For Whom the Nobel Tolls

...and "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee," a commentary on Hegel's master-slave dialectic in the guise of an eighteenth-century African explorer's narrative, together with suitably forged scholarly apparatus...

...In the face of the brutal reality of the South African past, nostalgia for civilization and its values is untenable— the only solace that Coetzee's character Lurie holds out to the reader is the possibility of redemption through an art that accompanies the memorial traces of longing, like the soft trio of instrumentalists on cello, flute, and bassoon accompanying the singer in Lurie's unfinished and perhaps unfinishable opera on Byron's last mistress, Teresa...

...Coetzee's anomalous status as an experimental novelist afforded him the luxury of being ignored by the regime's censors and political police, even while being criticized by the African National Congress's self-appointed intellectual vanguard for failing to adhere to their Stalinist aesthetic canons...

...Although multiculturalism cannot save us, Western humanism, Coetzee shows, is unlikely to save us either...

...Coetzee left England in 1965 for the United States and the University of Texas, from which in 1969 he received his Ph.D...

...in English for a dissertation that applied computerized stylistic analysis to the works of Samuel Beckett...

...Both the psychological novel and revolutionary terrorism are found wanting in Coetzee's depiction of Dos-toyevsky's efforts to come to terms with the suspicious death of his foster son...

...From 1968 to 1971, he taught African literature at SUNY Buffalo, but then his fledgling career in the American academy came to an abrupt halt as the vagaries of American immigration law drove him back to South Africa and the University of Capetown...

...The revolutionary terrorists, for their part, want action rather than words, but can only substitute violence for their own failures of imagination...

...Kochin teaches politics and literature at Yale and at Tel Aviv University...

...Elizabeth Costello is not a novel, but is built around accounts of fictional academic lectures delivered by the title character, an Australian novelist and critic...

...Coetzee appeared on many lists of likely candidates, since his nine books of fiction, as well as his critical essays, have won him worldwide attention...

...The writer voids himself of what is alive within him in writing: His gifts to us come out of pathology rather than fullness and superfluous love...

...The novel is an account of the failure of both Susan Barton, a middle-aged woman cast away on Cruso's (and Friday's) island, and of the great writer "Daniel Foe" to comprehend and retell Friday's story...

...Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello display Coetzee's unsurpassed understanding of the paradoxes and absurdities of the postmodern academy, his critique of multicultural sentimental-ism, and his disciplined inquiry into our ability to go on in the light of the very worst human possibilities...

...Lucy cannot prosecute or even admit what the three men have done to her, because in "this place," South Africa, she can find her place, she says, only by renouncing all claims to rights, whether over her person or her property...

...The American project of a life together in freedom should temper its hopes with an accurate perception of the needs and passions of those who find themselves excluded from our experiment...

...From this rebirth, Coetzee claims, a reader sufficiently versed in Western high culture to appreciate Coetzee's own critique is by virtue of that very knowledge excluded...

...Yet perhaps the decision of the Swedish Academy should have come as more of a shock: Here is a man who does not believe that literature can save us...

...In Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee argues that the Western artistic, literary, and philosophic heritage neither equips us "Westerners" to deal with the moral horrors produced in modernity (the Nazi holocaust, colonialism in some of its nastier African manifestations), nor can it assimilate the teeming masses at the cultural periphery of the West...

...Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Coetzee's first novel to receive major public recognition, borrows from Kafka—especially Kafka's surreal fragments on Imperial China—to tell the story of a provincial magistrate who has to confront the brutality and stupidity of the civilization he is sworn to defend...

...Thus Michael K says of the pumpkin he has managed to grow for himself while squatting on an abandoned Afrikaner homestead, "such pumpkin I could eat every day of my life and never want anything else...

...Coetzee's native victims of colonizing desire pay in their sufferings "the price of being alive," to apply a phrase from Boyhood...

...Coetzee's works expound a critique of the ideals of the modern West and of the possibilities of literature as a vehicle for those ideals...

