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Mastering authority: J.M. Coetzee’sDiary of a Bad YearDavid Attwell aa University of York, United KingdomPublished online: 18 Mar 2010.
To cite this article: David Attwell (2010) Mastering authority: J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year ,Social Dynamics: A journal of African studies, 36:1, 214-221, DOI: 10.1080/02533950903562575
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Social DynamicsVol. 36, No. 1, March 2010, 214–221
ISSN 0253-3952 print/ISSN 1940-7874 online© 2010 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/02533950903562575http://www.informaworld.com
Mastering authority: J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year
David Attwell
University of York, United KingdomTaylor and FrancisRSDY_A_456733.sgm10.1080/02533950903562575Social Dynamics0253-3952 (print)/1940-7874 (online)Original Article2010Taylor & Francis361000000March [email protected]
J.M. Coetzee’s fiction has, from its inception, parodied language which claims tospeak as the public use of reason. Diary of a Bad Year departs from this positionto some degree by offering a series of public reflections on the times; however,these reflections are embedded within a narrative structure which disallows usfrom taking them at face value. Such narrative framing raises the question ofauthority: not only the authority of the reflections themselves, but the authority ofthe voice and the voice in the text. The relationship between fiction and the publicsphere is such that fiction foregrounds the problem of authority in public discourseand seeks to capture the position of authority through heightened forms of mimesisand self-consciousness.
Keywords: J.M. Coetzee; autobiography; fictionality; authority
The fictional pretext for J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year (2007) is an invitationfrom a German publisher (Mittwoch Verlag of Herderstrasse, Berlin) to an ageingnovelist to contribute to a collection to be called Strong Opinions. The novelist’sadopted country is Australia; South Africa is his country of birth. His name is with-held, but he is referred to as Señor C by the young woman Anya who he employs asa typist, and as Juan by Anya’s partner Alan.1 The initials J.C., together with manyother clues, imply that the text is meant to be taken as autobiographical, though in asharply qualified sense. The semi-detached autobiography is well established inCoetzee, notably in the third-person memoirs Boyhood (1997), Youth (2002) andSummertime (2009); arguably, this text falls into that category while including explic-itly fictional elements (certain details of J.C.’s life, such as the dates of his birth andarrival in Australia, do not match up with Coetzee’s, and the narrative involving Anyaand Alan is fictional).
J.C. takes the opportunity of the invitation to contribute to Strong Opinions torespond ‘to the present in which I find myself’ (p. 67), the response initially taking theform of a series of public reflections. The reflections of Part One, ‘Strong Opinions’,are pithy essays frequently about world affairs, particularly in relation to the war onterror, as it is known (although the topics cover a wide range, many of which come upelsewhere in Coetzee’s writing). The form mimics what Immanuel Kant (1784)famously called the public performance of reason: a tradition at least as old as Michelde Montaigne, it has since the eighteenth century come to be associated quintessen-tially with an Enlightenment concept of the public sphere. The reflections of Part Two,the ‘Second Diary’, are personal – contrasting the private sphere with the earlier
*Email: [email protected]
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public reflections – and for all their framing within the narrative of J.C., they areunreservedly autobiographical on Coetzee’s part.
It is clear from the start that Coetzee is playing with the relationship betweenpublic discourse and fictional writing (writing, broadly conceived2). After the first ofthe reflections, on the origins of the State, J.C. asks himself: ‘Why is it so hard to sayanything about politics from outside politics? Why can there be no discourse aboutpolitics that is not itself political’? (p. 9). This was, in a sense, Hamlet’s problem inElsinore: Claudius, the usurping monarch, exercises so much power over the courtthat public discourse is corrupted, so Hamlet has to feign madness for the truth to berevealed. (Hamlet’s problem implies Michel Foucault’s [2001]: what is the status ofmadness as superior reason?3) Hamlet appears in the last sentence of Diary of a BadYear, when Anya, imagining herself returning to attend to J.C. at his death, promisesto ‘whisper in his ear: sweet dreams, and flights of angels, and all the rest’ (p. 227).Part of Horatio’s final peroration is recalled here – ‘Good night, sweet prince, / Andflights of angels sing thee to thy rest’ (Shakespeare 1987, pp. 5, 2, 312–313) – thoughjudiciously trimmed to avoid the connection being too grandiose. Through the link toHamlet, J.C.’s struggle with public discourse is ennobled. Coming as it does just aswe contemplate the character’s death, it is easy to grant the implication – we allowourselves to slip into elegy at that point in the text.
