Tim Mehigan, The University of Queensland
David Attwell’s new book JM Coetzee and the Life of Writing (2015) commands attention for a particular and notable reason: it is the first extended investigation of the South African author’s work since the advent of Coetzee archive at the University of Texas in 2011.
Attwell is always mindful of the conventional wisdom about Coetzee’s works – a wisdom he has contributed to over many years through his own scholarship. But his chief concern in Life of Writing is to allow the archive to speak. He wants the drafts of Coetzee’s novels, his notes, press clippings and miscellaneous remarks, to be considered at length for the first time.
In doing so, the book raises the question of whether that archive makes any real difference to our appreciation of Coetzee’s core concerns. Whether the works stand eloquently, as they mostly have till now, on their own ground, with no need of augmentation.
Another way of putting the same question (a touch polemically, I admit) is to ask whether the philologist – the literary archivist of days gone by – is needed when it comes to ongoing engagement with notable writing.
Image courtesy of Text Publishing
As a way of answering that, let me outline the approach Attwell adopts. The chapter Suburban Bandit: Michael K as outlaw, considers Coetzee’s 1983 novel Life & Times of Michael K, which marked Coetzee’s arrival on the global stage and bagged him the 1983 Booker Prize – the first of two to come his way.
For those who don’t know, Life & Times is the story of a man called Michael K, who journeys from Cape Town to his mother’s rural birthplace. The setting is apartheid era South Africa during a fictional civil war.
Much scholarship already exists around Life & Times. But the archive reveals the literary model Coetzee was using as a way into his material. It was not, as had been widely assumed, any one of several possible texts by Franz Kafka – many believed “K” was a tribute to Kafka, or the protagonist K in two of his novels.
Instead, the model was a piece of writing that appeared a century before Kafka’s, the novella Michael Kohlhaas (1810) by the German author Heinrich von Kleist.
The protagonist of Kleist’s story suffers a loss when two horses he leaves as surety are worked into the ground while he is away on business. His campaign of revenge soon makes him one of the most feared outlaws of his day (Kleist’s story is based on an actual historical chronicle).
The question Coetzee poses in his recasting of Kleist’s story is whether that path of violence would have to be abjured in the fictional universe of his own novel. The complicated gestation of Life & Times sheds light on the complex problem Coetzee chose as his starting point.
Attwell uncovers in this instance, as with so many others he considers, a sprawling edifice of writings and rewritings, plots and subplots, many of which end up – as with a good film – on the cutting-room floor.
EPA/Mauricio Duenas Castaneda
As Attwell shows, Coetzee’s novels do not abandon the contradictions inherent in their intellectual starting point or shift onto easier ground. On the contrary, they retain the sense of contradiction from which they spring and to which they insistently seek a response.
These responses illustrate the struggle of protagonists against a testing, frequently intransigent, outer reality. They also bring forth in essential outline “the life of writing,” the exacting craft of the writer. It turns out that the kind of writing to which Coetzee pledges himself is not fully tractable even to the most dogged and drawn out literary labour.
Small wonder Coetzee chose a moment of decadal significance – January 1, 1970 – as the moment of personal commitment to the supremely challenging literary enterprise he had set himself.
In the concrete instance of Life & Times we see an initial premise, arising from middle-class indignation, move through various stages of development, finally emerging as the pathos of the simpleton Michael K. The rebellion this character stages is then almost completely allegorical.
Harelipped, idiot-seeming, Michael K is fitted to allegory less because of an inability to articulate his concerns than the unspeakable circumstances engulfing him. The novel, on a long journey to its final form, thus reveals to the reader a psychological and existential predicament.
It is a predicament, as the medical officer in the novel tells us, according to which meaning seeks to “take up residence within a system without becoming a term in it”. Though in the end a different novel quite removed from its dominant inspiration, Michael Kohlhaas, Life & Times nevertheless works out the same sort of rebellion of decency against obscene outer circumstances.
Attwell concludes:
Coetzee triumphed over his own earlier difficulties by creating a powerful anomaly – one which, when read back into the culture from which it springs, stands as an affirmation of artistic and intellectual freedom (even if such a declaration, in its finality, traduces what the novel itself argues).
The book is without question an important work of scholarship, and one of the most insightful studies of Coetzee and his oeuvre yet published.
JM Coetzee and the Life of Writing by David Attwell is published by Text Publishing.
Tim Mehigan, Professor of Languages and Cultures , The University of Queensland
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
The link below is to a review of the Kobo Touch 2.0 Ebook Reader.
For more visit:
http://goodereader.com/blog/e-reader/kobo-touch-2-0-e-reader-review
Last year more than a dozen political memoirs were published in Australia. From Bob Carr’s Diary of a Foreign Minister to Greg Combet’s The Fights of My Life, from Rob Oakeshott’s The Independent Member for Lyne to Bob Brown’s Optimism, one could be forgiven for thinking Australia is a nation of political junkies.