...In these post-colonial novels, Coetzee studies how colonial projects attempt to subjugate or extinguish the native and simultaneously preserve or revive his voice—through literary depiction or social-scientific inquiry...

...Elizabeth Costello puts on the table the Nazi regime and its crimes, with a brief mention of Hitler's "older brother and mentor," Stalin...

...We are indebted to J.M...

...Youth (2002) presents Coetzee as a student of twentieth century literature and an apprentice computer programmer and writer...

...All of his efforts, from which Coetzee is careful not to exclude his own novels, produce only ventriloquism...

...Coetzee can claim to be both elephant and professor...

...The psychological novel, we learn, is inevitably misread as offering solace, when it is merely the author's transformation of human emotions and relations into a product whose value to life itself is anything but manifest...

...Much of Coetzee's work consists of studies of colonial and post-colonial dilemmas: Dusklands (1974) has two linked parts, "The Vietnam Project," an account of psychotic breakdown in the guise of a RAND-type think tank report on Vietnam by a psychological warfare expert...

...Humanism, as Coetzee portrays it in the character of Helen, lacks the internal resources to respond to the brutality of the apartheid state or the militant ignorance of the townships...

...We tour the squalid slums and the revolutionary underground of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's St...

...Coetzee has tackled both the transient and the permanent difficulties of modernity: rationalist social engineering as exemplified in Western colonial projects from Vietnam to Zululand, modern humanism, and the hope for a rational system of ethics...

...but they live the truth that the value of everything in life comes from enjoying it in freedom...

...Like Kafka and Beckett, Coetzee carries on literary modernism's critique of technological modernity while parodying modernism's aspirations that literature can replace religion as a ground for community and as a moral compass...

...This is no more than Coetzee deserves: His spare, disciplined style enables the expression of a magnificent imagination...

...For Coetzee's biography, one should first turn to his self-interpretation...

...In Boyhood (1997), Coetzee comes to perceive his own perplexed place in apartheid South Africa as an English-speaking son of a liberal Afrikaner father...

...Western humanist high culture can only survive, Elizabeth acknowledges, in the unlikely event that it can find some new and compelling way to respond to the craving for salvation...

...Coetzee teaches the unlucky ones, those neither born American nor capable of becoming American, that one cannot wait for freedom to begin to live...

...Coetzee there depicts his preparations for his self-exile from South Africa as well as his subsequent failure to find a place for himself in early 1960s London as a computer programmer...

...As Lurie discovers, the old prohibition on miscegenation is replaced with a new prohibition on intergenerational sex, at least when not properly paid for...

...The native responds by refusing recognition and maintaining effective silence, while surviving as a mute refutation of the colonial effort...

...Foe (1986) retells Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe...

...Lurie tries to spice up this weary existence by having an affair with a young coloured (to use the South African term) theater student, Melanie Isaacs...

...The lesson called "The Novel in Africa" takes place on a cruise ship to Antarctica, on which Costello is booked as entertainment along with a Russian band and an ex-Nigerian ex-novelist...

...In Lesson 5, "The Humanities in Africa," Elizabeth Costello flies to Natal to be present at the award of an honorary doctorate to her sister, a former classical scholar turned Catholic nun and medical missionary...

...In the last few years Coetzee has finally succeeded in achieving the status of an academic emigre, holding a professorship in the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought and a distinguished fellowship at the University of Adelaide, Australia...

...On its surface, Age of Iron (1990) comes much closer to realism...

...The white male academic, who reads Coetzee seeking self-knowledge, is told that his days are over by one who knows the promises and the failures of Western literature as well as any critic of our time...

...In the Heart of the Country (1977) tells several forbidden stories of colonial desire...

...Lucy is attacked by two men and a boy, the last a brother-in-law to her Xhosa neighbor Petrus...

...That novelist, Emmanuel Egudu—whose name and opinions call to mind Romanus Egudu, a scholar of West African oral poetry— 1 describes himself in the third person: "He teaches in colleges in America, telling the youth of the New World about the exotic subject on which he is an expert in the same way that an elephant is an expert on elephants: the African novel...