But do we allow the reference to Hamlet to colour the autobiographical presencethat lies somewhere behind J.C.? There is some Hamlet in Coetzee, although the noteof self-deprecation that is so strong in an autobiographical text such as Youth wouldlead one to conclude that Coetzee’s Hamlet is more like J. Alfred Prufrock’s:
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;Am an attendant lord, one that will doTo swell a progress, start a scene or two,Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool …Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;At times, indeed, almost ridiculous –Almost, at times, the Fool. (Eliot 1963, p. 17)
On the other hand, Coetzee has kept up what Hamlet called an antic disposition in along struggle with public discourse, with modern rationality, with language thatpretends to know itself, with political discourse that assumes the right to determinewho speaks what and to whom. Such language, propped up philosophically by RenéDescartes’s cogito and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s account of the ascendancyof reason, and politically by the history of modernity, especially in its colonial mani-festations, is the nemesis of many of Coetzee’s characters.4 Against it, Coetzee (1992,p. 65) has sought to elaborate the traditions and generic possibilities of fiction, givingrein to what he calls countervoices, drawing attention to the positionality of hisnarrators, enabling the revelation of self-interest, the unconscious and desire as theyposition the subject in its history (while bloodless, rational discourse parades as supra-historical, the subject transparently knowing itself, keeping out of the fray).
It is curious, then, that we should open Diary of a Bad Year to find a series ofdisquisitions on the affairs of the day, written in an avowedly public language. HasCoetzee chosen to come down from the mountain, so to speak, to mix with ordinaryunself-knowing folk? Or has he succumbed to the temptation to have his say after all?There are plenty of inducements and writers frequently do capitulate in this way. TheNobel platform expects its laureates to oblige, in fact, and many do, with relish, like
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Harold Pinter, the subject of one of the novel’s reflections. Pinter used his 2005acceptance speech to attack Tony Blair, calling for him to be tried as a war criminal.To which J.C. responds:
When one speaks in one’s own person – that is, not through one’s art – to denounce somepolitician or other, using the rhetoric of the agora, one embarks on a contest one is likelyto lose [… therefore] it takes some gumption to speak as Pinter has spoken […] therecome times when the outrage and shame are so great that all calculation, all prudence, isoverwhelmed and one must act, that is to say, speak. (p. 127)
Is this the point of the (seemingly anti-Coetzeean) accommodation in Coetzee’s text?And would this imply that he is performing a renunciation? The answer is both yesand no. To begin with yes: anyone who knows anything about Coetzee’s work andreputation will know that J.C.’s views are recognisably Coetzee’s. We might note inpassing that the fictional editor of Strong Opinions says he would prefer to leave openthe question of whether the views are firmly tied to the writer’s; the interest shouldfall, he says, on ‘the quality of the opinions themselves – their variety, their power tostartle, the ways in which they match or do not match the reputations of their authors’(pp. 132–133). Fiction shades into autobiography here, because the text anticipatesthat the reader will gauge J.C.’s views alongside what we know of the author’s. Tothis extent, Coetzee is having his say. But to return to that part of the answer which isno: he does this without the formal renunciation, because the reflections are wrappedin a fictional situation and are presented in parallel (literally, in parallel on the page)with the points of view of the various players in the narrative, including Anya’s andAlan’s, who act as the countervoices in the text (though perhaps not as fully realisedcharacters; I’ll come back to this point).
