J.M. Coetzee is probably the most complex and intellectually engaging writer to emerge from South Africa. The writer of nine novels, three books of literary criticism, two autobiographical memoirs, a collection of essays and literary reviews, and a collection which traverses the territory between criticism, fiction and philosophy, Coetzee's oeuvre presents a reading of his world which is both perceptive and searing.  

In prose that is both sparse and complex, Coetzee's novels traverse the difficult ground of sketching the possibilities facing the reflexive consciousness in a world structured by inequality and dehumanisation. His has been an important voice in the debates around politics and representation in Apartheid South Africa, and in his prose and criticism he has maintained an insistence on placing South African writing in a wider global and historical context.

As David Attwell, one of Coetzee's most nuanced and articulate critics argues, "Coetzee brings to his work a unique combination of intellectual power, stylistic poise, historical vision, and ethical penetration" (Doubling the Point, 1). Informed by debates in philosophy, linguistics, and critical theory, Coetzee's novels have been characterised as "criticism-as-fiction" by another of his more astute critics, Teresa Dovey.

Coetzee's compact prose holds many important lessons for South African readers and writers and is  possessed of an ethical vision, which transcends the local specificities of his first and immediate realities. After all, he articulates his vision as one which calls for "[F]irst the unflinchingness, then the forgivingness" (Doubling the Point 29) in its reading of history, both personal and political.

The novel transcends South African specificities to comment on the situation of oppressor and oppressed in modernity

Examining the fine line between complicity and implication, Coetzee's novels sketch the ethical and moral implications of living both inside of, and apart from, a world in which inequality and dehumanisation are the rule rather than the exception. Beholden to no particular political position, Coetzee has consistently, in both his fiction and non-fiction, and in the face of immense pressure from his critics, refused to reduce his complex thought on the human condition to a polemic. However, he holds the deepest respect for his fellow South African novelists who took a more direct and polemical approach in their writing.

Speaking of his own work on censorship, Coetzee says that

I regard 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, as Fugard and others were officially, and Brink and others unofficially. This honor I have never achieved nor, to be frank, merited. Besides coming too late in the era, my books have been too indirect in their approach, too rarefied, to be considered a threat to the order (Doubling the Point 298).

This statement is typical of the humility and self-deprecation Coetzee often brings to his characterization of self and work, and also shows the immense respect he holds towards other South African writers such as Nadine Gordimer, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991.

Coetzee's first work, Dusklands (1974), comprises two novellas, the first detailing the dilemmas of a functionary of the United States military industrial complex—one of Chomsky's backroom boys—in his involvement in the Vietnam War, the second offering a fictional reworking of a report of travels into the interior of the southern African subcontinent by one of Coetzee's own ancestors in the nineteenth century.

His second work, In the Heart of the Country (1977; published outside South Africa in 1982), is written as a series of numbered insets which constitute a monologue by a woman protagonist on a South African farm and can be seen as the beginning of Coetzee's overt engagement with the canonical texts of South African English writing—from Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883) to Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist (1974).

Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) brought Coetzee international acclaim. It offers a complex allegorical response to the ethical and moral dimensions of the South African political dilemma. In many respects a response to, and reading of, the death in police custody of political activist and Black Consciousness leader Steve Bantu Biko in 1977, the novel transcends South African specificities to comment on the situation of oppressor and oppressed, victimizer and victim, in modernity.

His fifth novel is emblematic of Coetzee's desire to engage with questions larger than the local conditions in his country

Returning to the South African landscape in his next novel, the Booker Prize-winning The Life & Times of Michael K, Coetzee imagines the consciousness of an ordinary human being skirting the apocalypse that envelops an imaginary South Africa plunged into revolutionary crisis. The combination of his sparse, realist prose and the searing ethical vision offers a vivid and compelling sketch of the life of a human being overwhelmed by the waves of twentieth century history.

Foe (1986), his fifth novel, is emblematic of Coetzee's desire to engage with questions larger than the local conditions in his country. Offering a direct and imagined intertext to Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), the novel invents a woman narrator, Susan Barton, who sets herself up as both muse and antagonist to the eighteenth century writer often thought of as the father of the English novel.