...Melanie's boyfriend intervenes so as to break off the affair, and he and Melanie's father see to it that Lurie is brought up on disciplinary charges that result in his dismissal...

...Coetzee criticizes Western high culture from within: His essays reveal him as a penetrating critic of great figures of modernist fiction such as Robert Musil...

...In these, Coetzee deploys his formal imagination as an experimental writer, but allows the reader to get something without having to untangle all the formal play...

...Such a reader, to say nothing of others, must face the fact that after him will come not a global cultural wasteland, but something wholly new, whether local, peripheral, national, or global...

...If Coetzee undermines our hopes in Western high culture, he also shows us that sentimental multicultur-alism offers us nothing beyond the tired seductions and hack philosophy of an Emmanuel Egudu...

...Lurie flees to his daughter Lucy's farm in the Eastern Cape, where he takes refuge from the bleak fact that he has outlived his sexual attractiveness...

...In Disgrace, we see not only the end of romance, but also the apparent end of all distinctively human possibilities for a life worth living, as racial inequality is overcome by tribal chaos...

...Coetzee for the manner in which he has employed his learning, his skill, and his judgment to teach us this lesson and others...

...Curren says to a young comrade in Age of Iron, "Life is not following a stick, a pole, a flagstaff, a gun, and seeing where it will take you...

...In Coetzee's version, "Cruso's" Friday is not a Carib cannibal but an escaped African slave, whose tongue has been cut out, either by an Arab slave-taker, or by Cruso himself...

...Where Elizabeth sees talent wasted, Sister Blanche sees the sacrifice of personality in adoration of the sacrifice of "Our Savior...

...He fears that if he actually puts all his energies into poetry or love, nothing great will happen for him in either field...

...As Mrs...

...His work constitutes a radical challenge to our learned prejudice that Western high culture can help twenty-first century men and women find a humane life together...

...A lesson here for Americans is that our liberal political arrangements may not be currently realistic in many places...

...David Lurie, the subject of Disgrace, is serving out his time teaching "Communication Skills" and "one special-field course a year, irrespective of enrollment...

...Petersburg with Dostoyevsky himself as our guide, in place of Dante's Virgil...

...The colonizer fails to satisfy his desire to hear the authentic voice of the Other...

...Lawrence claimed, through the worship of the dark gods of sexuality...

...Perhaps the most disturbing possibility Coetzee raises, for his typically secularist reader, is that this rebirth might come out of Christian faith in the value of suffering, a faith that demands its believers spurn humanist affirmations of permanent value in the beauties of form...

...Coetzee's work has grown both richer and more accessible in Master of Petersburg (1994), Disgrace (1999), and his latest book, Elizabeth Costello (2003...

...debts as a novelist are to the experimental formalism of writers such as Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett...

...Its gappy narrative and hallucinating female narrator call attention to the prison-house of the text that seems to keep us from coming to terms with life as it is lived...

...The attack, Lurie comes to realize, is used, if not instigated, by Petrus to humble Lucy and force her to accept Petrus's protection and yield control to him of her remaining land...

...In political conditions that seemed to defy moderation, Coetzee was a respected and respectable critic of both apartheid and the ANC's house intellectuals and party-line writers, most notably Nadine Gordimer...

...Speaking through Costel-lo, Coetzee asks whether the representation of these possibilities is a moral duty, or a source of moral corruption...

...Elizabeth has no counterargument for her sister in defense of humanism: She admits that humanism promised salvation— in the eighteenth century through reason, in the twentieth century, as D.H...

...Life and Times of Michael K (1983) presents a disfigured gardener on a quest through a hypothetical wartorn late apartheid South Africa for a patch of land where he can cultivate his own garden in freedom...

...Elizabeth's only persuasive response to Blanche's preaching, and it is a response that Elizabeth refrains from communicating to her sister, holds out the prospect not of salvation through works of the human spirit but through celebration of the moments of bodily pleasure possible even amidst wretchedness and suffering...

...Both works confront the peculiar academic mode of analyzing and representing these possibilities: We go on with writing and composing in the face of these phenomena, despite the fact that we cannot find in Western humanist high culture the resources to confront them forthrightly...

...More important, Coetzee has in his fiction critically explored the notion that literature as we know it can promote humane ideals...

...Blanche then takes Elizabeth to visit her hospital in rural Zululand, where Elizabeth meets Joseph, a wood-carver of real artistic potential who has spent life carving images of Jesus in agony upon the cross...

...Emmanuel himself isn't a good example of either...

...It purports to be the last letter of a retired Capetown classics professor, Helen Curren, who is condemned to die of cancer in what she regards as the hell of Virgil and Dante on African earth...

...As Coetzee shows, a glimpse of this abyss does not disturb post-Christian academics, so much as make them squirm at the faux pas of its being mentioned aloud...

...With Elizabeth Costello we recognize that we are no longer naive enough to fall for Emmanuel's line, while we would still like to believe that we retain the openness that made our seduction by multi-culturalism possible...

...Disgrace shows us the injustice of apartheid and its sequel, racially motivated crime and consequent moral squalor...

...In his sentimental cruise-ship lecture, he claims all of the virtues for the traditional African understanding of life and art, while he refuses to come to terms with anything in the reality of present-day Africa, save its inability to offer him the comforts to which he has become accustomed...

...That his quest takes him through an Eastern Cape province gulag turns out to be more of a problem for Michael's warders than for Michael K himself...

...Coetzee is a disturbing writer because he excavates the lost possibilities of the Western tradition only to extinguish the hopes that we have wrongly placed in Western high culture...

...He has to date published two volumes of memoirs, under the general title of Scenes from ^-rovincial Life...

...As Michael K thinks to himself in his first prison camp, "There seemed nothing to do but live...

...In Master of Petersburg, Coetzee moves from the colonial periphery and the literature of colonialism and empire to the imperial capital and the literature of social conflict...

...He also grows into an understanding of his father's decline from lawyer and businessman husband to impotent drunk...

...You are already in the midst of life...

...Coetzee thus recalls linguist Roman Jakob-son's grounds for rejecting ^ Vladimir Nabokov (at the time assistant curator of butterflies at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology) for a position in literamre: "An elephant is a very fine animal but he should not be confused with a professor of zoology...

...Yet that art can only redeem us if its value is recognized by a human future whose probability Coetzee presents as highly questionable...

...Life is not around the corner...

...For the still adolescent Coetzee, computer programming is a way to fill the hours while waiting to be possessed by Eros and the Muses...

...Coetzee occupied a tenuous intellectual and political position in the waning days of apartheid, which he chronicled in three volumes of collected essays, White Writing (1988), Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (1996), and Stranger Shores (2001), and a volume of essays and interviews, Crossing the Point (1992...

...Sister Blanche delivers a deliberately provocative commencement address depicting the abyss between the humanist hopes of classical scholarship and the theocen-trism of Christianity...

...Yet Coetzee's greatest literary Michael sS...

...Those who delight in metafic-tional gameplaying will note that in lesson 6, "The Problem of Evil," the fictional novelist Elizabeth Costello encounters the real novelist Paul West at a conference in Amsterdam and gives a lecture attacking his real book, The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauf-fenberg, for its lush portrayal of the torture-murders of the failed conspirators in the 1944 plot against Hitler...

...The "Eight Lessons" that constitute Elizabeth Costello range in style from realism in "The Lives of Animals" and "The Humanities in Africa" to mock realism (lesson 1, "Realism"), to a pastiche of Kafka, and they are placed in the book out of narrative order...

...The prize is given, according to the terms of Alfred Nobel's bequest, for "the most outstanding work in an ideal direction," while J.M...

...Using the novel, Coetzee shakes our faith in the edifying virtues of that very literary form...