The New Criterion

J. M. Coetzee
Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000-2005.
Viking, 304 pages, $25.95

Unlike John Updike’s critical gourmandise, J. M. Coetzee’s approach to literary essays is that of a stringently discerning gourmet. While Updike consumes with relish then works to recreate his feast in sensuous prose, Coetzee picks at his dish, prods it with his fork, and moves it around his plate. He checks the recipe, considers alternative ingredients as well as the cook’s training and disposition, then sums up his findings in a cool, distanced style. Coetzee has collected his recent essays and introductions under the title Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000–2005, and while his discussions are as meticulous and thorough as ever, overtones of dutifulness have crowded out the sense of discovery and fascination that animated his previous volume of essays, Stranger Shores.

Coetzee opened that 2001 collection with the lecture “What Is A Classic?” It begins with a nuanced analysis of T. S. Eliot’s lecture of the same name, which Coetzee reads as part of “a decades-long program on Eliot’s part to redefine and resituate nationality in such a way that he, Eliot, could not be sidelined as an eager American cultural arriviste lecturing the English and/or the Europeans about their heritage and trying to persuade them to live up to it.” To this, Coetzee juxtaposes his own first experience of the transcendent, revelatory power of “the classic,” when, as a teenager mired in provincial South Africa, he overheard a recording of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. The classic, he concludes, is “what survives the worst of barbarism, surviving because generations of people cannot afford to let go of it and therefore hold on to it at all costs.” And criticism, even of the most severe and skeptical variety, helps ensure the classic’s continued survival, by testing and affirming its indispensability.

That urgent empathy surfaces only occasionally in Inner Workings. More often, the topics seem to have been chosen for, rather than by, Coetzee. A lengthy piece on Sándor Márai, for example, concludes with a whimper. “[H]owever thoughtful a chronicler of the dark decade of the 1940s [Marai] may have been, … his conception of the novel form was nevertheless old-fashioned, his grasp of its potentialities limited, and his achievements in the medium consequently slight.” A fair amount of work went into those pulled punches. Coetzee’s level-headed treatment of writers he esteems less than most can be refreshing and useful, such as his discussion of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. “But to the reader unpersuaded by the theory, the reader to whom the dialectical images never quite come alive as they are supposed to, the reader perhaps unreceptive to the master narrative of the long sleep of capitalism followed by the dawn of socialism, what does The Arcades Project have to offer?” He then culls the best of Benjamin’s idiosyncratic oeuvre, noting that it has more than a passing resemblance to Ezra Pound’s Cantos.

Both works are the issue of years of jackdaw reading. Both are built out of fragments and quotations, and adhere to the high-Modernist aesthetics of image and montage. Both have economic ambitions and economists as presiding figures… . Both authors have investments in antiquarian bodies of knowledge whose relevance to their own times they overestimate. Neither knows when to stop. And both were in the end consumed by the monster of fascism, Benjamin tragically, Pound shamefully.

Coetzee is at his best in Inner Workings when considering writers from the provinces of dead or dying empires. Robert Musil, Joseph Roth, Paul Celan, and Bruno Schulz all came from different corners of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The first two were supreme elegists of the old Austria. Celan, though born in Bukovina, wrote primarily in German and his “unremitting, intimate wrestlings with the German language” were an essential force in redeeming the language of Dichter und Denker from the stain of the Holocaust. Schulz, who rarely left his Galician hometown of Drohobycz, mythologized that village as a magical realm of childhood. Coetzee notes that Schulz’s “orientation is toward the recreation, or perhaps fabulation, of a childhood consciousness, full of terror, obsession, and crazy glory; his metaphysics is a metaphysics of matter.” It was a realm Schulz isolated from any incursions of history. Coetzee speculates that Schulz had become aware of the deadend into which that isolation had led him. But Schulz was shot by the Gestapo before he could complete the manuscript of his last novel, now lost, a novel possibly leading him out of his imaginative constriction.

William Faulkner, too, seems a touchstone for Coetzee. He writes that

Faulkner’s interventions in public affairs were ineffectual not because he was stupid about politics but because the appropriate vehicle for his political insights was not the essay, much less the letter to the editor, but the novel, and in specific the kind of novel he invented, with its unequalled rhetorical resources for interweaving past and present, memory and desire.

Coetzee, too, alongside his many politically engaged essays, has found the perfect vehicle for his political and moral insights. His austere, allegorical fiction has addressed his own country’s burden of racism and exploitation both before and after apartheid, directly and aslant. He considers the Snopes trilogy to be Faulkner’s abiding achievement, for reasons that seem to echo Coetzee’s own past on several levels. He notes the way Faulkner uses the trilogy to track

the takeover of political power by an ascendant poor white class in a revolution as quiet, implacable, and amoral as a termite invasion. His chronicle of the rise of the redneck entrepreneur is at the same time mordant and elegiac and despairing: mordant because he detests what he sees as much as he is fascinated by it; elegiac because he loves the old world that is being eaten up before his eyes; and despairing for many reasons, not least of which are, first, that the South he loves was built, as he knows better than anyone, on twin crimes of dispossession and slavery; second, that the Snopeses are just another avatar of the Falkners, thieves and rapists of the land in their day; and therefore, third, that as critic and judge he, William “Faulkner,” has no ground to stand on.

Yet there is little evidence in Inner Workings, even in Coetzee’s most insightful discussions of writers as kindred to him as Faulkner, of how these readings might have informed or influenced his own novels.

Criticism has long played an unusually symbiotic role in Coetzee’s fiction. His third novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, the first to bring him wide and enthusiastic critical attention when it was published in 1980, is a fictional reworking of Cavafy’s poem of the same name. His 1986 novel, Foe, is a re-imagining of Robinson Crusoe. In The Master of Saint Petersburg (1994), Coetzee recreates Dostoevsky as a character in a very Dostoevskyan novel. Coetzee’s ninth novel, Elizabeth Costello, published in 2003, the year he was awarded the Nobel Prize, is his least integrated hybrid of fiction and criticism. Elizabeth Costello, an aging writer, travels around the world giving lectures, advancing views that Coetzee can, through his fictional mouthpiece, coyly advance and distance himself from at the same time. In the various chapters, entitled Lessons, Elizabeth Costello addresses realism in fiction, the novel in Africa and the Humanities in Africa, animal rights, the problem of evil in the world and the implications of novelistic renditions of evil. Evil and fictional depictions of it are at the center of Coetzee’s 1999 novel, Disgrace, which contains a deeply disturbing rape scene, all the more effective for being indirectly witnessed by the victim’s father shut up in a closet. In another variant of his critico-fictional hybridizations, Coetzee revived Elizabeth Costello and allowed her to challenge the protagonist of his most recent novel, Slow Man (2005), on the morality of creating fictional characters and having them suffer when there is already much pain in the world.

So it is perhaps to Coetzee’s fiction that one must turn to find the most energetic and vibrant manifestations of his critical intelligence. The essays in Inner Workings are unfailingly informative and for the most part interesting, if not illuminating. Even with such qualifications, the application of an intelligence as refined and exacting as Coetzee’s to major and not-quite major writers repays the readers in dividends which, if not as great as those of his earlier books, are dividends nonetheless.