• 1 See for example Morphet, T., ‘Two interviews with J.M. Coetzee, 1983 & 1987’, in TriQuarterly, N° 6 (...)

1Obtaining an interview from J.M. Coetzee is not an easy task. Such endeavours frequently come to a sudden end.1 Whenever the critic asked Coetzee a question about personal problems or the situation in South African, he met with a rebuff. When Morphet asked him ‘Do you pursue the logic of the fiction for your own sake or for the readers?’ (p. 458), Coetzee’s answer remained vague: ‘I hope I pursue the logic of the story for its own sake. That is what it means to me to engage with a subject’. When Morphet asked him: ‘Whom are you seeking to create as the ideal reader of Life & Times?’, Coetzee did not hesitate to say (p. 459): ‘I wasn’t aware that I have ever taken care of my readers. My ideal reader is, I would hope, myself’. In his second interview, Morphet somewhat tactlessly tried to corner the interviewed into the assertion of some political stance. Coetzee did not allow himself to be drawn into such a trap: ‘Your questions again and again drive me into a position I do not want to occupy… Let me therefore simply say that certain things get put in question in my novels, the notion of arbitrariness being, I hope, one of them’ (p. 464). And those were the closing lines of this interview...

• 2 Attwell, D., ed., Doubling the Point, Essays & Interviews, Harvard UP (Cambridge, Mass., 1992).
• 3 Sévry, J. D., ‘An Interview with J.M. Coetzee’, Commonwealth 9-1, 1986, pp. 1-7.
• 4 Foe, Secker & Warburg (London, 1986), p. 63.

2Coetzee does not like people to infringe on his privacy. Moreover, he considers that it is not for him to comment on his works. As he once said to me, ‘It is for you to decide’. Some time later, in Doubling the Point2 he went further by acknowledging that ‘there is also the question of control, control over the interview. Writers are used to being in control of the text and don’t resign it easily’ (p. 65). This I experienced in 1985 when I also interviewed him.3 We were often interrupted by telephone calls which he answered at once, after which he would get back to the interview, resuming the broken sentence where he had left if as if it had been a written text, as if some page had been turned over. We had decided during a conversation at lunch time that he could decline to answer a question whenever that suited him, with a wave of his hand. As I was going upstairs to his office, I could see a huge anti-apartheid demonstration being organized by students and staff. So, naturally enough, I started this interview with a question about what was happening there. The only answer I received was the signal we had agreed upon, a reaction which left me nonplussed, but which I now understand, even if, throughout this interview, I felt as if I were about to besiege a ‘Castle Keep’ (in Kafka’s Burrow). I could also sense, as is said in Foe, that ‘more is at stake in the history you write’.4

• 5 See note 2. See also author’s note, p. VII: ‘David Attwell and I set out this project in 1989 and c (...)
• 6 Boyhood, Scenes from a Provincial Life, Secker & Warburg (London, 1997).

3Coetzee changed his attitude however between 1989 and 1991 when, for two years, he and David Attwell5 set out on a project which resulted in no less than nine interviews which were commentaries on papers previously published or ‘retrospects’. This is the essence of Doubling the Point, a collection which, together with Boyhood,6 casts much light on the problem I intend to address.

• 7 This from Manguel, A., A History of Reading, Flamingo (London, 1997), p. 265: ‘According to one of (...)

4The interview as a genre may often verge on the autobiography or on the confession. In a forty-two-page article entitled ‘Confessions and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky’, Coetzee has many interesting points to make on The Kreutzer Sonata (1889), The Confessions (1766) and Notes from the Underground (1864). He reaches conclusions which may explain his own attitude. He feels ‘sceptical’ about the proclaimed sincerity of a would-be ‘confession’ which he again calls ‘ambiguous’ and ‘ambivalent’. In other words, a confession is a mere delusion inasmuch as ‘the artist creates his own truth’ (p. 261), with a definite purpose: ‘The end of a confession is to tell the truth to and for oneself’ (p. 291). We are then asked to beware of such forms of writing, of ‘this particular mill for cranking truth out of lies’ (p. 293). To reinforce his argument on the fallacy of a confession, Coetzee chooses for his three authors three episodes which deal with a shameful event (the word ‘shame’ is quoted eight times in ten lines p. 251) in their lives relating to women or to perverse forms of humiliation. He nonetheless stresses that one cannot expect genuine spontaneity in a confession since it differs radically from the secret chambers of intimacy to reach a wide public through the processes of writing and editing. It thus becomes ‘literature’. The writer pretends to open his heart in privacy whereas he is exposing it to his readers, which is the source of numerous distortions and adornments. Truth, if any (but Coetzee, in all his writings gives much credit to this notion), then becomes blurred. The confession amounts to a form of self-justification. Coetzee would have been quite pleased to hear that Rousseau read his Confessions to wide aristocratic audiences in the winter of 1768. One of these public readings lasted from nine in the morning until three in the afternoon.7 So much for an alleged ‘confession’.

