J. M. Coetzee and the Novel: Writing and Politics After Beckett by Patrick Hayes (review)

In 1984, when the struggle against apartheid in South Africa seemed particularly grim, Nadine Gordimer published a notorious critique of J. M. Coetzee. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Gordimer faulted Coetzee, a fellow South African, for what she characterized as his “revulsion against all political and revolutionary solutions” (75). She accused his fiction of “stately fastidiousness” (75) and chided its author for presuming to position himself above the fray. In troubled times, she insisted, the South African novelist had an urgent responsibility to engage with history and attempt to shape it.

Patrick Hayes responds to Gordimer’s charge by affirming and examining Coetzee’s central and abiding concern with a politics of reading. Like David Attwell’s J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (1993) and Derek Attridge’s J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading (2004), Hayes’s study is an explanation of and apologia for Coetzee’s engagement with political and ethical systems, though its principal argument is that Coetzee engages with them by contesting and renewing the conventions of the novel. Incorporating more recent texts into his chronological survey, Hayes develops his thesis through close readings of Coetzee’s South African fiction, from Dusklands (1974) through Disgrace (1999), and concludes by scrutinizing the work that the author has thus far published since relocating to Australia: Elizabeth Costello (2003), Slow Man (2005), and Diary of a Bad Year (2007). Coetzee’s latest novel, The Childhood of Jesus (2013) is not covered. Hayes makes reference to Coetzee’s essays, but he ignores Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life I (1997), Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II (2002), and Summertime (2009), the autobiographical trilogy that, ironizing its protagonist, induces in the reader the same kind of fertile tensions that the fictions do.

“It was not midnight. It was not raining,” writes Samuel Beckett’s Moran at the conclusion of a text that begins: “It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows.” Concluding the trilogy of which Moran’s Molloy (1951) volume is the first installment, the Unnamable declares: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” Beckett’s prose is characterized by a rhetoric of assertion and denial, not only in sentences that blatantly contradict each other but also in pairs of characters—Molloy and Moran, A and C, Worm and Mahood, Vladimir and Estragon—who cancel each other out. Coetzee’s career as a novelist was born under the sign of Beckett. Pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin, he studied Beckett’s manuscripts—as well as the South African documents that inspired Dusklands—archived in the university’s Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center and wrote a dissertation titled “The English Fiction of Samuel Beckett: An Essay in Stylistic Analysis” (1969). Hayes contends that Coetzee’s fictional oeuvre is a response to the challenge Beckett poses to the continuing vitality of the novel. It is an appropriation of the older writer’s methods and meanings but also an attempt to extricate writing from the solipsistic impasse to which Coetzee claims Beckett brought it.

Just as Coetzee admired Beckett’s “fierce comic anguish” (48), Hayes, deploying a term coined by James Joyce, characterizes Coetzee’s own fictional strategies as “jocoserious.” He finds in each of Coetzee’s books an oxymoronic interplay of wisdom and folly and an oscillation between verisimilitude and anti-illusionism, between logocentrifugal and logocentripetal impulses, what he calls “referential equivocation” (84). In Life and Times of Michael K (1983), for example, he describes “both the attempt to elevate Michael into a hero, and the attempt to dismiss him as a false icon” (84). Hayes likens the juxtaposition of Elizabeth Curren and Vercueil (in Age of Iron [1990]), David Lurie and the dogs (in Disgrace), and J. C. and Anya (in Diary of a Bad Year) to Beckett’s contrasting doppelgängers. He reads Age of Iron as...