The Outlaw Novelist as Literary Critic

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/12/books/review/jm-coetzee-late-essays.html

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LATE ESSAYS2006-2017By J.M. Coetzee297 pp. Viking. $28.

In a 2010 letter to his friend and fellow novelist Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee made a remark that would not come as a surprise to anyone familiar with his work: “I must say that I get impatient with fiction that doesn’t try something that hasn’t been tried before, preferably with the medium itself.” Coetzee has long believed that art is superior to sport because the artist gets to make up the rules of the game as he goes along, while the sportsman must stick to the rules agreed upon by others. The writer who reinvents the rules of the genre in which he writes is an outlaw — a dangerous, romantic, if marginalized figure of mysterious intentions — while a writer who writes as he is expected to is under the control of the artistic circumstances into which he was born. Coetzee has been an outlaw novelist since 1973, when “Dusklands,” a pair of genre-defying novellas that helped introduce elements of postmodernism to South African writing, was first published. His experiments with what can be done with the novel form have continued for more than 40 years, most eccentrically in “Foe,” “Elizabeth Costello” and “Diary of a Bad Year,” most ingeniously in “Life and Times of Michael K,” “Disgrace” and “The Childhood of Jesus.”

“Late Essays: 2006-2017” brings together most of the literary criticism Coetzee has written during the last 11 years. Of the 23 essays that make up the book, nine (most notably a brilliant discussion of Philip Roth’s “Nemesis”) first appeared in some version in The New York Review of Books. Nine others are introductions to books Coetzee has chosen for his Biblioteca Personal, or personal library, a collection of 12 books (one an anthology of world poetry) issued in Spanish translation by the Argentine press El Hilo de Ariadna. Coetzee has explained that he selected for this personal library works that “played a part, major or minor, in my own formation as a writer.”

Among the introductions included in “Late Essays” are those to Defoe’s “Roxana,” Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter,” Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary,” Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” Ford Madox Ford’s “The Good Soldier,” Robert Walser’s “The Assistant,” Heinrich von Kleist’s “The Marquise of O” and “Michael Kohlhaas,” Samuel Beckett’s “Watt” and Patrick White’s “The Solid Mandala.” The collection is rounded out with reviews of lesser known writers like Friedrich Hölderlin, Irène Némirovsky, Gerald Murnane and Hendrik Witbooi, each of whom should be considered an honorary member of Coetzee’s personal library, for each is treated with the same concerted respect shown to those he has elected for inclusion in the Argentine series.

From a personal library, one would expect personal criticism. But Coetzee provides no such thing, if by personal we mean sentimentalized reflections on the moments in his life at which he encountered such books or the lessons he has taken from them and tried to bring into his own fiction. In fact, these essays could be described as antipersonal. The hero is always the writer under discussion. This is a curiosity of Coetzee’s criticism: that a writer who cares so deeply about reinventing the boundaries of fiction would so frequently stay within the margins of orthodox criticism. With the sole exception of the incandescent “Eight Ways of Looking at Samuel Beckett,” Coetzee’s essays rarely venture far from formula: They usually include an overview of the life of the author, the historical context in which the author worked, a plot summary and a breakdown of the aesthetic inner mechanics of the piece.

But within these conventions, Coetzee is as perspicacious and erudite a guide as one could hope for. His biographical sketches of the life and times of the authors he addresses are excellent, concretely informative while also marbled with interesting tidbits. (Robert Walser, I learned, developed “psychosomatic cramps” in his right hand that he attributed to an unconscious enmity for the pen, leading him to adopt an alternative form of script he called his “pencil system.”) But the meat of Coetzee’s overviews can be found in other good introductions by other critics. What can’t be found anywhere else, where Coetzee is unparalleled, is his ability to capture the psychology of individual characters, to lay bare the inner working of their minds, and in so doing bring to light the source of their enduring interest to readers.

Of Defoe’s heroine Roxana, for example, Coetzee writes: “Roxana does not pretend that the virtue whose loss she intermittently laments is something she deeply and sincerely believes in. On the contrary, she is happy to remain in a divided, ambivalent state in which she wants to resist seduction but equally wants her resistance to be swept away. She is well aware of this division or ambivalence within herself. … Implicitly she recognizes that she finds being seduced more interesting (more engaging, more thrilling, more erotic, more seductive in prospect) than giving herself in a direct, unambiguous way; that the prelude to the sexual act can be more desirable, more erotically fulfilling, than the act itself. Seduction, the thought of seduction, the approach of seduction, the imagined experience of seduction, turns out to be profoundly seductive, even irresistible.”

If one is to appreciate Coetzee’s essays, one must recognize how precisely, with what concentration, he lays bare a terrifically complex psychology, giving readers a handhold on which to build even more complex readings of their own. (Readings that would likely, in today’s atmosphere, quickly point out that “irresistible” seduction isn’t the fruit of effective persuasion but rape, a fact Coetzee draws attention to elsewhere in the chapter.) One must also admire the subtle brilliance of Coetzee’s sentences, as in the last line of the passage quoted above, in which seduction is discussed in a manner that itself impersonates seduction, with the repetition of phrases (the thought of seduction, the approach of seduction and so on) heightening the thrill for the reader until the sentence succumbs to the seduction it has performed by landing upon “even irresistible.”

“Late Essays” is filled with many moments of such perfect insight, moments when the reader is left enthralled by Coetzee’s powers of perception. Another example is this gem, on the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert: “What is wrong with systems, to Herbert, is that they are systems. What is wrong with laws is that they are laws. Beware of angels and other executives of perfection.”

At certain points, “Late Essays” can suddenly become “Last Essays.” At this stage of Coetzee’s career, one might of course expect reflections on matters of mortality and finality, or at least an interest in the late style of literary giants. But Coetzee doesn’t dwell on such issues any more than a younger writer would. In one instance, however, he lets slip his admiration for a particular scene at the end of Philip Roth’s “Everyman,” where the protagonist observes at his work, and then converses with, the aging gravedigger who dug his parents’ graves and who will perform the same service for the protagonist when the time comes. After the gravedigger has carefully described the process by which a grave comes to be dug, Roth’s unnamed Everyman says, “I want to thank you. … You couldn’t have made things more concrete. It’s a good education for an older person.”

In these essays, Coetzee is doing for the writers who came before him what I imagine he hopes will be done for him by the writers who will follow. He is gravedigging, with probity, with the greatest reverence for the craft they share, and in this way is saying thank you in the only way one writer can really say it to another, which is by writing about them well.