Coetzee and Late Style: Exile within the Form

Abstract

Let us trace a theme, but more than a theme, an enactment, of exile as it has come to inform recent work of J. M. Coetzee. Exile I mean not simply in political sense-the final decision to shake dust of [South Africa] off [his] feet, to seek a place where it is not yet properly shameful to be alive, in Australia (1)--but more intrinsically than that, insofar as it affects substance of his art, and very frame of his writing body. This is exile from one's body about which Paul Rayment thinks in Slow Man: is running down (53-54), unstrung in Homeric language. So it is with characters of Elizabeth Costello and JC, in their respective books, Elizabeth Costello and Diary of a Bad Year persons taking regretful leave of their bodies. This sequence is a literature of leave- taking, a trilogy of novels in flight from homeland, from body, and from very comforts of novelistic form. Novels against novel. This is a kind of aesthetic exile that implies a deliberate self-distancing from necessity of formal finishing, given that what had characterized Coetzee's art up to Nobel ceremony was just this quality of laborious finishedness: spare prose and a spare, thrifty (Coetzee, Doubling 20), chiseled gauntness without any trace of flaccidity or unassimilated matter. Not so with this last trilogy, which suddenly, as with a weary shrug of shoulders, shows all seams and fissures, failures of integration, which would hitherto have been smoothed over in a determinate movement of formal resolution. It is a literature touched by death, and intimately so. Its style is, to be clear, a late style, as Adorno memorably described it apropos of Beethoven: The power of subjectivity in works of art is irascible gesture with which it takes leave of works themselves. It breaks their bonds, not in order to express itself, but in order, expressionless, to cast off appearance of art. Of works themselves it leaves only fragments behind, and communicates itself, like a cipher, only through blank spaces from which it has disengaged itself. Touched by death, hand of master sets free masses of material that he used to form; its tears and fissures, witnesses to finite powerlessness of I confronted with Being, are its final work. (566) We read at start of Elizabeth Costello, after a brief description of eponymous character's attire and appearance: the blue costume, greasy hair, are details, signs of a moderate realism. Supply particulars, allow significations to emerge of themselves. A procedure pioneered by Daniel Defoe (4). That is an irascible gesture. You cannot simply call it metafiction and leave it at that. Characteristic of opening movements of this book, such discourse is more aggressively disenchanting and disappointing than that term allows. There is a scene in restaurant, mainly dialogue, which we will skip (7) we read. It is not a good idea to interrupt narrative too often, since storytelling works by lulling reader or listener into a dreamlike state in which time and space of real world fade away, superseded by time and space of fiction. Breaking into dream draws attention to constructedness of story, and plays havoc with realist illusion. However, unless certain scenes are skipped over we will be here all afternoon. (16) This passage is doing something more interesting than pacing track of postmodern metafiction; after all, as Coetzee has written, Anti-illusionism-displaying tricks you are using instead of hiding them-is a common ploy of postmodernism. But in end there is only so much mileage to be got out of ploy. Anti-illusionism is, I suspect, only a marking of time, a phase of recuperation, in history of novel. The question is, what's next? …