John Maxwell Coetzee is a South African-born novelist, essayist, linguist, translator, and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. Coetzee was born in Cape Town to Afrikaner parents on February 9, 1940, in Cape Town, South Africa. Coetzee studied at the University of Cape Town and later earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of Texas at Austin. Coetzee has held academic positions in the United States, England, and South Africa, focusing on English literature and linguistics.
During the 1960s he worked as a programmer for IBM in London, which he describes in the semi-autobiographical novel The Young Years. During the 1970s he applied for permanent residence, but was denied it due to his involvement in protests against the Vietnam War. He returned instead to Cape Town, where he taught English literature until 2002.
As an alter ego in Coetzee’s writing, both an older male academician and the female author Elizabeth Costello recur. His prose is rigorous and analytical. Dusklands (1974), Coetzee’s first book, is about more than just the force of large military machines, white supremacy’s rule, and colonial exploitation. It also discusses the sometimes lethal effects of cultural clashes, the breakdown of the human spirit, and the total collapse of a way of life. Dusklands contains two novellas united in their exploration of colonization; The Vietnam Project (set in the United States in the late 20th century) and The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee (set in 18th-century South Africa).
Eugene Dawn, the protagonist of The Vietnam Project, is the author of a special report on misinformation related to the Vietnam war. Eugene evaluates the merits of his report, which he feels compelled to defend because his supervisor, Coetzee, is not pleased with it. Coetzee likes Eugene’s writing abilities, but proposes some modifications. Eugene, despite his repeated reminders to be confident, is insecure. “He’s going to reject me,” Eugene says as he recounts the day’s events in his boss’ office.
Coetzee’s “The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee” concludes the novel Dusklands. He begins with a “Translator’s Preface,” giving the novella the appearance of a historical document. Immediately following this, the so-called Jacobus Coetzee notebook begins. The story begins with a brief overview of the changes that have transpired in connection to the Boers, white settlers (of which Jacobus is one), and indigenous black African tribes. This theme is explored throughout the story as Jacobus recounts his experiences living in South Africa’s northern lands.
Coetzee’s second book, The Heart of the Country (1977; also published as From the Heart of the Country; filmed as Dust, 1986), is a stream-of-consciousness narrative of a Boer madwoman, and Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), set in some undefined borderland, is an examination of the ramifications of colonization. Life & Times of Michael K. (1983), which won the Booker Prize, concerns the dilemma of a simple man beset by conditions he can neither comprehend nor control during a civil war in a future South Africa.
In Foe (1986), his reworking of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Coetzee continued to examine colonizer-colonized themes. Coetzee’s female narrator reaches fresh conclusions about power and otherness, eventually concluding that language may enslave as effectively as shackles. Coetzee’s Age of Iron (1990) dealt directly with contemporary South African circumstances, while The Master of Petersburg (1994) made reference to 19th-century Russia (especially Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Devils); both books deal with the theme of literature in society. Coetzee made history in 1999 by winning the Booker Prize twice with his work Disgrace. Following the novel’s release and an outcry in South Africa, he relocated to Australia, where he was given citizenship in 2006.
Coetzee received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002, the year he emigrated to Australia. In part, the Nobel Prize citation reads: “Coetzee’s focus is directed mostly at instances when the boundary between good and wrong, while crystal-clear, can be seen to serve no end. In examining vulnerability and defeat, Coetzee catches the holy light in man. Soon after receiving the Nobel Prize, Coetzee produced another novel, Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons, an abstract book including eight pieces about a fictitious Australian writer and intellectual.
Quotes from J.M. Coetzee’s works:
“Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That’s what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise, what is life for?”
“(I)f we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we fear guilt or retribution.”
“Truth is not spoken in anger. Truth is spoken, if it ever comes to be spoken, in love. The gaze of love is not deluded. It sees what is best in the beloved even when what is best in the beloved finds it hard to emerge into the light.”
“We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.”
“He continues to teach because it provides him with a livelihood; also because it teaches him humility, brings it home to him who he is in the world. The irony does not escape him: that the one who comes to teach learns the keenest of lessons, while those who come to learn learn nothing.”
“Perhaps; but I am a difficult person to live with. My difficulty consists in not wanting to live with other people.”
“To the last we have learned nothing. In all of us, deep down, there seems to be something granite and unteachable. No one truly believes, despite the hysteria in the streets that the world of tranquil certainties we were born into is about to be extinguished.”
