|
Literary Review
The impossibility of grace
|
While Coetzee's hard, cold prose suits his philosophical concerns, it robs Youth of any consoling sensuousness. Yet, it is an oddly compassionate book, says PANKAJ MISHRA.
|
IN 1962, two years after South African police massacred black protestors in the town of Sharpville, J.M. Coetzee arrived in London. Compared to previous literary immigrants from South Africa, Coetzee probably carried a heavier burden of fear, revulsion, and hopes to his new home. It is also what weighs upon the chief protagonist of his new novel Youth, a young mathematician called John, who travels to London in the early 1960s, determined to shake off the "dust of ugly new South Africa".
At university in Johannesburg, Coetzee's character has read Ezra Pound, as part of his preparation for the rich life he thinks is awaiting him in London. He has also read Flaubert, who makes him want to go to bed with Emma Bovary. This makes him suspect that despite his reading there is "something rotten" in his sensibility. And sensibility is all-important to John: for he wants to burn with a Pateresque hard gem-like flame; live life as he expects artists in the past have, with passion and anguish; and then transmute the experience into art.
But life in the England of the 1960s turns out to be mean. John drifts in and out of his job as a computer programmer at IBM. His search for sexual bliss peters out into a series of unsatisfying affairs. His literary ambitions go no further than such unfortunate lines of verse as "the waves of incontinence". After a brief infatuation, he grows indifferent to Henry James and Ford Madox Ford. He suffers the usual confusions about art: How is it made? Does one have to live first? What about women and sex? Do they hinder or encourage the artist?
There are no answers in Youth that do not immediately lead to fresh questions. Those who found Disgrace bleak are likely to draw even less comfort from Youth. The temptation here might be to dismiss John as a bore, and to defuse his self-doubts by tracing them back to Coetzee's own youth. After all, it seems axiomatic that the personal insecurities we read about have been resolved to some degree at least by success, however delayed or hard-fought. Otherwise, how could they be written about? Certainly, there is much relief to be had in turning away from John's desolation and in looking at Coetzee's career, where literary ambition, no matter how confused or neurotic initially, has been brilliantly fulfilled. Youth does begin to appear a surrender to nostalgia, the kind of thinly fictionalised memoir of long-surmounted bitterness that well-feted novelists are prone to write in comfortable middle age.
Coetzee, however, is not content to simply empty out an old drawer of experience. His cold dry prose alone seems to rule out a voluptuous embrace of early deprivations. In any case, the aspiring writer in John is aware that "he may have his own vision of London but there is nothing unique to that vision." What seems to preoccupy John — and his creator — is the idea, which is expressed early in the book, that "things are rarely as they seem". It is what John wants to tell his estranged lover, who has found herself described as a burden in his private diary. For he is not sure if his diary reflects his true feelings, or whether it contains "a fiction, one of the many possible fictions, true only in the sense that a work of art is true".
A few years ago, Coetzee raised similar doubts about the kind of secular self-revelation pioneered by Montaigne and Rousseau in a long essay titled "Confession and Double Thoughts". According to him, such confessions rarely questioned their own motives and assumptions, or the element of self-interest that lurked behind them. They seemed to him to be unaware of the potentially endless nature of self-consciousness, or of what may be the same thing: self-deception.
Coetzee claimed to find a more complex psychology in the fictions of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. His own recent novels have seemed Dostoyevskian in their obsessive suspicion that we only feel what we imagine we feel. It is a suspicion that takes Disgrace and Youth far from both the self-satisfied record of sensibility, and the social and psychological dramas adorned with "beautiful writing" or notions thereof, whose sheer multiplicity and repetitiveness gives the contemporary novel its sickly pallor.
Nevertheless, the effort to rescue the novel from spiritual retardation is not without difficulties — and not just for the kind of reader who craves the artificial tensions of plot and "strong" characters. Coetzee's novelistic technique seems impeccable — more polished indeed than Dostoyevsky's — but the philosophical concerns that give his prose its urgency also strip it of even the traces of any consoling sensuousness. Besides, the novel needs stable objects, and to a certain extent, stable characters, to achieve even its very provisional truths. A destabilised self finally contemplates nothing but itself; and its preoccupations, as often random as they are profound, are barely contained by the form of the novel.
These are problems the novelist solves in his own way. For Dostoyevsky, the radical impasse of self-consciousness opened out into religion. But grace doesn't seem a possibility in Coetzee's secularised world and characters. Youth ends with John in a new job in Cambridge, at the beginning of an awkward and unlikely friendship with an Indian computer programmer called Ganapathy, but still drifting, self-knowledge as elusive as ever, and feeling himself "cold, frozen". The last sentences speak stoically of death. "One of these days the ambulance men will call at Ganapathy's flat and bring him out on a stretcher with a sheet over his face. When they have fetched Ganapathy they might as well come and fetch him too". This at first is startling, and seems slightly melodramatic. But soon no other ending looks appropriate for this oddly compassionate book. It is as if with the self rendered unknowable, there remains only flesh: the body with its clear sharp urges and pains, always replete with the certainties of decay and extinction.
Youth, J.M. Coetzee, Secker and Warburg, £14.99.
Bankaj Mishra, well-known novelist, is the author of The Romantics.
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
|
