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J.M. Coetzee (b. 1940) |
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South-African novelist, critic, and translator, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. The violent history and politics of his native country, especially apartheid, has provided J.M. Coetzee much raw material for his work, but none of his books have been censored by the authorities. Often he has examined the effects of oppression within frameworks derived from postmodernist thought. Coetzee's reflective, unaffected and precise style cannot be characterized as experimental, but in his novels he has methodically broken the conventions of narration. "He continues to teach because it provides him with a livelihood; also because it teaches him humility, brings it home to him who he is in the world. The irony does not escape him: that the one who comes to teach learns the keenest of lessons, while those who come to learn learn nothing." (Disgrace by J.M Coetzee, New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2000, p. 5; first published in Great Britain by Martin Secker & Warburg in 1999) John Maxwell Coetzee, a descendant from 17th-century Dutch
settlers,
was born in Cape Town. His father was a lawyer and his mother a
schoolteacher. Coetzee
has portrayed himself as a sickly, bookish boys, who adored his
freedom-loving mother, who taught herself to ride a bicycle: "I will not be a prisoner in this house, she
says. I will be free." (Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life, London: Secker & Warburg, 1997, p. 3) At home Cotzee spoke English and with other relatives Afrikaans – his parents wanted to be English. Coetzee studied both mathematics and literature at the University of Cape Town. After graduating, he moved to England, where he worked as an applications programmer (1962-63) in London. His evening Coetzee spent in the British Museum, reading Ford Madox Ford, and seeking the meaning of life, as he later said. From London he moved to Bracknell, Berkshire, where he worked as a systems programmer for a computer company. In 1969 Coetzee received his Ph.D. from the University of
Texas with a dissertation on Beckett. From 1968 to 1971 he taught at the State
University of New York at Buffalo. While in Buffalo, Coetzee started to
Write his first book, Dusklands
(1974), which consists of two closely related novellas, one about
America and Vietnam, the other, 'The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee,' set
in the 1760s. In 1972 he became a lecturer at the University of Cape
Town, at that time an institution for whites, and was later appointed
professor of literature. With
his partner, Professor Dorothy Driver, Coetzee settled
in 2002 in Adelaide, Australia. In an interview with Australian
television he said: "Leaving a country is, in some respects, like the
break-up of a
marriage. It is an intimate matter." ('Something is rotten in the rainbow nation' by Chris Otton, Mail & Guardian, 19 October 2006, https://mg.co.za/article/2006-10-19-something-is-rotten-in-the-rainbow-nation/. Accessed 1 July 2025)
Between 2014 and 2018, Coetzee was a visiting professor at the
Universidad de Nacional General San Martín in Argentina. He
directed a seminar series entitled "Literatures of the South". Coetzee's works cannot be classified as belonging to any specific postmodernist intellectual current. His essays reveal interest in linguistics, generative grammar, stylistics, structuralism, semiotics, and deconstruction. The dilemmas of his novels are based on South African reality, but often presented in a timeless, metafictional form and carrying a plurality of meanings. In the Heart of the Country (1977), in which the central character is a rebellious, sexually deprived daughter of a sheepfarmer, Coetzee examined the conventions of the South African plaasroman, or farm novel. The calmly written torture scenes of Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) questioned the voyeuristic nature of fiction. The title of the novel referred to a poem by Constantin Cavafy: "and now, what will become of us without / barbarians? / These people were a kind of solution." Life and Times of Michael K
(1983) won the Booker
Prize, but
Coetzee did not attend the ceremonies. (In some sources, Coetzee's
second name is Michael, or Marie.) The protagonist of the story, set in
a future Cape Town and Karoo, is a descendant of Franz Kafka's
characters, who never find out the meaning of their suffering, like the
victim of the execution machine in the short story 'In der
Strafkolonie' (1919). Michael K eventually ends up in a concentration
camp. Cynthia Ozick wrote in her review: "Mr. Coetzee's subdued yet
urgent lament is for the sadness of a South Africa that has made
dependents and parasites and prisoners of its own children, black and
white." ('A Tale of Heroic Anonymity,' The New York Times, December 11, 1983) Foe (1986) played with Daniel Defoe's classic novel Robinson Crusoe. In the story a woman, Susan Barton, shares the island with Robinson Cruso and Friday. "I am cast away. I am all alone," she says without getting any sympathy from Cruso, the cruel tyrant of his small empire. After they are rescued, Susan meets Daniel Foe and becomes his muse, whom he forgets. Friday remains mute, his tongue is cut, and he is never allowed to tell his own tale. In The Master of Petersburg (1994) the protagonist is the famous Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky, who tries to understand the death of his stepson, Pavel Alexandrovich Isaev. In his sorrow he takes the role of Orpheus: "He thinks of Orpheus walking backwards step by step, whispering the dead woman's name, coaxing her out of the entrails of hell; of the wife in graveclothes with he blind, dead eyes following him, holding out limp hands before her like a sleepwalker. No flute, no lyre, just the word, the one word, over and over." (The Master of Petersburg, London: Minerva, 1995, p. 5; originally published in Great Britain by Martin Secker & Warburg in 1994) Coetzee himself has lost his son. He died in a mysterious fall from a high balcony. Before producing Age of Iron (1990) Coetzee also
