Friday December 8th

My little green lights in the dark dark night

Dear Gentle Readers,

as you know, I’m a great—though very critical—devotee of the South African, now Australian, writer J.M. Coetzee.

Writing in Bookforum’s latest issue about Coetzee’s own latest novel, The Pole (which I have not got my hands on yet, but which is interesting to me for publishing reasons as well as literary ones—it was first published in Spanish, by an Argentinian press, if I remember right, out of a motivation that appeals to me), Leo Robson tells us that for Coetzee,

The enemy, simply put, is literary realism, which by disguising or denying its own artifice—a move that the term enshrines—combines the delusion that you can present things as they are, saying in essence “Here is the world,” with a desire that the reader get swept up in that world. Realism is not merely a set of conventions but conservative in a larger sense, an act of collusion on the writer’s part with a system of assumptions in which the reader is enlisted. Coetzee has forged a sense of distance, smudging the windowpane in order to challenge prevailing modes of seeing and being, with hallucinatory logic (Dusklands, In the Heart of the Country), an otherworldly tone (Waiting for the Barbarians, Life and Times of Michael K), literary palimpsest or pastiche (Foe), writing about himself as a character (Boyhood, Youth) and as dead (Summertime), dividing the page between competing narratives (Diary of a Bad Year), introducing an author into the fiction (Slow Man), constructing an alternate universe built on literary tropes and nudging in-jokes (the Jesus trilogy).

Robson notes very accurately that Coetzee is not always successful in this windowpane smudgery. I gave up, irritated, before finishing the first of the Jesus trilogy, passionately dislike the widely-lauded, symbolically clunky and misogynist Disgrace, and have generally not been impressed with his recent work. Nevertheless, he remains maybe the most formative writer for me.

I’ve shared with you before my approval of Coetzee’s own diary entries, which often chronicle his impatience with the conventions of realism, with the drudgery involved in eking out the obvious and necessary on the page. It’s a feeling I increasingly experience when writing both fiction and journalism: the idea is already dead and I just have to get the details on the page so the reader can follow along. No fun, that, unless I can get lost in it too.

What I really love about Coetzee’s best writing isn’t the more or less interesting metafictional tricks he sometimes gets up to—reminding us that these are made up worlds narrated by shifty, shadowy figures—but is more about what you’d find in Beckett, say, or Camus, both in terms of style and philosophy. It’s summed up in Robson’s description of Coetzee as offering “little in the way of solace or solicitude, presenting a harsh world in parched prose…”)

Though I see that ‘parched’ prose as austerely beautiful, extremely so:

I stand out in the open watching the coming of the storm. The sky has been fading till now it is bone-white with tones of pink rippling in the north. The ochre rooftrees glisten, the air grows luminous, the town shines out shadowless, mysteriously beautiful in these last moments.

I climb the wall. Among the armed dummies stand people staring out towards the horizon where a great cloud of dust and sand already boils up. No one speaks.

The sun turns coppery. The boats have all left the lake, the birds have stopped singing. There is an interval of utter silence. Then the wind strikes.

As a reader of fiction, I often favour the spare and real-feeling and, speaking of Coetzee, the dour (in his case, this can have its own comic aspect, as if he were the postmodernist literary version of Buster Keaton).

Buster Keaton is his own straight man. Maybe Coetzee, too? Not sure this is the right way for me to bring my natural sense of humour into my fiction though.

Thinking back to the trickier writing of this sometime literary model of mine, to his metafictional stuff, well, I don’t really want to write like that. Rather than using metafictional devices—tricks to show how tricksy fiction is—to remind them that the world they are inhabiting is a constructed reality, not a real one, my hope is the more traditional control with consent in which the reader is hypnotized—able to put the book down at any time, able to suspend their wilful suspension of disbelief, but choosing not to: a direct but voluntary response to my words. I like to entertain, and want that to be at least one aspect of what I do. Literary seduction, I suppose. Yet I do appreciate the refusal to either manipulate or pander to the reader, to make it too easy to slide into that fiction-generated dream, as often occurs in mainstream literary-lite fiction, and particularly when there are interesting political reasons to break the illusion of reality, as I think there often are.

(An aside: the pandering and manipulating tendencies of many mainstream novels may or may not be due to the forces chronicled in Dan Sinykin’s interesting new book, Big Fiction, which looks at

“how we should read” fiction published in the U.S. [and, thanks to the its great dominance globally, elsewhere] during the past half century or so, a period during which every book, no matter its preoccupations or themes, could be said to reflect a greater entity: the corporation.

I need to think about his arguments more.)

Anyway, I happen to like what I think of as Coetzee’s ‘classic’ novels (mostly published in the earlier period of Sinykin’s analysis)—perfectly structured, with gorgeous but restrained detail, often questioning realism and the nature of authorship and narrative but still allowing you to fully inhabit, imaginatively-speaking, a real-feeling world: Waiting for the Barbarians (source of the above Coetzee quote), The Life & Times of Michael K, Age of Iron, and the strange, perfect The Master of Petersburg.

Part of what I have struggled with in my own novel is not exactly the issue of realism, but I think it overlaps with it. See, I find it very hard to choose one approach, one tone, one way of getting into a story or a character, and so have written and rewritten from different points of view, with different character names and biographies, in different tenses and different styles. And this makes sense, because I’m trying to tell a mystery story in a world where there are different versions of and understandings of the facts.

If the novel is, in part, about versions of the story of the truth, then the fact that a novel itself can only be one version or interpretation of what happened or what in fact never happened (because it’s fiction) seems relevant, and challenging. In the end (though it’s not the end, is it, it isn’t over till the fat lady sings and I release the manuscript from my sweaty, uncertain palms), I find myself resorting to some of Coetzee’s own sort of trickery-to-deflate-the-trickery-of-fiction. Attempting, like him agonizingly (I imagine), to make it different, better, more literary—by which I mean more difficult, more authentic, less manipulative. Every time you do a trick, show your hand.

Or don’t. I can’t decide.