While J.C.’s opinions present themselves as rational disquisitions (and featureAustralian public life more frequently than the Africa of his past), they are deeplymarked by Coetzee’s own formation. They begin with a theory of the State as a formof banditry: Akira Kurosawa’s film The Seven Samurai is commended for its ‘Shakes-pearean clarity and comprehensiveness’ in demonstrating that State-formation isabout men in armed sects securing hegemony, pure and simple. The compromisedeveloped in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan in which the citizen gives up some freedomin order to shelter under the State’s protection, does not ease the subject’s fears; some-how the State is always an arbitrary and alien imposition. Although the novel does notsay so, we begin to wonder if Hobbes’s version of the cultural settlement that makesthe State acceptable depends on a relatively homogeneous culture in which tacitunderstandings about power are tradable for security. It may be that under Africanconditions, however, where postcoloniality ensures that one lives permanently withpower as difference, the idea of the State as inherently theirs rather than ours hasbecome entrenched. Certainly, J.C.’s account of how we are born into the State is insympathy with Achille Mbembe’s description of the phenomenology of power in Onthe Postcolony (2001). In the African postcolony one experiences power as comman-dement, that is, one experiences it in terms of a logic that does not have to justify itselfbecause its power is self-justifying. According to Mahmood Mamdani in Citizen andSubject (1996), in colonial and postcolonial Africa citizenship is a gift in the hands ofa State whose purpose is to regulate the boundaries between settlers or elites, who aregranted admission, and peasants, who are not; for the peasantry, subjection withoutcitizenship is the norm (neocolonial states took over this legal and cultural structurefrom their departing masters, from Indirect Rule in particular). Apartheid-era South
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Africa was no exception to the pattern, Mamdani argues; it was a neocolonial Africanstate par excellence. In one of Diary of a Bad Year’s reflections, ‘On Raiding’, thepillaging of one’s neighbours’ goods is seen as a practice encouraged by colonialconditions and continuing in contemporary crime in South Africa (pp. 103–106); thisis entirely consistent with the views J.C. expresses on the origins of the State. WhenAlan complains that J.C. doesn’t understand contemporary world politics and shouldgo back to Africa where he would feel at home, he is dead right; Alan becomes aneffective, truth-telling countervoice at this point (p. 99). What Alan doesn’t suffi-ciently appreciate, however, is that since J.C. moved to Australia, the African modelhas emerged as the template of the State globally. On several points, such as censor-ship and torture, which are the subject of several reflections, J.C. finds himself in acondition of déjà vu as he watches apartheid-era practice becoming the global norm.Since flight from the State has become impossible, since we are born into it, the solu-tion that proposes itself is the same as the one developed in the bad old days bymarginalised intellectuals in South Africa: quietist anarchism, or ‘inner emigration’(p. 12). Universally, more than ever, the novel seems to suggest, Enlightenment prin-ciples about publics, the right to speak and the rule of reason are collapsing under theweight of their contradictions. If we are to salvage anything, it might as well be inpremodern terms; frequently the categories that J.C. brings to his reflections arepremodern ones such as honour and shame and the curse – the premodern is invokedin a postmodern critique of the modern.
This is all well-covered ground in Coetzee’s early fiction. In this late novel, it isoffered in the terms of political analysis, but it has proved its worth as the living miseen scene of novels such as Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) and Life and Times ofMichael K (1983). In the former, the magistrate’s orderly life on the periphery of afictional Empire is thrown into crisis by the arrival of Colonel Joll, a securocrat fromthe metropole who brings the arbitrary rule of the imperial State to bear on the magis-trate’s outpost. Michael K is the perennial escapee, evading the perimeter fences andthe subtler, conceptual forms of entrapment that an increasingly totalitarian societythrows at him. Arguably the bleakest form of this vision in the fiction is in The Masterof Petersburg (1994), in which a fictional Fyodor Dostoevsky risks a Faustian solu-tion, giving himself over to repugnant forms of transgression in an effort to match andsublimate the hold of the State as well as the resistance politics it has spawned, aconflict which is presented as a brutal all-or-nothing stasis of oppression and counter-culture that has led to the murder of his son, Pavel.
In these and other examples, Coetzee brings the aesthetic and the ethical togetherindissolubly, drawing the reader into visceral, disturbing, open-ended encounterswith prevailing historical conditions, without the comfort of a countervailing spaceof rational detachment. In order to make such fiction possible, Coetzee has had toconduct a form of guerrilla warfare with the public sphere, refusing to play by itsrules, entering the fray only occasionally, and then with unexpected but explosiveresults. A question raised by the formal play, even the whimsy, of Coetzee’s recentwork, in particular Diary of a Bad Year, is whether this epistemologically far-reaching and combative mode can be sustained. The overriding subject of ElizabethCostello (2003), Slow Man (2005) and Diary is really the practice of authorshipitself, a question always in the background of earlier work, but it has now becomethe fabric and substance. Beyond Roland Barthes’s death of the author, the ontologyof the writer as agent of the writing has begun to return, though in some recon-structed and still rather opaque sense.
