The Outsider

The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2003 is awarded to the South African writer John Maxwell Coetzee

"who in innumerable guises portrays the surprising involvement of the outsider".

J.M. Coetzee’s novels are characterised by their well-crafted composition, pregnant dialogue andanalytical brilliance. But at the same time he is a scrupulous doubter, ruthless in his criticism of the cruelrationalism and cosmetic morality of western civilisation. His intellectual honesty erodes all basis ofconsolation and distances itself from the tawdry drama of remorse and confession. Even when his ownconvictions emerge to view, as in his defence of the rights of animals, he elucidates the premises on whichthey are based rather than he argues for them.

Coetzee’s interest is directed mainly at situations where the distinction between right and wrong, whilecrystal clear, can be seen to serve no end. Like the man in the famous Magritte painting who is studying hisneck in a mirror, at the decisive moment Coetzee’s characters stand behind themselves, motionless, incapableof taking part in their own actions. But passivity is not merely the dark haze that devours personality, it isalso the last resort open to human beings as they defy an oppressive order by rendering themselvesinaccessible to its intentions. It is in exploring weakness and defeat that Coetzee captures the divine sparkin man.

His earliest novel, Dusklands, was the first example of the capacity for empathy that has enabledCoetzee time and again to creep beneath the skin of the alien and the abhorrent. A man working for theAmerican administration during the Vietnam war dreams of devising an unbeatable system of psychologicalwarfare, while at the same time his private life disintegrates around him. His reflections are juxtaposed witha report on an expedition to explore the country of the native Africans, which purports to have been writtenby one of the 18th-century Boer pioneers. Two forms of misanthropy, one of them intellectual and megalomaniac,the other vital and barbaric, reflect each other.

One element in his next novel, In the Heart of the Country, is the portrayal of psychosis. Acareworn spinster living with her father observes with distaste his love affair with a young coloured woman.She has fantasies of murdering both of them, but everything seems to indicate that she decides rather toimmure herself in a perverse pact with the house servant. The actual sequence of events cannot be determined,as the reader’s only sources are her notes, where lies and truths, crudeness and refinement alternatecapriciously line by line. The high-flown Edwardian literary style of the woman’s monologue harmonisesstrangely with the surrounding African landscape.

Waiting for the Barbarians is a political thriller in the tradition of Joseph Conrad, in which theidealist’s naivety opens the gates to horror. The playful metanovel Foe spins a yarn about theincompatibility and inseparability of literature and life, told by a woman who yearns to be part of a majornarrative when in reality only one of minor importance is offered.

With Life and Times of Michael K, which has its roots in Defoe as well as in Kafka and Beckett, theimpression that Coetzee is a writer of solitude becomes clearer. The novel deals with the flight of aninsignificant citizen from growing disorder and impending war to a state of indifference to all needs andspeechlessness that negates the logic of power.

The Master of Petersburg is a paraphrase of Dostoevsky's life and fictional world. To die in one’sheart away from the world, the temptation that Coetzee’s imagined characters face, turns out to be theprinciple of the unconscionable liberty of terrorism. Here, the writer's struggle with the problem of evil istinged with demonology, an element that recurs in his most recently published work, Elizabeth Costello.

In Disgrace Coetzee involves us in the struggle of a discredited university teacher to defend hisown and his daughter’s honour in the new circumstances that have arisen in South Africa after the collapseof white supremacy. The novel deals with a question that is central to his works: Is it possible to evadehistory?

His autobiographical Boyhood circles mainly around his father’s humiliation and the psychologicalcleavage it has caused the son, but the book also conveys a magic impression of life in the old-fashionedSouth African countryside with its eternal conflicts between the Boers and the English and between white andblack. In its sequel, Youth, the writer dissects himself as a young man with a cruelty that is oddlyconsoling for anyone able to identify with him.

There is a great wealth of variety in Coetzee’s works. No two books ever follow the same recipe.Extensive reading reveals a recurring pattern, the downward spiralling journeys he considers necessary for thesalvation of his characters. His protagonists are overwhelmed by the urge to sink but paradoxically derivestrength from being stripped of all external dignity.

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John Maxwell Coetzee was born in 1940 in Cape Town in South Africa. His background isboth German and English. His parents sent him to an English school and he grew up using English as his firstlanguage. At the beginning of the 1960s he moved to England where he worked initially as a computerprogrammer. He then studied literature in the USA and went on to teach literature and English at the StateUniversity of New York at Buffalo up until 1983. In 1984 he became Professor of English Literature at theUniversity of Cape Town. In 2002 he moved to Australia, where he is attached to the University of Adelaide.

Coetzee made his debut as a writer of fiction in 1974. His international breakthroughcame in 1980 with the novel Waiting for the Barbarians. He was awarded the Booker Prize in the UnitedKingdom for Life and Times of Michael K, 1983.

After "updating" Robinson Crusoe in the novel Foe, 1986, Coetzee returned toSouth Africa with Age of Iron, 1990.

In 1999 Coetzee became the first author to be twice awarded the Booker Prize, now forhis novel Disgrace, in which the plot, as in In the Heart of the Country, 1977, mainly takesplace on a remote farm in South Africa.

A fundamental theme in Coetzee’s novels involves the values and conduct resulting fromSouth Africa’s apartheid system, which, in his view, could arise anywhere.

Coetzee has also published translations and acted as a literary critic for the New YorkReview of Books for instance. Coetzee’s literary criticism has been published in essay form in journals suchas Comparative Literature, the Journal of Literary Semantics and the Journal of Modern Literature andcollections have been issued as White Writing, 1998, Doubling the Point, 1992, Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship, 1996, and Stranger Shores : Essays 1986 –1999, 2001.

Coetzee’s latest work Elizabeth Costello : Eight Lessons, 2003, is a mixture ofessay and fiction, and some sections have already been included in other published works such as What isRealism? and The Lives of Animals.