In Age of Iron (1990) Coetzee offers an oblique and uncompromising examination of his country in the voice of Elizabeth Curren, an ageing white South African woman dying of cancer in Cape Town during the worst excesses of the apartheid state's emergency during the 1980s.

Coetzee's first post-apartheid novel, The Master of Petersburg (1994), again shows his desire to transcend local South African specificities and engage with the rich tradition of European literature and philosophy with which his entire oeuvre had been in dialogue. In this novel he chooses the nineteenth century Russian realist novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky as his interlocutor.

The last novel published before Coetzee left South Africa, for  personal reasons which this writer does not wish to explore, Disgrace (1999) examines a particular response to the newly democratic South Africa by a certain kind of middle class, white South African position, embodied by the disgraced university academic David Lurie. The novel was awarded the Booker Prize, Coetzee's second, despite the controversy it caused in South African political and critical circles.

Coetzee's entire oeuvre, up to and including the novel that won him his second Booker Prize, dedicates itself to examining the dilemma he outlined in his "Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech" in 1987:

The masters, in South Africa , form a closed hereditary caste. Everyone born with a white skin is born into the caste. Since there is no way of escaping the skin you are born with (can the leopard change its spots?), you cannot resign from the caste. You can imagine resigning, you can perform a symbolic resignation, but, short of shaking the dust of the country off your feet, there is no way of actually doing it (Doubling the Point 96).

The latest of Coetzee's novels, Elizabeth Costello (2003), and the first to be published since his relocation to Australia , is a poignant examination of the price the ageing novelist of the title is asked to pay for having done something as paradoxically private and public as writing. It offers important insights into Coetzee, himself a writer who has often stated his need for privacy. As he says of his younger self, He is trying to find a capsule in which he can live. perhaps J.M. Coetzee, the man, should be allowed that capsule so that we, his readers, may continue to engage with his writing.

It is important to judge Coetzee's writing by and for itself, rather than ask the man or his life to account for issues raised by and in such writing. An intensely private man who seems to prefer the solitary pursuit of his writing to the publicity of being a famous writer from a small country, he has characterised the journalistic interview as:

An exchange with a complete stranger, yet a stranger permitted by the conventions of the genre to cross the boundaries of what is proper in conversations between strangers. I don't regard myself as a public figure, a figure in the public domain. I dislike the violation of propriety, to say nothing of the violation of private space (Doubling the Point, 64-65).

Here he seems to echo the Magistrate, the protagonist-narrator of Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), who confesses, "When I pass away I hope to merit three lines of small print in the Imperial gazette. I have not asked for more than a quiet life in quiet times." (8).

Later in his career, Coetzee turned from the writing of fiction to the writing of autobiographical memoirs, a shift signaled in a series of interviews published alongside his early literary criticism as Doubling the Point (Harvard University Press 1991). The two slim, compelling and eloquent volumes—-Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life (1997) and Youth (2001)—are unflinching in their examination of Coetzee's childhood and young adulthood, and refuse to be sentimental or indulgent in the sketching of his early years.

Disgrace (1999) examines a particular response to the newly democratic South Africa

They give the reader a telling insight into the novelist-academic's reading of his own earlier life and his world. That Coetzee chose the autobiographical mode, with his usual complexity, during a period when South Africa  was undergoing a public self-examination of its past in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's public investigation into apartheid human rights violations, again shows the kind of unrelenting ethical power of Coetzee's vision.

In one of a series of interviews with Attwell, Coetzee confesses, I feel a greater freedom to follow where my thinking takes me when I am writing fiction than when I am writing criticism. (Doubling the Point 246). Despite the self-deprecating manner in which he characterizes himself as "rather slow and painstaking and myopic in my thinking," Coetzee's nonfictional writings range from insightful and critically erudite literary criticism (the essays collected in White Writing and Giving Offense), and various reviews and commentaries on writers ranging from Salman Rushdie to Nadine Gordimer, to witty and lucid observations on various aspects of South African life. (Here the essays on rugby, photography, and film in Doubling the Point and Stranger Shores come to mind.)

Born in 1940, Coetzee studied at the University of Cape Town and the University of Texas , Austin, where he completed a doctoral thesis on the work of Samuel Beckett, the Irish Nobel Laureate and modernist playwright and novelist, who remains an important influence on Coetzee, alongside Dostoyevsky, Rousseau, and the Czech writer Franz Kafka.

Coetzee spent significant periods during the 1960s outside South Africa, first in the United Kingdom, then in the United States. He taught English language and literature at the University of Cape Town from 1972 until his retirement in 2002 and currently divides his time between the University of Adelaide in Australia, and the University of Chicago and Stanford University in the United States. As a teacher of graduate studies, Coetzee is generous in sharing his engaging and incisive thoughts with his students on topics that have included the construction of identity in eighteenth century prose, the writing of urban landscapes in the prose fiction, American short fiction, and Plato.

If Coetzee's characterisation of Apartheid South African literature as

A literature in bondage, as it reveals in its highest moments, shot through as they are with feelings of homelessness and yearnings for a nameless liberation. It is a less than fully human literature, unnaturally preoccupied with power and the torsions of power, unable to move from elementary relations of contestation, domination, and subjugation to the vast and complex human world that lies beyond them (Doubling the Point 98),

is accurate, then he is crucially responsible for moving the culture of letters in the country of his birth beyond this interregnum, and we, his readers and critics, are grateful to him for the arduous labor he has performed on our behalf. 

In his latest novel, Elizabeth Costello (2003), the protagonist of the title gives a speech when she accepts an award for her literary achievement—Coetzee is himself expected to offer an acceptance speech to the Swedish Academy for his Nobel Prize in early December—in which she says:

Despite this splendid award, for which I am deeply grateful, despite the promise it makes that, gathered into the illustrious company of those who have won it before me, I am beyond time's envious grasp, we all know, if we are being realistic, that it is only a matter of time before the books which you honor, and with whose genesis I have had something to do, will cease to be read and eventually cease to be remembered. And properly so. There must be some limit to the burden of remembering that we impose on our children and grandchildren (20).

Given the value of his contribution to South African writing and culture, and more broadly, to the human condition, one can only hope that this process of forgetting will be postponed as far into the distant future as is possible. Coetzee's writing is an essential gesture towards the limits of what it means to be both human and alive in this tumultuous time in human history.

Works Cited:

• Coetzee, J.M. Elizabeth Costello. London: Secker & Warburg, 2003.

• --- Youth. London: Secker & Warburg, 2002.

• --- Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999. London: Secker & Warburg, 2001.

• --- The Lives of Animals. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999a.

• --- Disgrace. London: Secker & Warburg, 1999b.

• --- Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life. London: Secker & Warburg, 1997.

• --- Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship. Chicago: University of Chicago

• Press, 1996.

• --- The Master of Petersburg. London: Secker & Warburg, 1994.

• --- Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews. edited by David Attwell: Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991.

• --- Age of Iron. London: Secker & Warburg, 1990.

• --- White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa. New Haven: Yale University Press and Johannesburg: Radix, 1988.

• --- Foe. Johannesburg: Ravan, 1986.

• --- The Life & Times of Michael K. London: Secker & Warburg, 1983.

• --- Waiting for the Barbarians. London: Secker & Warburg, 1980.

• --- In the heart of the country. London: Secker & Warburg, 1977.

• ---. Dusklands. Johannesburg: Ravan,1974.

• Attwell, David. J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing. Berkeley: University of California Press and Cape Town: David Philip, 1993.

• Dovey, Teresa. The Novels of J.M. Coetzee: Lacanian Allegories. Johannesburg: Ad.Donker, 1998.

• Gordimer, Nadine. The Conservationist. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.

• Schreiner, Olive. The Story of an African Farm. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986 [1883].

A.C. Fick lives in Grahamstown, South Africa, and teaches critical theory in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University.

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