• 8 Doubling the Point, p. 391. See also, page 17, from the first interview: ‘in a larger sense all wri (...)

In his last interview, Coetzee begins to talk about himself. As a result, he eventually makes a rather unexpected (though obvious) observation: ‘All autobiography is story telling, all writing is autobiography’.8 There is no contradiction in the author’s eyes, between writing novels and writing an autobiography or answering interviews, only continuity.

• 9 Doubling the Point, p. 338.

The distance now established by the third person, this absence within a presence, enables him to treat his own veracity tactfully and to avoid voyeurism or exhibitionism. It also enables him to remain the ‘master’, the ‘kleinbaas’ of this narration. Moreover, Coetzee is not naïve enough to believe that literature may amount to a disclosure of or a coincidence with stark reality. This is visible in one of his interviews,9 when he comments on a paper he wrote on Alex La Guma, a Marxist writer and staunch supporter of social realism.

• 10 This was basically what Teresa Dovey attempted.

8It is tempting for a critic to take advantage of such a confession as Boyhood to extract Oedipian elements and to apply them to the bulk of Coetzee’s works, with the indispensable manipulation of Freudian or Lacanian concepts.10 What is striking when one reads this autobiography is an overwhelming attachment to the figure of the mother. This child, this subject, this ‘I’ ‘does not want her to have a desire of her own’ (p. 4); ‘He keeps driving her into corners, demanding that she admit whom she loves more, him or his brother’ (p. 14); ‘He wishes she did not love him so much, she loves him absolutely, therefore he must love her absolutely’ (p. 47); ‘He is too close to his mother, he does not want to have a father’ (p. 43). Naturally enough, one could draw a parallel between such elements and the text in Life and Times of Michael K (1983). Yet such interpretation remains limited because the relationship between the unconscious and creativity is far too complex.

• 11 In Doubling the Point, Coetzee also tells us how ‘by dint of utterly uncharacteristic single-minded (...)

Like many of Coetzee’s characters, this young child refuses to submit to the crushing norms imposed upon him by his social environment. He sometimes wishes he could behave like the others. He would like this terrible mistress, Miss Oosthuizen, to cane him (‘He has never been beaten and is deeply ashamed of it’ [p, 9]). Yet he does everything to escape a common fate.11 He sometimes starts malingering so as to escape school and prefers to stay at home, wrapped up in his blankets, though he is a very good pupil. This constructed eccentricity may at times flatter his vanity. He knows he is a liar, but does not admit it to himself. Neither is he without ambition: ‘he knows that if he wants to be a great man he ought to be reading serious books’ (p. 103). He feels a constant need to preserve his independence.

• 12 Doubling the Point, p. 203.

11The works of Coetzee abound in holes, secret nooks, deserts (In the Heart of the Country, or Waiting for the Barbarians ), burrows (Life & Times of Michael K) or islands (Foe) on which the characters have been marooned or where they try to shelter from the outside world. Coetzee has always been fascinated by Kafka’s ‘The Burrow’. He sees ‘that story as a parable about writing’, or as ‘a comment about writing’.12 According to Coetzee:

• 13 See also, in Doubling the Point, p. 341, an interesting definition: ‘Freedom is another name for th (...)
• 14 In Doubling the Point, while discussing La Guma, Coetzee says more about his refusal of political c (...)

This freedom the ‘I’ was already trying to conquer in Boyhood13 enables the expression of desire. In one of his interviews with David Attwell, Coetzee explained how Michael K / Coetzee was left with a choice: Michael could have left his burrow and his pumpkins (a possible reminiscence of Jonah, IV, 9) and joined the guerrilla raging outside. But that solution was discarded because it did not correspond to Coetzee’s desire: ‘The book in the heroic tradition, is not a book I wanted-to-write’ (Doubling the Point, pp. 207-208).14

• 15 See Kafka, F., ‘The Burrow’, in the Complete Stories of Franz Kafka, ed. by N.N. Glatzer, Penguin ( (...)

