Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year, Politics, and the Problem of Position

Abstract

Why is it so hard to say anything about politics from outside politics? Why can there be no discourse about politics that is not itself political? --J. M. Coetzee (Diary 9) What are we to make of J. M. Coetzee's of Bad Year? One of the first things to note is that it is an unconventionally structured text, to say the least. Consisting as it does of different sections that are generically diverse, it is of piece with Coetzee's other recent novels--if we can call them that--in being marked by what Michael Marais has called their perfunctory treatment of (193). (1) Though the novel is divided into two parts, Strong Opinions and Second Diary, the connection between them is not immediately apparent. Not only is the second diary undated, but first one appears to be missing, while Strong Opinions--which does not really look much more like diary than the undated Second Diary does--is dated (12 September 2005-31 May 2006). Even more immediately striking is the architecture of the pages and the challenges this poses for the reader. Most pages consist of initially two, later three, parallel sections: essays in political philosophy, letters, fictional narrative. Thus Strong Opinions starts with philosophical essay on the origins of the state (3) while the second section of the opening page, which appears below line subdividing it, is written in different mode entirely, seeing that it concerns the as-yet unnamed narrator's encounter with quite young woman wearing tomato-red shift that is startling in its brevity. As the juxtaposition of these sections suggests, the division of the text on individual pages appears to be between essays of political philosophy and commentary on political events on the one hand and, on the other, self-reflexive literary narrative below the line--an opposition that, as is already apparent on the opening page, also juxtaposes mind and body, argument and desire. Given these generically diverse sections and their combination on particular pages, how is one to read the text? What is the text suggesting about the relation between politics and literature, or political philosophy and literary writing? And how might we understand the conjunction here of the serious and the playful, perhaps even the sublime and the profane? These questions are lent particular urgency by the fact that Coetzee--or rather, JC, as the putative author of the collected in the texts signs himself in letter to Anya (Diary 123), the owner of the red smock whom he subsequently engages as typist--explicitly presents the text, or at least the parts of it made up of primarily political, essayistic opinions, as a response to the present in which I find myself (67). (2) How does the peculiar form of the text, and the problems of reading that it poses, relate to its status as response to the present, to such issues as the permanent state of exception (as Agamben might say) and the war on terror (e.g. 21, 37); the abrogation of the rule of law (e.g. 17-18, 39) and the torture of enemy combatants (e.g. 171-72); the systematic maltreatment and slaughter of non-human animals (e.g. 63- 65); the shameful fate of corporatized universities (35), and the brutality of an economic order founded on the assumed necessity of competition as the sublimation of warfare (80)? What is the relation between the forceful, direct, strong opinions articulated in response to the present on the one hand, and the underlying narrative on the other? As I shall show, one way of approaching of Bad Year is to recognize that it addresses, and attempts to negotiate, longstanding worry of Coetzee's concerning the relation between politics and literature: if the text, or at least its political-philosophical sections, is in part an attempt to respond to the present, then the political character of this engagement renders it vulnerable to the predations of those in power, namely politicians. …