Ceridwen Dovey on J. M. Coetzee on Writers by Ceridwen Dovey & Louine Shaw

Author:Ceridwen Dovey & Louine Shaw [Dovey, Ceridwen & Shaw, Louine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781721371938
Amazon: 1721371931
Publisher: Audible Studios on Brilliance Audio
Published: 2019-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Finally, Coetzee alights on something that will work, at least for him:

(4) The possibility of rewriting another novel … or of making that rewriting into the subject of your own writing.

For some later critics, this method of ‘rewriting’ – the way Coetzee builds his own novels on the back of his critiques of wider discourses of fiction and theory – started to feel frustratingly predictable. In his 2012 essay, Hedley Twidle complains about Coetzee’s trick of alluding in his fiction to the other texts, the secondary reading list, one might need to seek out to understand the novels themselves. ‘[I]t all comes as a total, all-too-teachable package,’ Twidle writes, ‘a whole literary-critical paraphernalia, which you then assemble together in class like a Lego set.’

But imagine the thrill if you were the first to assemble that Lego set, all alone, fitting each novel into its previously camouflaged theoretical and philosophical foundations, seeing if each piece clicked into place. When my mother realised that Coetzee’s novels ‘did theory’ on themselves, it was an epiphany of the kind that scholars live for, an insight that – once shared – seems self-evident to everybody else forever after because of its obvious rightness.

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