12The burrow which often appears metaphorically in the works is a place of creation. Contrary to what may happen in the outside world where the turmoil of history and the tyranny of power force individuals and groups to conform to the desire of others (Waiting for the Barbarians, Dusklands or The Master of Petersburg) this man discovers a feeling of freedom. But ‘The cycle safety- danger-safety’ (Doubling the Point, p. 225) through which all his characters have to move is fragile. In this Kafkaian ‘Burrow’, strange ‘noises’ come from the outside world; is it the snout or muzzle of the invading beast?15 (or could it be another interviewer?). This is a place where the creator can expand his vision of time and master it: ‘Narrative must create an altered experience of time’ (Doubling the Point, p. 203). Or, in more precise terms,

• 16 The exchanges established between the novelist, his self, his works and the interviewed may become (...)
• 17 ‘When a writer uses the same syntactic operation again and again, he is signalling a particular hab (...)

Coetzee feels that stories escape him; they write and think for themselves (a characteristic he shares with Musil), and it is his role to follow them.16 As a result, this familiarity with narration, this dialogue with inner voices (‘There is a sense in which writing is dialogic: a matter of awakening the countervoices in oneself and embarking speech with them’ [p. 65]) ends with the emergence of a new space, of a meeting point with oneself: ‘The novel becomes less of a thing than a place where one goes every day for several hours a day for years on end’ (p. 205). This is also a place where the author can enjoy no end of literary experiments and games, moving from one favourite writer to another, from creative writing to criticism, translation, or lecturing activities, wondering why, for example, Beckett makes such abundant use of passivization,17 thus disturbing the order of words. In such a case, a sentence may remain agentless, a phenomenon he perceives as another expression of the irresponsibility of writing and of the liberties one can take with language. It is precisely this ‘omnipotence’ which attracts Coetzee.

• 18 See ‘The Burrow’: ‘My burrow takes up too much of my thoughts’ (p. 334).
• 19 See Foe.
• 20 See in Deuteronomy, XXVII 1, 2-3: ‘Thou shalt set up great stones, and plaister them with plaister. (...)
• 21 See: ‘Kafka... pushes at the limits of language... to think outside one’s language, perhaps to repo (...)
• 22 See: ‘The medium – the median – that is what I wanted to be! Neither master nor slave, neither pare (...)

14Inside this cell, inside this well-protected cocoon – which in the eyes of Coetzee as well as in those of Kafka is described with much irony18 – the writer / creator19 feels elated by this omnipotence as if he could be a law unto himself. Coetzee cannot become interested in politics in terms of personal commitment (something he was often blamed for by people who did not understand what was actually at stake) because he is a moralist. It is impossible for ethics to remain encapsulated within the boundaries of politics; it has to move across the frontiers of the arbitrary, of power. Sitting in the shade of his well-watered pumpkin, Coetzee the moralist elaborates parables of his own for us to meditate on. His works could be seen as a systematic debunking of such received concepts as ‘Truth’ and ‘Law’. The law, in its official version, constantly exerts pressure on individuals, forcing them to take a stand they cannot agree with, forcing them, ‘in the name of the law’, to lie. Why should a child (Boyhood) profess a religion when he actually does not care about such preoccupations? He will then say he is a Roman Catholic. The law is constantly exposed as a system of oppression, from Dusklands (1974) to Age of Iron (1990) and The Master of Petersburg (1994): under its name, terror and crime abound and the ‘Truth’ colonel Joll is trying to wrench from his victims turns the Magistrate into a paltry figure (Waiting for the Barbarians [1980]). Yet human beings are in search of the ‘Truth’ and the ‘Law’. In In the Heart of the Country, Magda has lost touch with the figure of authority by mistaking the genitor for the father. It is a form of compassion which Coetzee probably feels for his creation. Magda’s helplessness and confusion incite her to erect a pile of stones which she paints white, a clear allusion to the Mosaic Tables of the Law.20 She too ‘pushes at the limits of language’,21 but she cannot attain syntactic coherence, her language remains chaotic because it has no grammar, because she has lost the Law. ‘Truth’, the meaning of life, are now beyond her reach, and it is Grace she is demanding from a sky that has been emptied of its Gods and of their Law.22 The ‘Law’ and the ‘Truth’ given by society tend to become meaningless. The task of the writer as a moralist working from his burrow is perhaps to give meaning to a world that has lost it.

