about the politics of the new South Africa, where the novel is set. However, his daughter Lucy’s stubborn resistance to reporting her rape by three black intruders, or to take any steps to guard against its recurrence, certainly has a political aspect. She wants to stay on her farm, even though she expects that the rapists will return. ‘What if … that is the price one has to pay for staying on? Perhaps that is how they look at it; perhaps that is how I should look at it too.’ Her refusal to be prudent in someone else’s terms, of course, parallels his, but as a father he cannot happily witness her obstinate vulnerability: ‘If she had any sense she would quit,’ he says, echoing her own advice to him: ‘You shouldn’t be so unbending, David. It isn’t heroic to be unbending.’ She finally accepts an offer from her neighbour and former helper, Petrus, to become his third wife in return for his protection. ‘I agree, it is humiliating,’ she tells her father. ‘But perhaps that is a good point to start from again. Perhaps that is what I must learn to accept. To start at ground level. With nothing. Not with nothing but. With nothing. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity.’ ‘Like a dog,’ he responds.

There is little comedy in Disgrace, though David Lurie has a strong defensive sense of his own ridiculousness, and the chamber opera he is writing, Byron in Italy, surprises him by becoming a comedy: ‘It is not the erotic that is calling to him after all, nor the elegiac, but the comic’, surely mirroring to some extent the ludicrousness of his own post-disgrace life. Coetzee’s next novel, Elizabeth Costello, begins sombrely, if not grimly, with the ageing, tired novelist making unsuitable speeches in various settings. Her passions are all out of step with her audiences – animal rights, vegetarianism, the problem of evil in literature – and her views are not received with enthusiasm despite her reputation (based, gallingly, mainly on a novel she wrote in the 1960s). But like a true Coetzee heroine, she resists giving her audience what they want, even pulling the rug from under their polite acquiescence. Having silenced the room by announcing at an academic dinner that her vegetarianism arises ‘out of a desire to save my soul’, she then further alienates the one person who expresses respect for her ‘way of life’, by responding, ‘I’m wearing leather shoes … I’m carrying a leather purse. I wouldn’t have overmuch respect if I were you.’ She is in turn rejected, or stonewalled, by Paul West, the novelist whose book The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg (1980) she is about to attack in her paper on ‘Witness, Silence, and Censorship’ at an international conference in Amsterdam. She tries to explain herself to him in private beforehand, but although he hears her out, he makes no sign, speaks no word, in response. After her paper she sees two alternatives – to stay at the conference or leave, but:

there ought to be a third alternative, some way of rounding off the morning and giving it shape and meaning: some confrontation leading to some final word. There ought to be an arrangement such that she bumps into someone in the corridor, perhaps Paul West himself; something should pass between them, sudden as lightning, that will illuminate the landscape for her, even if afterwards it returns to its native darkness. But the corridor, it seems, is empty.

No neat conclusions for Coetzee’s characters: their resistance, heroic or otherwise, is not to be rewarded with illuminations and resolutions.

But this ‘novel’, consisting of eight ‘lessons’, ends on a note that, if not exactly light-hearted, at least tends towards the lighter end of the spectrum. Elizabeth Costello is confronted with what will presumably be her final challenge, ‘At the Gate’. To pass the gate she must make a statement of beliefs, but she is not prepared to do so: ‘I am a writer, a trader in fictions … I maintain beliefs only provisionally: fixed beliefs would stand in my way.’ This, however, is unacceptable to the authorities, and she is stranded in a world where a parody of Kafka jostles grotesquely with comic-opera pastiche, trying to reconcile her scepticism with the requirement that she believe in something. Eventually she remembers – or creates – a story about frogs in her Australian childhood which she can believe. ‘What a relief!’

Her relief seems more than temporary, just satisfaction at being able to make a sincere statement to the demanding judges so she can pass through her gate. But there are many layers of irony here, and they can be peeled back as far as the reader wishes. Perhaps the resistance that is so much a part of Coetzee’s repertoire is ultimately scepticism: if you don’t accept the usual beliefs of your society, whether they concern sexual morality, censorship or the rights of animals, you are likely to resist the rules and sanctions that arise from those beliefs. For David and Lucy Lurie, this means a difficult life of hardship and risk; for Elizabeth Costello, after the trials of old age, it means endless days ‘in a kind of literary theme park’. At the end of the novel, she is still waiting to be allowed through to something which she is unsure about: ‘There is light, certainly, but it is not the light that Dante saw in Paradise, it is not even in the same league.’

And in his latest novel, Slow Man, what are we to make of Paul Rayment’s graceless refusal to be helped? When Michael K says, ‘I have escaped the camps; perhaps, if I lie low, I will escape the charity too’, it could conceivably be a reaction to political circumstances, but when Rayment refuses a prosthesis to replace his amputated leg, it seems to arise from nothing but a temperamental reaction to bad luck. He knows he is behaving badly: ‘A golden opportunity was presented to him to set an example of how one accepts with good cheer one of the bitterer blows of fate, and he has spurned it.’ It is partly a matter of style: he is old-fashioned, like David Lurie, and rejects the very idea of a prosthesis. His nurse Marijana is the only person who can lift him off his high horse: ‘He would like her to think he bears his mishap gamely; he would like her to think well of him in all respects.’ The novel seems to be developing as a reasonably straightforward realist story about an uncooperative injured man with unsuitable feelings towards his nurse.

