J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing by David Attwell

Author:David Attwell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-10-19T16:00:26+00:00

There was trouble ahead, though, because Coetzee still had to tackle the politically sensitive question that the writing of Michael K had produced: the matter of K’s relation to the guerrillas operating from bases in the mountains. When the novel was published, it won applause abroad, but some critics at home were uneasy. Most memorably, in her review for the New York Review of Books, Nadine Gordimer argued that a ‘revulsion against all political and revolutionary solutions rises with the insistence of the song of cicadas to the climax of this novel’. The problem, for Gordimer, was K’s indifference to the anti-apartheid struggle, and the fact that Coetzee ‘does not recognize what the victims, seeing themselves as victims no longer, have done, are doing, and believe they must do for themselves’.33

Two decades later Coetzee still felt the smart of this criticism, as we have seen, noting in the draft of Diary of a Bad Year that Gordimer had accused him of lacking political courage.34 This sad outcome is made sadder, in retrospect, by the fact that Coetzee had anticipated just such a reaction and had tried to head it off as he wrote. The problem was the consequence of the essential contradiction that the novel sought to overcome from its earliest moments: how to turn Kleist’s violent rebel into the pacific, internal exile that is Michael K. If he were a revolutionary, like Michael Kohlhaas, it would not be difficult for K to make common cause with those who had chosen armed opposition, but Coetzee had been getting further and further away from his model, turning K into something quite different.

In one respect, K and Michael Kohlhaas remain ideological bedfellows: in standing outside the law, both are radically free subjects, citizens of the universe – but while Kohlhaas embraces violence, K does not. In that respect, Coetzee was in danger of setting himself apart from the freedom struggle in South Africa, which arguably was closer to Kleist’s model than his own. Coetzee had to make a simple but irrevocable decision in his drafting: would Michael join the guerrillas or not? If he did, it would betray what he had become; if he did not, Coetzee himself would stand accused of being politically spineless. Coetzee writes, as if in self-admonishment, ‘The book started with Kleist behind it. Is Michael K– ever going to take to the hills and start shooting?’35

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