• 24 Later, in 1985, he pondered on the price B. Breytenbach had to pay for his rebellion: he was ‘no lo (...)
• 25 See Doubling the Point: ‘A child is born wild; we name it to subjugate it’ (p. 342).

His mother, who is of Afrikaner origin, gives her children English names. As for his father, ‘his accent has more than a trace of Afrikaans in it’ (p. 106). Even the simple problem of the language one can use within the family becomes complex. This is perhaps why so many of the characters (Foe or Michael K) stay mute; in this manner, they escape meddling with the others through language. The boy’s relationship with the Cape coloured people, even on the farm, suffers from a similar and inevitable ambivalence. Can he escape such prejudices if he wants to grow up, if he wants to become a member of the tribe of adults? He would hate to feel excluded.24 These are questions he is not yet capable of answering properly. Even if Afrikaans is the language of the farm, there are moments when it sets him ill at ease. Once more, he comes to arbitrary decisions so as to disentangle himself from choices he cannot and does not want to make: we can now understand why some of the questions asked by critics – South African or not – irritate him. He refuses to be labelled.25 He remains lucid about his situation. Intelligence is a poison. As a child, he preferred cricket (English) to rugby (Afrikaner, obviously South African). But he kept facing contradictions; he was the child of many frustrations: ‘He thinks of himself as English’ (p. 124), but, ‘when he speaks Afrikaans all the complications of life seem suddenly to fall away’. Consequently he must shelter in some recess, and ‘the burrow’ is not far:

• 26 See Doubling the Point where he compares his childhood with that of Nabokov: ‘I too had a childhood (...)

Even if he considers his childhood a happy one,26 he nonetheless had to go through anxiety and suffering. The cover photograph of Doubling the Point shows the picture of a boy withdrawn into himself, his head sunk between his knees. Suffering and the cruelty which lies in its wake have always exerted an ambivalent attraction on him.

• 27 See: ‘Friday is mute, but Friday does not disappear, because Friday is body. If I look back over my (...)

16Staying at Auntie Annie’s, he organizes strange games with a book press. Alternatively (but he is the initiator) the two children put a hand into the funnel where the mealie pits are ground. And then the handle is turned. They are taken to hospital and his brother loses part of one of his fingers. But before he brings the handle to a stop, ‘he could feel the fine bones of the fingers being crushed’ (p. 119). Later in life but earlier in terms of publication, in Doubling the Point, Coetzee comes back to this central problem of suffering. It is a South African problem: ‘Let me put it badly: in South Africa it is not possible to deny the authority of suffering, and therefore of the body’ (p. 248). Coetzee’s work presents us with a full gallery of suffering bodies: Magda in Waiting for the Barbarians, Friday, Michael K, etc… The author is lucid about the possible meanings of the suffering of these victims27 (Dostoevsky provides a clue to such trials with his considerations about Grace through Suffering), and he never presents us with a happy character. The child (Boyhood, pp. 60-61) envies a young coloured who is at ease with himself as he walks past, a boy whose ‘body is perfect and unspoiled’. Yet he ‘remains a living reproof to him’. The body is always surrounded with violence, either inflicted, or sustained. Like in Russian literature, of which Coetzee is a keen admirer, this suffering remains a central problem to all of South Africa’s literatures. Long before the end of apartheid, Coetzee always occupied a very particular place within South African literature due to this fundamental ‘eccentricity’ which he developed as a child. His works can be considered as a vast metaphor of retirement, where autobiographical elements become more and more transparent.

• 28 See in Doubling the Point: ‘Why that revulsion? I can only say that violence and death, my own deat (...)

17Coetzee feels revulsion when he meets violence,28 which he perceives as a death threat. This suffering leads to the domination of the other. Yet the body which refuses to reciprocate the inflicted pain is more eloquent than detailed descriptions of suffering. The reader is forced into self-questioning. Thus the obscenity of the situation into which it has been forced is denounced. The only solution left is that of exile within the body itself, which stays mute (Michael K). The body becomes another burrow, another hiding place.

• 29 ‘I am not a Christian, or not yet’ (Doubling the Point, p. 250).

18One day, perhaps love will step in, a feeling the child discovers with Agnes, a young girl: ‘Is this love – this easy generosity, this sense of being understood at last, of not having to pretend?’ (p. 95). In this regard, Coetzee the humanist is possibly more of a Christian (like Dostoevsky) than he realizes29 and the commentary he makes on the nature of suffering in crucifixion shows how fully he has understood its true meaning: