An Interview with J. M. Coetzee

Q:

Over the course of your career, you've written more about Beckett than any other author. These writings form a truly extensive oeuvre: from your PhD dissertation to occasional essays, from an introduction to the recent Grove edition of his shorter fiction to the wonderful conference piece "Eight Ways of Looking at Samuel Beckett,"¹ and even a recent review of the first volume of his letters.² But when you first wrote about Beckett, he was alive and producing new works. Beckett has plainly changed since then. At the same time, you were a graduate student then, and you have also changed. No less important, you were from a specific place at a specific moment in history: while the coordinates of your world were changing then, they have utterly changed now. Is there an account that would help us make sense of this three-dimensional chessboard: Beckett, yourself, and the different yet overlapping worlds that each has occupied?

A:

Let us not overestimate my involvement with Beckett. There are writers who have meant more to me than he has. But leaving that aside, let me try to answer your question.

My doctoral dissertation, which I wrote in 1966-67, was on Beckett, in a certain sense, but it was equally an exploration of method, of how to do stylistic analysis of prose fiction. My ultimate ambition, I suppose, would have been to develop a method of analysis that could be applied to other bodies of prose too. I was very much a child of the times, the times of formalism and then of structuralism, with their debt to science and their own quasi-scientific ambitions.

What interested me most was the semantic dimension of syntax: how a sentence-shape can bear a meaning which is, if not independent of the meaning of the sentence, at least, as a framework or vehicle, receptive to certain kinds of meaning and unreceptive to others. This is a line of inquiry that goes back to classical rhetoric.

What led me to think of Beckett in this way, namely as a writer to whom the shapes of sentences mattered, was primarily Watt, which in fact occupies an odd place in Beckett's oeuvre. It was written in English at a time when he was thinking of going over to French; it leads nowhere in the story of his development as a writer; and it is an abandoned work. None of this, however, registered very strongly with me at the time. Watt was simply the funniest book I knew. How did Beckett do it?—that was what I wanted to know, not only as a student of literature but also as an aspirant imitator.

The comedy of Watt was largely formal: that much was clear. A "high" form (much of it a parody of the language of philosophical inquiry) was being used for "low" content. What I failed to notice—at least this is how it seems in hindsight—was the Irishness of the whole project: not just the Irish garrulousness of its learned comedy but the Irishness of its humor too (vide Sterne).

The comedy was Irish and to that extent unavailable to me as a writer. I might be able to learn how to make up Beckettian syntactic structures, and those structures might indeed be induced to carry their own formal meaning; but what I would have at my disposal with which to fill them would never be the equal of what Beckett had, because the language and the sensibility he worked with, the language-sensibility, was both personal and communal, Beckettian and Irish.

Thus the chief lesson that Beckett—or at least my explorations into Beckett—was teaching me, a lesson whose force came home to me only years later, concerned the English language, the medium that both Beckett (in 1947) and I turned to, a medium that I naively used to think was neutral and could be bracketed and forgotten. In fact the language that came to Beckett in Ireland, and the sensibility embodied in that language, was quite different to the language and...