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Coetzee’s Nobel Lecture (2003) is like the Costello stories in drawing publicdiscourse into the procedures of fiction. It reflects on the spaces of intimacy anddistance between the self-of-writing and the writer’s historical–biographical being.The former (the Crusoe figure of the story) is the persona that comes together in theact of giving oneself over to writing’s unpredictable processes; the latter is the histor-ical being (the Defoe figure), the author who, after a lifetime of writing, seems to owehis very existence to the success of his creature and counterpart. At the end of thelecture these selves are like
deckhands toiling in the rigging, the one on a ship sailing west, the other on a ship sailingeast. Their ships pass close, close enough to hail. But the seas are rough, the weather isstormy: their eyes lashed by the spray, their hands burned by the cordage, they pass eachother by, too busy even to wave. (p. 7)
The pathos of this passage reflects an anguish of self-division, a longing that the sepa-rate spheres might be brought together. I also detect this pathos (and the longing) inthe unusually thin fictional material in Diary of a Bad Year. Anya, as I mentionedearlier, is hardly developed, and the same is true of Alan, although his role as the archneoliberal is an interesting one. The richness of the text lies wholly in the experienceof reading, as one follows the opinions and the narrative sequences printed belowthem, wondering (often inconclusively) about the connections between them. But asfor the narrative itself in which the opinions are embedded, there is something slightlyperfunctory about it, as if the text were assuming that the assertion of the presence offictionality were enough to give one the experience of fiction. From the point of viewof fiction in these more traditional terms, the most successful moment in the novel isin the reflections, not in the narrative. It is no. 18 of the ‘Second Diary’, which is abrilliant rendering of the interior life of a magpie that makes itself known to J.C.during his regular visits to the park across the road from the apartment. Here, the sparkof fiction is properly ignited; by comparison, in the narrative itself, it burns dimly.
It is tempting to conclude that what J.C. says of many writers as they get older isalso true of Diary of a Bad Year – ‘[the] prose becomes thinner, [the] treatment ofcharacter and action more schematic’ (p. 193) – except that the novel invites us todraw this conclusion, so its thinness, if that is what it is, is counterbalanced by acertain metafictional thickness. J.C. says that what looks like an attenuation of powersfrom the outside may be, from the inside, ‘a liberation, a clearing of the mind to takeon more important tasks’ (p. 193). The example he gives is that of Leo Tolstoy, whois generally thought to have succumbed to simplification and didacticism, but whomust have felt that ‘he was ridding himself of the shackles that had enslaved him toappearances, enabling him to face directly the one question that truly engaged hissoul: how to live’ (p. 193). This observation is similar to the conclusion Coetzeereaches about Tolstoy in his essay ‘Confession and Double Thoughts’. Here Coetzeespeculates whether having tested the psychology of self-deception and the endlessabysses of self-doubt, Tolstoy was capable of deciding (‘rashly’?) ‘to set down thetruth, finally, as though after a lifetime of exploring one had acquired the credentials,amassed the authority, to do so’ (Coetzee 1992, p. 293).
Does J.C. – or the novel – reach an equivalent point, at which the text addressesthe reader with a similar power and the author and the masks coalesce? Authority isthe key term from the essay on confession. The truth Coetzee refers to there is nottranscendent; it does not reveal itself: the writer has to have amassed sufficient author-ity to provide a persuasive mimesis of it. As Coetzee says of Olive Schreiner, who was
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regarded as a thinker in her day but whose philosophical power he questions:‘Generally, it is not important that writers have good ideas. Rather, it is a matter ofseeing a mimesis of intellectual engagement’.5 What is true of Schreiner is, accordingto Diary, true of Tolstoy and also of Walt Whitman: ‘neither had much wisdom tooffer; wisdom was not what they dealt in. They were poets above all; otherwise theywere ordinary men with ordinary, fallible opinions. The disciples who swarmed tothem in quest of enlightenment look sadly foolish in retrospect’ (p. 151). Instead ofwisdom:
What the great authors are masters of is authority. What is the source of authority, or ofwhat the formalists called the authority-effect? If authority could be achieved simply bytricks of rhetoric, then Plato was surely justified in expelling poets from his idealrepublic. But what if authority can be attained only by opening the poet-self to somehigher force, by ceasing to be oneself and beginning to speak vatically?
The god can be invoked, but does not necessarily come. Learn to speak withoutauthority, says Kierkegaard. By copying Kierkegaard’s words here, I make Kierkegaardinto an authority. Authority cannot be caught, cannot be learned. The paradox is a trueone. (p. 151)
Authority would appear to be associated with the mimesis or the performance of aparticular kind of voice, a vatic speech in which the self is open to a ‘higher force’ (inSøren Kierkegaard this was a straightforward question: the higher force was God).The clearest illustration of such speech in the novel is given in the last of J.C.’s reflec-tions which is on Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, in particular the passage inwhich Ivan ‘hands back his ticket of admission to the universe God has created’, andmounts a ‘tirade against forgiveness’ (pp. 231, 233). What moves J.C. is not Ivan’sself-damning argument but ‘the accents of anguish, the personal anguish of a soulunable to bear the horrors of this world. It is the voice of Ivan, as realized byDostoevsky, not his reasoning that sweeps me along’ (p. 233).
