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A dapper, silver-haired figure stands centre stage in Central Hall, reading from loose sheets of paper with a quiet intensity. Continuing the Out of the Archive conference on Beckett, this rare public appearance marks another highlight of York’s first Festival of Ideas, and J. M. Coetzee’s second visit to the university.
Coetzee himself began as a Beckett scholar, choosing to write his dissertation on Beckett’s early fiction. His first novel, Dusklands, was then published in 1974. Now the first writer to have been awarded the Booker Prize twice, he has written 9 novels, 3 translations, and 5 other books that defy categorisation. Like Beckett, who translated between French and English, Coetzee too has lived between languages. And just as Beckett won a Nobel prize in 1969, he was to repeat this success 34 years later.
Coetzee was born in 1940 in South Africa; a land that awarded him its highest honour - the Order of Mapungubwe (gold). Coetzee had lived in South Africa, England, and America, before he finally emigrated to Australia. He was refused permanent residency in America in 1971 because of his involvement in an anti-Vietnam war protest, which had given him a criminal record. It was the publication of Disgrace that won him his second Booker prize. The novel, which contains multiple kinds of disgraces, can be read as many different narratives. It is a book about blame, crime, and control, and grapples uneasily with the promise of the ‘Rainbow Nation.’ It was also the book that created conflict between him and the African National Congress. As a result, J. M. Coetzee was to leave the place of his birth.
Introducing the event, Vice-Chancellor Brian Cantor celebrates the nationally recognised research of York’s English and Related Literature department. He emphasises the importance and vitality of the humanities here at York. ‘For us,’ he states, ‘York is the city of ideas.’ Derek Attridge then welcomes the ‘pleasantly huge audience,’ introducing the writer whose words are ‘polished gems.’ For Attridge, Coetzee’s integrity, honesty and generosity have remained remarkably untarnished by the international media circus. He speaks of York’s gratitude for this rare visit. Sharing Beckett’s suspicion of media attention, Coetzee has established a reputation for being press-wary, and for keeping himself apart. He even declined to accept either of his Booker Prizes in person.
Coetzee reads from a work in progress. Its first chapter sets up a story about a man and a boy in an unfamiliar country. Like many of his other novels, it is about miscommunication, language, and daily cares; the barest elements of human existence. The novelist’s voice is unhurried, and he speaks with all the clarity of his written style. His words seem almost frugal, and yet at the same time taut, as though a bowstring has been drawn tightly behind them. The passage strikes me as reminiscent of Samuel Beckett in its panning of the ridiculousness of life’s normality to find a subtle comedy. Coetzee’s novels are ones that discuss being an outsider, exclusion, and powerlessness. His subject matter is messy and complicated. Rather than offering black or white readings, he gestures to all the shades of grey in-between.
The reading is, as Derek Attridge concludes, a privileged glimpse into a new fictional world. It is a world that is at once familiar, recalling Coetzee’s earlier novels, and yet one that is also new, and never before seen.
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