Reading Coetzee, Eventually

Our major critics and our major authors, recognizable even in this age in which the very ideas of "the major," of "the author," and even of "our" (or anyone's) right to declare on such matters have fallen under such clouds of suspicion and, in some corners, attracted such outright hostility—our major critics and our major authors have tended to find one another, the major critical career, or a major portion thereof, a major idea, henceforth associated with the critic in question, often originating in the critic's sustained engagement with the work of some single major author. Mack and Pope, Hartman and Wordsworth, Frye and Blake, Van Ghent and Dickens, Bloom and Blake (then Shelley, then Yeats, then . . . Shakespeare, perhaps), Ellmann and Yeats, Trilling and Forster, Kenner and Joyce, Bakhtin and Dostoyevsky, Vendler and Keats, Gilbert and Gubar and Brontë, Greenblatt and Shakespeare . . . the list could extend into the present, in which case one could do worse than nominate the following pair: Attridge and Coetzee.

This judgment does not overlook Derek Attridge's impressive body of previous work, especially in or adjoining Joyce studies, some of which has indeed prepared the ground for this study.¹ Nor does it in any way attempt to minimize the value of the influential commentaries on J. M. Coetzee contributed by, among others, Susan Van Zanten Gallagher, Dominic Head, Rita Barnard, Brian Macaskill, Michael Moses, and David Attwell (Attridge's York colleague), contributions that by virtue of their very success in occupying certain areas of critical terrain may have specified the space (or, as we will see, the time) here explored so richly by Attridge. The point is to recognize an almost perfect aligning of sensibilities, critical and creative. In brief, I think that Lars Engle is correct to call Attridge's J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event "the best work on Coetzee to date," a work that "will prove to be a benchmark of criticism on an author of lasting importance" (back cover). Indeed, it is difficult to imagine any scrupulous and informed meditation on Coetzee henceforth that would choose to ignore this discussion. In the future it will be hard to think of Derek Attridge without thinking of Coetzee; it may be hard to think of Coetzee without thinking of Attridge.

One quiet achievement of J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading emerges from an important literary historical ambition announced very early in the book. Attridge will be aiming, he declares, to remove Coetzee from the "postmodern" literary historical box into which some critics have been trying to stuff him. Characteristically, Attridge proceeds by criticizing not the critic but the box. Indeed, boxing itself is addressed in the early pages of the book, pages that lucidly define a few of the serious problems arising upon the attempt to distinguish the "diverse contemporaneous cultural practices" of modernism and postmodernism (4). Unlike skeptics like the late Richard Rorty, however, who by the late nineties had given up on the entire category of the postmodern, Attridge still finds at least one formulation of the modernism-postmodernism opposition both real and relevant, with modernism therefrom emerging as much the preferable of the two. Not that he thus offers a lengthy defense of modernism, or an apology for it; rather, he seeks to distinguish the ethical and general cultural good that modernism did and could still do, citing what "begins in the modernist period," "the practice of formal innovation and disruption" (4), the "foregrounding of language and other discursive and generic codes through its formal strategies," thus "testing and unsettling . . . deeply held assumptions of transparency, instrumentality, and direct referentiality" (30).

Attridge stresses the essentially critical, "antirealist" dimension of modernism (22), or at least "certain aspects" of it (13); he is most interested in modernism's capacity to "remind[ ] the reader forcibly of the conventionality of the fictional text" (13), its power to "disrupt[ ] the illusion of realistic narrative," thus exhibiting...