David Attwell Reveals the Four “Surprises” he Discovered in Reading JM Coetzee’s Manuscripts

The UCT Summer School Extension programme welcomed South African academic David Attwell, visiting Head of English at the University of York, to the Kramer Building earlier this month for a series of two lectures on JM Coetzee.

The first seminar was titled “Autobiography Into Fiction: JM Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K”, and was attended by a cohort of Attwell’s students visiting Cape Town from the University of York.

Attwell based the talks on an expanded analysis of the reclusive author’s papers. His exploration into Coetzee’s private world was facilitated by the opening of the JM Coetzee Archive by the University of Texas’ Harry Ransom Center last year.

Attwell, who is highly regarded worldwide for his in-depth analysis of Coetzee’s oeuvre, is the author of JM Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (Perspectives on South Africa). He edited Coetzee’s Doubling the Point, co-edited The Cambridge History of South African Literature with Derek Attridge, and Bury Me at the Marketplace: Es’kia Mphahlele and Company. Letters 1943–2006 with Chabani Manganyi.

Finuala Dowling welcomed Attwell, noting that since he edited Doubling the Point, Coetzee’s intellectual autobiography, it has been “almost impossible to write about either Coetzee or South African literature without beginning one’s bibliography at ‘Attwell’”.

“Soon,” she added, “we’ll be able to place besides Doubling the Point, as its matching book-end, David’s critical biography, JM Coetzee and the life of writing, face to face with time.” This manuscript is scheduled for publication in 2015 by Jacana Media.

Dowling said Attwell’s work was the result not just of his scrutiny last year of the original notebooks and manuscripts but “a unique and enduring rapport between a writer and his critic”. She said that relationship was an ongoing dialogue between two remarkably attuned minds, which began many years ago at UCT, when Attwell registered for an MA under Coetzee’s supervision. “It is particularly fitting that the subject of tonight’s lecture is The Life and Times of Michael K, a novel which was set in Cape Town, had its genesis in this city, and was written on this university’s stationery!” Dowling added.

UCT exam books bound between a piece of cardboard, and held together with what appears to be a
segment clipped from a wire hanger. Photo by Alicia Dietrich, courtesy of the Harry Ransom Centre.

Attwell began by expressing his delight to be back on the UCT campus, and to be speaking on Coetzee where the author had spent most of his academic career. “Coetzee’s studies are a global project, a global undertaking,” he said. “There are centres named after him, centres of creative writing, centres for creative and performing arts named after him, in places at other ends of the world – Adelaide, Australia, and Bogota, Columbia. There is even an asteroid named after Coetzee.”

In his talk, Attwell discussed the four main surprises that had emerged in the process of reading Coetzee’s manuscripts, and the interrelationship of fiction and autobiography, particularly in the genesis and development of The Life and Times of Michael K, which won the Booker Prize in 1983.

“The first surprise appearing in Coetzee’s manuscripts has to do with impersonality,” Attwell said. “For a writer who is so famously guarded, who polemicises against the idea of fiction being a simple expression of reality, Coetzee’s manuscripts reveal him to be much more autobiographical than one would have imagined.” With some exceptions, such as Foe, which is a reworking of Robinson Crusoe, Attwell believes Coetzee’s fiction often derived from personal experience, with his “confessional impulse at least as strong as the impulse to self-masking”.

Attwell said this discovery reminded him of the true meaning of aesthetic detachment: “It’s not a point of departure, it’s a point of arrival, a progressive writing out of the self. The taboo in literary criticism is that the text is a public document, but that taboo disables us from appreciating that the disappearance of the author into the work is actually a cultural artefact, the result of a particular orientation towards the creative process.

“The arch-theorist of impersonality was TS Eliot. His influence on literary criticism was very strong because of this. That influence was so strong that we’ve actually forgotten what he meant. For Eliot, the creation of a work of art was actually a process of self extinction. The self must be present before it can be extracted from the text, as it were, before it can be extinguished. This is the direction that Coetzee followed in his early and mid career.”

The second surprise was insecurity: “Coetzee’s famous control, his minimalism, his taut management of materials, is related to procedural indirection, to an acute self-consciousness. We’ve known this because he’s spoken about writing as a matter of awakening the counter-voices in oneself. Carrol Clarkson’s study of Coetzee’s linguistics confirms this. What is seen in the papers, is just how much insecurity this version of creativity entails. At times it is almost debilitating insecurity. Getting through passages of self-doubt often involved Herculean levels of effort.”

The third surprise articulated by Attwell related to the metafictional quality of Coetzee’s writing. “Metafiction is writing about writing, the building into work of an implicit commentary on the work itself,” he said. “Coetzee is renowned for doing this but the metafiction is not developed programmatically as a way of making general statements about language or art or fictionality. Even though this is a widespread assumption of literary criticism – there is even a popular view that Coetzee writes novels to expound principals derived from post-structuralist theory, for example.”

Attwell believes this is wide of the mark: “There’s an existential impulse that informs the metafiction. A typical question he would pose for himself in his notebook, for example, would be, ‘Where in this work is there room for me?’ That was something he often writes to himself. Or, in a more sophisticated form, ‘When is this book going to achieve self-consciousness?’”

Attwell then referred to Robert Alter’s Partial Magic: The Novel as Self-Conscious Genre, finding an observation recorded in Coetzee’s notes: “Alter correctly observes that the self-conscious novel is aware of impermanence and death in the way that realism cannot be. He’s on the right track. As a result of this strand of thinking in Coetzee’s work, I’ve subtitled my book, ‘Face to Face with Time’. The key element of his authorship involves pushing himself to the point at which he begins to confront existential questions, about himself and about authorship too.”

For Attwell, the fourth and final surprise had to do with the intertextuality that peppers Coetzee’s work. “However, these references don’t precede, rather, they follow the work of invention,” Attwell said. “The allusions enter only once the project has found its own feet. Often this intertextuality is a result of a reading campaign which he will embark on in order to resolve particular difficulties that have arisen in the development of the work.”

Should these surprises even be surprises? Or are they are startling only because of the myths that circulate about Coetzee? “Really,” said Attwell, “it should not come as a surprise to us to discover that Coetzee is human, after all.”

Attwell enjoyed discovering some of the “disarmingly personal gems” he’d come across in the archive. He shared an image of Coetzee’s school notebook dating back to 1948, when the author, aged eight, did a project on bees. “Critics write about his interest in animals, in particular his interest in insects,” Attwell observed. Another of Attwell’s favourites was a photograph of the top of an oak tree in the Coetzee home in Rosebank, which he says he hopes to use on the cover of his next book.

On screen, Attwell showed another remarkable find, a detailed hand-drawn map Coetzee had made as a young man visiting the British Museum. Coetzee, who was reading Burchell’s Travels in the Interior of South Africa, “constructed a beautiful map of where Burchell had been through the country. The isolated boy with an Afrikaner background was reinventing himself in London, but hanging on to a South African identity somehow, realising that that identity was fundamental to the writing”.

The next notebook entry, which illustrated the germination of Coetzee’s idea for The Life and Times of Michael K, was dated 17.X.79 in Coetzee’s neat, orderly script. The provocation was a household burglary in suburban Cape Town.

“Coetzee spent most of 1979 in the USA on sabbatical leave from UCT, refreshing his linguistics, attending seminars on syntax in the departments of linguistics at the University of Texas, at Austen, and at Berkley. He was also finishing Waiting for the Barbarians during those travels,” Attwell said.

Soon after returning to his Rondebosch home, Coetzee experienced a burglary. “The following month he sketched a plan: A man of liberal conscience returns home to discover his home has been broken into and vandalised. He reports the incident to the police but he quickly learns that they are more interested in keeping the lid on the suppressed classes than they are in petty crime. Having effectively no recourse to the law he succumbs to rage. He recklessly drives into the townships posting notices offering rewards, too angry to notice the squalor around him. Matters come to a head when there is another house invasion when he is present and he shoots the intruder. Inured to violence now, and out of control, he calls down a plague on both houses and begins a vendetta.”

Attwell outlined the model Coetzee chose for this story: Heinrich von Kleist’s Romantic novel of 1810, Michael Kolhaus. “Set in the late medieval period, a horse dealer is stopped on the way to market and a license is demanded. Unable to produce one, his horses are confiscated. It turned out the officials are corrupt so Kolhaus becomes an outlaw, embarking on a campaign of robbery and insurrection.”

Attwell described how the style of Kleist’s book interested Coetzee, and offered further extracts from journal entries that outlined the novel: “Michael K started with concept of vendetta, and Coetzee briefly imagined Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country rewritten as vendetta with the theme of the theft of the good land underpinning the novel. The protagonist’s rage was to be fuelled by the discovery that burglars used the typescript to wipe their backsides! Michael K then drifts from being an intellectual to being a working-class coloured.”

Attwell read out Coetzee’s fiery self-scrutiny about the state of the country: “I am outraged by tyranny, but only because I am identified with the tyrant, not because I love (or ‘am with’) their victims. I am incorrigibly an elitist (if not worse); and in the present conflict the material interests of the intellectual elite and the oppressors are the same. There is a fundamental flaw in all my novels: I am unable to move from the side of the oppressors to the side of the oppressed. Is this a consequence of the insulated life I lead? Probably.”

Attwell further examined the spiritual difficulties and contradictions Coetzee wrestled with. The notion of how to attach an outlaw narrative to the outrage he felt as a white victim of crime was one Coetzee pondered deeply. Attwell suggested that in the questions “How do I find my own voice?” and “How do I attain consciousness?” Michael K’s innocence existed as an expression of Coetzee’s own need to attain consciousness. He also explored Coetzee’s need to move away from verisimilitude, with his utilisation of the second narrator in the novel crucial to that requirement, enabling Michael K to become an elusive figure.

The lecture took place just days before the death of Nadine Gordimer, and Attwell mentioned how she had argued in a review that Coetzee did not recognise victims. Coetzee had felt the smart of her criticism, which he perceived as an expression of his lack of political courage.

Attwell’s focus turned to the different literary critical elements in Coetzee’s work, to his elusiveness, insecurity and impersonality. “He was a very guarded figure, tremendously self masked. In each category we learn something new about his authorship. There’s a different game now. Pursue the making of art as much as it is to pursue the art.”

A vibrant question and answer session commenced with interesting responses and queries from some of the academics in the audience. Dowling, Leon de Kock, Lucy Graham and Herman Wittenberg offered in-depth insights, and Attwell fielded questions about intertextuality, as well as the ethics of scrutinising Coetzee’s journals. He posited that Coetzee was “such an enormous figure” and mentioned that Hedley Twidle’s Bodley Head/FT Essay Prize. In the essay Twidle, who was also in the audience, had written about “getting past” Coetzee in a South African context. Attwell suggested that perhaps we had, rather, to “go through him, to immerse ourselves in him, to try to understand the James Joyce of South Africa”, adding that nobody in Dublin would trash Joyce, and nobody in the USA would want to circumvent William Faulkner. “It’s not the same, but Coetzee is as big a figure in our literary firmament,” he insisted.

“The notebooks are a rich resource for the students of the future. The entire archive, some 155 boxes of his papers, are now in the public domain and are very revealing. Some personal letters have been restricted and Coetzee has written humorously about this. He said that the literary executors sit with an author’s material after his or her death. The world wants the material but the literary executors make a decision that the author wasn’t competent to agree to make them available, so they disregard the author’s wishes. That just happened with Patrick White. If you want to destroy your papers, make sure you do it yourself, while you still can, so that somebody else doesn’t!”

In conclusion, Attwell said that the full disclosure available from these documents will enable a vital debate to continue: “The integrity of Coetzees’s overall life, completely immersed, will shine through.”

Liesl Jobson tweeted live from the event using the hashtag #livebooks

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Book details

• JM Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (Perspectives on South Africa) by David Attwell
  EAN: 9780520078123
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• Life and Times of Michael K by JM Coetzee
  EAN: 9780099479154
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• Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews by JM Coetzee, edited by David Attwell
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  EAN: 9780674215184
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