J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading (review)

It is often difficult for the literary critic to disentangle the "non-Western" (or "postcolonial" or "world") writer from his or her immediate historical/geographical/political contexts, especially in the case of South African writing, which seems explicitly and singularly focused on describing the horrors perpetuated in the apartheid era. This is precisely the historicizing impulse that Derek Attridge struggles against in his study of Coetzee's fiction. Of course, Attridge is not so glib as to dismiss the significance of Coetzee's historical moment out of hand; rather, he seeks to enlarge and enrich our understanding of Coetzee's oeuvre beyond the limited postcolonial binary of the colonized's struggle against the empire. Attridge contends that Coetzee's aesthetics—an aesthetics that shares the "formal singularity" of European late modernism—is informed by a more complicated concern in his "ethico-political realm" with otherness (6). Attridge argues throughout this study, which takes into account Coetzee's fiction, memoirs, interviews, and articles, as well as the author's recent Nobel Prize acceptance speech, that Coetzee is engaged in "the working out of a complex and freighted responsibility to and for the other, a responsibility denied for so long in South Africa's history" (31).

Now, of course, this sort of declaration of "responsibility" towards "otherness" is not new to Coetzee criticism. From David Attwell's 1993 J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing and Rosemary Jolly's 1996 Colonization, Violence, and Narration in White South African Writing through countless articles by literary critics including Benita Parry, Michael Marais, and Gayatri Spivak, the critical focus on Coetzee's fiction has been on his narrative strategy for representing the other. The difference with Attridge's study, though, is in his broadened definition of otherness. Attridge argues that the simple black/white dichotomy relied on by his critical predecessors limits the range of interpretive possibility and greatly reduces the import of Coetzee's project. Indeed, Attridge suggests that in reading Coetzee nothing should be taken for granted, not even the definition of "literature."

Attridge, then, begins his own interpretive readings at what he terms the moment of the "event" of reading, and this yields extremely complex and evocative readings particularly in his attention to structure and style. Attridge resists the pull towards the strictly thematic reading of Coetzee's fiction that a national-political methodology tends to produce. Instead, his strategy is to focus on one aspect of a novel—for example, the narrator's voice in Waiting for the Barbarians and Life & Times of Michael K, the meaning of the word "trust" in Age of Iron, the use of the phrase "the times" in Disgrace—and draw out precise and evocative readings not simply showing how Coetzee's fiction works but how literature works within Coetzee's fiction.

An example of this sort of close reading occurs in Attridge's analysis of Life & Times of Michael K, a discussion that attempts to distinguish itself from the narrowly allegorical readings to which this novel is so susceptible. To bypass the thematics of the novel—the copious declarations on the subject of life and living that Michael K offers throughout the novel that seem unavoidably to dominate critical discussion—Attridge shifts his focus to the style of indirect narration that Coetzee uses to represent K, to the way in which the author focalizes through this simple man while employing a language to which the character could not have access. At one point, Attridge offers us insight into Michael K and J.M. Coetzee through a reflection on the rhetorical questions K often asks himself:

K's thoughts are often in the forms of questions like this; they reflect his somewhat bemused attitude to the events that befall him, the natural consequence of his naïve outlook.… Meditative questions are a particularly effective way of drawing the reader into a character's experience—they invite us to share a moment of uncertainty or curiosity without arriving...