How to “rise above mere nationality”: Coetzee’s Novels Youth and Slow Man in the World Republic of Letters

Abstract

J. M. Coetzee's work presents critical reflections on literature that circulate beyond their culture of origin. Roughly coinciding with publication of Coetzee's novel Youth in 2001, Goethe's concept of Weltliteratur, introduced in 1827 (Eckermann 198), reentered literary scene, demanding new approaches and definitions for circulation of literature in a global sphere. (1) In this article, I read Youth and Slow Man, published in 2005, as works engaged in a dialogue with literary criticism of world literature. This dialogue highlights Coetzee's reflections on national identity within novels. Moreover, it reflects back on literary theory, and contributes to our understanding of certain Eurocentric tendencies within these recent theoretical developments. Of many critics who have commented on relationship between Coetzee's literature and his politics, one of more intriguing is Sarah Brouillette. In her study Postcolonial Writers in Global Literary Marketplace, she appropriates Pierre Bourdieu's insight that all authors produce literature that integrates and responds to their experiences of being authors in a market, in order specifically to explore dynamics between postcolonial and literary field. The author's life and moment in an author's marketing (2) become key constraints and become part of what she--following Gerard Genette--calls the for subsequent reception of author's works. She argues that, for postcolonial author, author's anxiety towards market appears in form of an uneasy relation, with diverse audiences of her works, as well as in multiple ways politics of her country, pinned by her nationality or ethnicity, will be interpreted by her readers. Brouillette's conflation of the postcolonial author (8-9) with the internationally distributed and widely read non-Western author (112- 43) is not unproblematic. But if we leave that aside and redefine her concept accordingly, her theorizations do pinpoint a variety of anxiety towards market, or idea of market, which she is right to associate with Coetzee. Brouillette curiously leaves out Boyhood, Youth and Slow Man from her investigation of Coetzee's post-apartheid work. In following I will present a reading of Youth that sheds light upon strategies at work in novel Slow Man, as there are relations between these novels that have so far largely been ignored. A probable reason for this is that protagonists in each have been introduced in other, earlier, novels. Youth is sequel to memoir-novel Boyhood (1997), while re-emergence of character Elizabeth Costello in Slow Man activates a strong inter-textual relationship first and foremost with Elizabeth Costello. But both Youth and Slow Man explore themes of migration, transnationalism, and authorship and challenge notion of national as a fixed and valuable category. Acknowledging connections between works makes us aware of a development in Coetzee's fiction of twenty-first century in which author's work seems insistent on constructing a literary world peculiar to name J. M. Coetzee. The many intertextual traces of Coetzee's earlier novels in his more recent ones, create, I suggest, a paratext for his readers to judge his work by, to rival paratext of nationality--South Africanness--which has until this moment been most influential way of reading and evaluating Coetzee's novels. The epigraph of Youth marks it as a novel concerned with world literature. A quote of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe introduces novel in one of Coetzee's rare epigraphs, emphasizing importance of traveling to reading: Wer den Dichter will verstehen/Muss in Dichters Lande gehen (Who wants to understand poet/must go to poet's land).This quote is from Goethe's opening of Noten und Abhandlungen zti Besseren Verstandnis zu West-Ostlichen Divan, 1819 (219). …