suffered from a personal tragedy - his ex-wife died of cancer. Boyhood:
Scenes from Provincial Life (1997) started Coetzee's
semi-autobiographical series, which continued in Youth: Scenes from
Provincial Life II (2002). Both works are written in the third
person. "Boyhood and Youth,
after all, aren't an
objective record of Coetzee's young life," William Deresiewicz wrote in
his review, "they are the 50-something Coetzee's reconstruction,
seven or eight novels later, of that life." ('Third-Person Singular,' The New York Times, July 7, 2002) The third volume of the
autobiography, Summertime
(2009), introduces a fictional
character, Vincent, who serves as a biographer of the author – already
dead. Basically, the novel is a continuation of Coetzee's existentialist narrative practices, which manifest in autobiographical masks, impersonality, and the play between what is hidden and what is revealed. "Are all autobiographies, all life-narratives, not fictions," asks Coetzee in The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy (2015), "at least in the sense that they are constructions (fiction from Latin fingere, to shape or mould or form?)" (Ibid., p. 3) The Childhood of Jesus
(2013),
set in an unnamed Hispanic country, is an allegorical novel
dealing with the construction of memory and identity but also touching
upon topical
issues, such as the plight of immigrant workers. When the five-year-old David arrives in the new land with Simón, who is taking
care of him, he asks, what are we here for. Simón's answer is: "We have
been given a chance to live and we have accepted that chance. It is a
great thing, to live. It is the greatest thing of all." (The Childhood of Jesus, London: Vintage Books, 2014, p. 21; first published in Great Britain by Harvill Secker, 2013) There
are many
references to the philosophy of reincarnation; Simón is the earlier
name of St. Peter the Apostle. He tells Davis that death is a great
adventure, "to start anew, to be washed clean."
Originally Coetzee had hoped that the novel would appear with a blank
cover and a blank title page. David's story continued in The Schooldays of Jesus (2016). In The Death of Jesus (2019), which completed the trilogy, it is still hidden from David, why he is here – why he is where he is. In Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (2003) Coetzee invented his female alter ego, a famous writer, who travels all over the world and gives speeches and academic lectures. In the United States she discusses and analyzes Kafka's monkey story 'A Report to the Academy' (lesson 1), in England at the fictional Appleton College she drew a parallel between gas chambers and the breeding of animals for slaughter (lesson 3), and in Amsterdam her subject is the problem of evil (lesson 6). As a material Coetzee used his own academic lectures, but at the same time he strips bare Costello's intellectual lifestyle – although her arguments are always fresh and seductive, the result of all her theoretizing is that she starts resemble more and more the copy of Kafka's primate, whose basic predicletions and moral ideas are contrary to the real world. Costello resurfaced in Slow Man (2005), about a misanthropic photographer, who has lost his leg in an accident and who falls in love with a married Croat woman. In this story the protagonist is perhaps a figure imagined by Costello. For further reading: Countries of the Mind: The Fiction of J.M. Coetzee by Dick Penner (1989); A Story of South Africa: J.M. Coetzee's Fiction in Context by Susan V. Gallagher (1991); Doubling the Point: J.M. Coetzee, Essays and Interviews, ed. by David Atwell (1992); J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing by David Attwell (1993); The Writings of J.M. Coetzee, ed by Michael Valdez Moses (1994); Critical Perspectives on J.M. Coetzee, ed. by Graham Huggan and Stephen Watson, introduction by Nadine Gordimer (1996); Colonization, Violence, and Narration in White South African Writing: Andre Brink, Breyten Breytenbach, and J.M. Coetzee by Rosemary Jane Jolly (1996); Pen And Power.A Post-Colonial Reading of J.M. Coetzee and Andre Brink by Sue Kossew (1996); J. M. Coetzee by Dominic Head (1998); Critical Essays on J.M. Coetzee, ed. by Sue Kossew (1998); Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning: J.M. Coetzee, Wilson Harris, and Toni Morrison by Sam Durrant (2003); J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face-to-face with Time by David Attwell (2016); J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus: The Ethics of Ideas and Things, edited by Jennifer Rutherford and Anthony Uhlmann (2017); The Intellectual Landscape in the Works of J.M. Coetzee, edited by Tim Mehigan ans Christian Moser (2018); Reading Coetzee's Women, edited by Sue Kossew and Melinda Harvey (2019); J.M. Coetzee: Truth, Meaning, Fiction by Anthony Uhlmann (2020); Metaphysical Exile: on J.M. Coetzee's Jesus Fictions by Robert B. Pippin (2021); J.M. Coetzee and Neoliberal Culture by Andrew Gibson (2022); Monstrosity, Alienation, and Impossibility of Communication in J.M. Coetzee's Novels by Roohollah Datli Beigi (2025); J.M. Coetzee and Christianity by Alicia Broggi (2026) Selected works:
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