Chronicle of Higher Education - web daily - October 2, 2003
Nobel Prize in Literature Goes to J.M. Coetzee of South Africa
By SCOTT MCLEMEE
The 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to John Maxwell Coetzee, a white South African novelist and essayist whose work chronicles the inner history of his country's transformation from racial dictatorship to a post-apartheid society. While acknowledging Mr. Coetzee's literary craft, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, in an announcement this morning, particularly emphasized his "ruthless criticism of the cruel rationalism and cosmetic morality of Western civilization" -- a remark with international political overtones, no doubt intended to resonate beyond the strictly cultural sphere.
The prize, which is worth about $1.3-million this year, will be presented in December.
Mr. Coetzee (pronounced cut-SEE-uh), an Afrikaaner who writes in English, was born in Cape Town in 1940. After studying English and mathematics in South Africa and working as a computer programmer in England, he completed a Ph.D. in English at the University of Texas at Austin, writing his dissertation on Samuel Beckett, whose work Mr. Coetzee has cited as an influence on his own writing.
The Swedish academy seems to have acknowledged its recognition of the earlier Nobel winner's importance for this year's laureate. "At the decisive moment," its citation states, "Coetzee's characters stand behind themselves, motionless, incapable of taking part in their own actions. But passivity is not merely the dark haze that devours personality. It is also the last resort open to human beings as they defy an oppressive order by rendering themselves inaccessible to its intentions."
Of the 18 volumes in English by Mr. Coetzee cited by the academy, 7 are novels, including The Life and Times of Michael K. (1983) and Disgrace (1999), both of which won the Booker Prize. The latter novel, in the academy's words, "involves us in the struggle of a discredited university teacher to defend his own and his daughter's honor in the new circumstances that have arisen in South Africa after the collapse of white supremacy."
The award also recognizes the author's autobiographical writings, which evoke "a magic impression of life in the old-fashioned South African countryside, with its eternal conflicts between the Boers and the English and between white and black." The academy noted that Mr. Coetzee "dissects himself ... with a cruelty that is oddly consoling for anyone able to identify with him" -- a quality of self-examination that recalls both Beckett's antiheroes and Dostoyevsky's underground men.
In addition to his fiction and memoir, Mr. Coetzee has published a sizable body of criticism, much of it appearing in The New York Review of Books and Salmagundi. He taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo from 1968 to 1971, then became a professor of English literature at the University of Cape Town. He served there until 2002, when he moved to Australia, where he is a research fellow at the University of Adelaide. He is also a professor of social thought at the University of Chicago.
His work has received considerable attention from literary critics. In 1993, the University of California Press published David Atwell's study J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing. In addition to two recent collections of scholarly papers, Critical Perspectives on J.M. Coetzee (St. Martin's Press, 1996) and Critical Essays on J.M. Coetzee (G.K. Hall, 1998), the laureate's work is discussed in a volume by Sam Durrant, Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning: J.M. Coetzee, Wilson Harris, and Toni Morrison, published this year by the State University of New York Press.
"There is a great wealth of variety in Coetzee's works," the academy noted in its award. "No two books ever follow the same recipe. Extensive reading reveals a recurring pattern, the downward spiraling journeys he considers necessary for the salvation of his characters. His protagonists are overwhelmed by the urge to sink but paradoxically derive strength from being stripped of all external dignity."
The full text of the academy's citation is available on the Nobel Web site.