Authority comes, then, not from crafting a position, still less from persuading anaudience or a readership of the rightness of one’s views. In an essay on DesideriusErasmus’s figure of Folly, Coetzee has argued that crafting a non-position may be adesirable goal. Such thinking is consistent with the modes of fiction that Coetzeedevelops in his earliest work: distrustful, even hostile to self-deceiving, self-assuredlanguage and to rational calculation, the narrators speak most powerfully from strangesources – from dreams, wounded bodies and defenceless longings. By definition,given their quality of public reasonableness, the ‘strong opinions’ in Diary of a BadYear are incapable of delivering this kind of speech. The private opinions of the‘Second Diary’, on the other hand, are more open to vatic promptings and there is apower of feeling in some of the more confessional entries where we might glimpsethem; for example, in the entry about J.C.’s father’s wartime memorabilia, whichinclude a note written in the father’s hand on a torn-off scrap of newspaper, ‘cansomething be done Im [sic] dying’ (p. 165).
The place where the text achieves most authority, however, is in the voice of Anyaas she imagines herself attending to J.C. soon after his death (the presence of deathwould seem to be a sine qua non). The power of this moment derives partly from thefact that he has told her of a dream of a young woman who does this for him. Thewish-fulfilment therefore becomes the fiction’s reality, although it should be notedthat, as the narrative develops, many of J.C.’s illusions about the relationship with
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Anya are shed. At the end, it is Anya’s matter-of-factness, her lack of pretension, hertolerance of his whims and ultimately her forgiveness of his inappropriate desires, hermoral authority in death’s company, in other words, that overwhelm J.C. and close thenarrative. Despite the thinness of her fictional realisation for most of the text, hervoice rises to prominence at the close of the novel, as if to demonstrate J.C.’sargument that what seems to be an attenuation of an author’s powers might in fact bea case of ‘ridding [one]self of the shackles that had enslaved [one] to appearances’(p. 193).
In J.C.’s reflections about authority, he distances himself from ‘[a]nnouncementsof the death of the author and of authorship made by Roland Barthes and MichelFoucault a quarter of a century ago’, which ‘came down to the claim that the authorityof the author has never amounted to anything more than a bagful of rhetorical tricks’(p. 149). This rejection of the Barthesian credo is an abjuration on Coetzee’s part,because he has often implicitly positioned himself in the tradition it represents, thetradition of anti-illusionism which culminates for Coetzee in Samuel Beckett. Nowthat ‘the dust has settled’ on the ‘death of the author’, as J.C. puts it, however, he isthankful that the ‘mystery of Tolstoy’s authority’ (p. 150) has remained untoucheddespite the exposure of his rhetorical tricks; he is thankful, too, to Tolstoy andDostoevsky and even to ‘mother Russia’ for ‘setting before us the standards towardwhich any serious novelist must toil’ (p. 227).
‘Slava, Fyodor Michailovich! May your name resound for ever in the halls offame!’ says J.C. of Dostoevsky, in particular (p. 234). Is this the kind of vatic utter-ance which Diary commends? That would be a naïve assessment, because the state-ment involves J.C. archly imitating a Russian compliment to be paid to Dostoevsky.The tone is peculiar: although it is an imitation, even a parody, it is also genuinelyhonorific and therefore un-ironic. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and mother Russia are allcapable of vatic speech; J.C. is content to write in their tracks, hoping to hit the rightnote. That these illusionists should be elevated in this way at the close of the novelsuggests the frame of mind that J.C. has reached: art may transform, but the life sotransformed stubbornly persists in its need of consolation. This observation sitsawkwardly with critical orthodoxy which has yet to let go of anti-illusionism, but itmay come close to naming the source of the authority captured by Diary of a BadYear.
Notes1. The name Anya alludes to Dostoevsky’s relationship with Anna or Anya Snitkina, the
stenographer who produced the text of The gambler and who he later married.2. Roland Barthes’s essays ‘To write: An intransitive verb’? (2001b) and ‘The death of the
author’ (2001a) provide the theoretical contexts for this emphasis.3. Coetzee explores this question in an essay on Erasmus in Giving offense (1997).4. Dusklands assumes this philosophical pedigree in its portrayal of the protagonists, Eugene
Dawn and Jacobus Coetzee.5. Coetzee Papers, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown. Unsorted lecture notes
on Comparative South African Literature, University of Cape Town, 1993.
Notes on contributorDavid Attwell is Head of the Department of English and Related Literature at the University ofYork, UK. He is the author of J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (Univer-sity of California Press, 1993).
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