Then Elizabeth Costello arrives on his doorstep and the fiction starts to turn on itself. Rayment’s resistance to the ramifications of his condition remains, but his energies are now focused on rebelling against this novelist, who knows all about him and the other people in his life, and who keeps urging him to act in some dramatic way. He suspects that she ‘is at work on a new book, and seems to be using me in it as a character, so to speak’. Costello’s urging is an irritant, but does not seriously affect Rayment’s behaviour, and despite her eloquence he is ‘signally unmoved’:

‘Mrs Costello,’ he says, ‘please open your ears to what I am saying. What is going on between myself and Drago’s family [Drago is Marijana’s teenage son] is none of your business. You do not belong here. This is not your place, not your sphere. I feel for Marijana. I feel for Drago, in a different way, and for his sisters too. I can even feel for Drago’s father. But I cannot feel for you. None of us is able to feel for you. You are the one outsider among us. Your involvement, however well-meaning it may be, does not help us, merely confuses us.’

The implications of this for the relationship between a writer and his characters are both comic and tinged with pathos, at least from the writer’s point of view. When Rayment finally manages to reject her, to send her away, at the end of the novel, Costello asks, ‘“But what am I going to do without you?” She seems to be smiling, but her lips are trembling too.’ After a long line of characters resisting the demands of society, Coetzee has now turned his attention to what would happen within a fiction if a character were to resist its creator. A dramatisation of writer’s block, or a philosophical meditation on a writer’s rights and responsibilities? Both, probably, but the most striking thing about Slow Man is its playfulness. Paul Rayment finds some of Elizabeth Costello’s novels in the library, and his reaction is, predictably, irritable. He discovers that her most famous book is about Marion Bloom from James Joyce’s Ulysses: ‘What is wrong with her? Can she not make up characters on her own?’ The humour becomes almost broad: ‘Why, why? Why does she ask a question and then not give the answer?’ Questions without answers make up much of Rayment’s narrative, and indeed, like the use of characters he has not made up on his own, have always been characteristic of Coetzee’s fiction. Once again, as in Elizabeth Costello, the ironies come in multiple layers.

The use of rhetorical questions, as mentioned in respect to Youth, often has a comic effect: both expressing young John’s uncertainties and allowing the author to comment ironically on his youthful self. It is also a way of expressing scepticism. In a world where nothing is given, every belief or position may be questioned; and when everything may be questioned, of course, there are no reliable guides to behaviour. This conclusion might lead to a complete freedom from restraint and morality. However, in Coetzee’s world that freedom becomes the right to resist any external set of values, while rigorously following an internal compass based apparently on instinct, even while its assumptions are also subjected to the same kind of sceptical questioning as any other value system. Coetzee’s freedom becomes the freedom to question, and to resist without a duty to justify one’s resistance.

Coetzee could not avoid being formed by the circumstances of his childhood and youth. It is almost nonsensical to ask what kind of writer he would have become had he been born in Australia or Sweden in 1940, rather than in South Africa. But many people were born in South Africa in 1940 and there is still only one J.M. Coetzee. One unwary interviewer asked him whether the ‘differences in tone, subject matter and approach between your work and another well-known political novelist, Milan Kundera … could … be due to the qualitative differences in the sort of political oppression you write about’. Coetzee replied: ‘I would hope that the differences between Kundera and myself that you mention are due to the fact that we are two different people, not to the grindings and groanings of history in Prague or Pretoria.’14 As he said later in the same interview, ‘I have no interest in overtly political literature.’15 Politics is for those who have firmer ground to stand on: resistance, on the other hand, can originate from the most isolated individual consciousness possessing nothing but the freedom to think for itself.

Footnotes

1 J.M. Coetzee, ‘Awakening’, The New York Review, October 23, 2003, 7.

2 Nadine Gordimer, ‘The Idea of Gardening’, The New York Review, February 2, 1984, 6.

3 Tony Morphet, ‘Two Interviews with J. M. Coetzee, 1983 and 1987’, Triquarterly 69 (1987), 459.

4 J.M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992) 207–08.

5 Stephen Watson, ‘Speaking: J.M. Coetzee’, Speak 1.3 (May/June 1978), 22.

6 Coetzee, Doubling 341.

7 Coetzee, Doubling 298.

8 J.M. Coetzee, ‘The Novel Today’. Upstream 6.1(Summer1988), 3.

9 Coetzee, Novel 4.

10 Morphet 464.

11 Coetzee, Doubling 341.

12 Derek Attridge, J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 13.

13 Coetzee, Doubling 52–53.

14 Richard Chon, ‘Coetzee: Too Late for Politics?’ Buffalo Arts Review 5.1 (Spring 1987) 6.

15 Chon 6.