Reading the Coetzee Papers

The acquisition of J. M. Coetzee’s papers by the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin represents a turning point in Coetzee studies, the effects of which will be felt for generations. For current readers, the most significant effect will surely be that the evidence of the creative process that has produced Coetzee’s authorship will begin to influence how he is read, both within and beyond academic circles. The claims that we as critics make about what and how these texts signify will from now on have to be qualified by what we will come to know about how the novels came into being, and the evidence we have about Coetzee’s distinctive forms of creativity. To make the point in a different way, if we choose to ignore the manuscripts, we will have to do so while making an explicit case for the established modernist position, that is, the case for the centrality of the final, published version of the text as public document.

As even a cursory perusal of the online Finding Aid shows, the collection is extraordinarily complete. Apart from the business correspondence, speeches, awards, citations, press clippings, photographs, and family memorabilia, the collection includes the extensive research materials that Coetzee assembled for his fiction and nonfiction. Most importantly, the collection includes the drafts of all the novels, from Dusklands (1974) to Elizabeth Costello (2003). After Coetzee’s relocation from Cape Town to Adelaide in 2002, the drafts consist of successive computer printouts. Most of the handwritten papers are written on now famous blue examination books purloined from the University of Cape Town.

The manuscript entries and revisions are meticulously dated, conveniently so for those who wish to follow their development. The self-archiving and the dating are curious features of the papers, suggesting that Coetzee may have had an eye on posterity, but equally importantly they would have served the creative process by providing a convenient method for moving blocks of text around from one draft to another during the years of composition of any one novel. There is surprisingly little long-range planning in Coetzee’s methods. He writes quickly, provisionally, determinedly, as often as he can, daily if possible, in search of his subject: the voice, the mode of address, its positionality, its embedding in a distinctive genre and history. The plot is the least stable of the elements and is continually revised. Decisions about titles are often postponed to the very end, to the extent that he is content to refer to a number such as “Fiction No. 4” until the right title makes itself known.

All of this implies absolute faith in the creative process, which brings me to the first and most obvious point about the effects of the papers on our reading: the interdisciplinarity that is now widely celebrated in the criticism (notably, at present, between literature and philosophy) is an outcome of a purposeful but open-ended creativity; it is tenacious but also self-critical and even self-displacing. The process is paradoxical: rigorous, even forensically analytical, but with room for negative capability. For an author with a reputation for severity, the insecurities revealed by the papers are also striking, especially in the notebooks that accompany the manuscripts. These are pocket-sized booklets that we can assume Coetzee carried around when he was not at his desk. By comparing the reflections, self-corrections, and sources jotted down in these notebooks with the longer exam-book manuscripts, a narrative of the work’s genesis and development emerges in each case, including the points of origin, changes of direction, the impasses, and the periods of confidence and fluency.

In the context of Coetzee criticism, I would speak of four surprises in the papers. These may also be lessons or corrections to widely held assumptions, but they confirm one’s hunches about how Coetzee’s creativity works. The first is about impersonality. For a writer who is so famously guarded, who polemicizes against the idea of fiction being a straightforward expression of selfhood, Coetzee’s manuscripts reveal him to be much more autobiographical than we would have imagined...