Coetzee, Gordimer and the Nobel prize

Abstract

ABSTRACT The South African writer, J. M. Coetzee, achieved prominence, in the 1980s, in a climate of political emergency in his own country. He was both attacked as politically evasive and praised as an artist of integrity. Referring in contrast to Nadine Gordimer, this paper speculates on Coetzee's being awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. To win the Nobel Prize in Literature – indeed, in any field – signals a pinnacle of achievement. Although laureates have been getting younger the Prize, unlike most literary awards, is never awarded to the same author more than once. It suggests a judgment, therefore, on a body of work: on a consolidated achievement. In 2003 J.M. Coetzee won the Prize in Literature, the second South African to be so honoured, the first being the 1991 laureate, Nadine Gordimer. President Thabo Mbeki duly congratulated Coetzee. Yet shortly before his being awarded the Prize, Coetzee's novel Disgrace (1999) had been castigated in an ANC-government submission to the South African Human Rights Commission as symptomatic of white Afro-pessimism. The bleak vision of post-apartheid South Africa, in which the protagonist's daughter is raped by a gang of African youths, irritated the ruling party. was Coetzee implying what the government believes many white, Indian and coloured South Africans believe: that any African government is inevitably doomed to fail? Soon afterwards, whether coincidentally or not, Coetzee relocated to Australia. In comparison to the understated tenor of his novels penned “down under”, Disgrace – despite the international clamour about it – does suggest a dead end for Coetzee in his home country. Perhaps it also suggests a dead end for many people who have to find sustenance in the so-called new South Africa, in which constitutional democracy exists alongside poverty, high levels of illiteracy, an HIV pandemic, and violent crime including almost daily reports of the abuse and rape of women.