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