Or that we’re fascinated by the personalities, policies and procedures that shape our political landscape. But are we really, and if not, why so many books?
The deluge shows no signs of abating, with a similar number of titles expected this year. Already we’ve seen the release of Shadow Minister Chris Bowen’s The Money Men, reflections by Federal Labour members Mark Butler and Andrew Leigh, with former Victorian Labour leader John Brumby’s practical “lessons”, The Long Haul, in press.
Liberals, once laggards in this genre, are stepping up in growing numbers. Federal Minister Christopher Pyne’s “hilarious” A Letter To My Children is out, and Peter Reith’s The Reith Papers is underway. Also in press is the genuinely unauthorised Born to Rule: the Unauthorised Biography of Malcolm Turnbull.
First nurtured by John Iremonger of Hale & Iremonger, Melbourne University Press now leads the way with the genre. MUP Director, Louise Adler, is notorious for her enthusiasm and her efforts to contract politicians of all parties and persuasions. But even Adler has reservations, writing in September’s Meanjin that “the political memoir is unabashedly myopic, subjective and reflexively partisan”.
Dean Lewins/AAP, CC BY-ND
One argument for the proliferation of political memoirs is that they enable the public to engage with politicians outside the frenzy of the 24/7 news cycle. Certainly the popularity of Annabel Crabb’s ABC show Kitchen Cabinet suggests there’s some weight to this “getting to know the person beyond the sound-bite” theory.
Some argue the 24-hour media cycle has debased politics to such a degree that voters are searching for a depth of focus missing from parliament and mainstream media coverage and finding it through other channels.
Based on the sales figures, a publisher can safely bet that an Australian political memoir or biography is likely to pay its own way, at the very least. Even the slow ones mostly sell more than a few thousand copies.
But do sales say anything meaningful about these books’ impact on our political process or cultural debate? And how to measure the impact of the political memoir on democratic process?
The genre has been trending for a few years now, propelled in no small part by the success of Bob Hawke’s The Hawke Memoirs (1994) which sold 75,000 copies, and John Howard’s Lazarus Rising (2011), which sold upwards of 100,000.
As far back as 2007, David Marr in his analysis of John Howard’s prime ministership, His Master’s Voice: the corruption of public debate under Howard, despaired of the increase in public “chatter” and the sabotage of free speech. Paradoxically, it was during this period, and subsequently, that political memoirs and biographies increased in number.
Thanks to the introduction of Nielsen BookScan in 2002 and its collection of reliable national book sales figures, metrical research into the book industry and reading patterns is now possible.
But what readers make of the content of these books, and how they contribute to Australian culture, is difficult to accurately discern.
Dr Jan Zwar conducted a close analysis of a range of narrative nonfiction books and their contribution to cultural debate during the Howard years 2003-2008. In an essay for the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature she observed that “experiences of the actual readers remain a mystery behind the wall of data”.
Dean Lewins/AAP
Other forms of media mediate the relationship between the memoir, its author and the wider readership. Syndicated publication of extracts, the author’s appearances through radio, television, online and print media to discuss the book, and appearances at writers festivals and festivals of ideas are all channels key to ensuring the possibility of the memoir’s broader ideas being promulgated.
In her 2012 essay More than Michael Moore: Contemporary Australian Book Reading Patterns and the Wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, Zwar proposed that it is through these “longer term, less obvious ways” that these texts have discursive impact.
Former PM, Julia Gillard, by way of example, has appeared at half a dozen writers festivals in Australia and New Zealand alongside her memoir, My Story (2015), although no one I spoke to nominated the memoir as being influential or contributing to the debate. Yet, with large live audiences, Gillard clearly is contributing.
The memoir is the prop for the event, and contributes to an already existing discussion of broader “Gillard” topics such as women in politics and education reform.
Similarly, Anna Bligh, former Premier of Queensland, speaking on the ABC program Q&A in August, firmly linked her memoir, Through the Wall: Reflections on Leadership, Love and Survival (2015), to her key message of encouragement to young women to pursue a career in politics, and not to be fearful of the walls “built of the solid bricks of prejudice” (to quote from the book).
Mick Tsikas/AAP
Mark Latham’s Latham’s Diaries, originally published in 2005, eclipses all other political memoirs and autobiographies in my research for impact, in terms of readers recalling and engaging with its dissection of the Labor Party in the post-Keating years, the Australian political system more broadly, and its insistence that there ought to be serious debate about political philosophy.
Whatever one may think of Latham today, this memoir has contributed to debate and critiques of Australian democratic process in the new century. Natalie Mast recently argued on The Conversation that, ten years on from its publication, “the flaws in our political system that Latham highlighted continue to affect us”.
It is both the specialist and the general reader that the politicians are appealing to, with general readers contributing the bulk of sales, and thus the economic viability of the genre. But it is the political analysts and historians, journalists, lobbyists, festival directors, politicians and would-be politicians who are the most critical readers of these books and who enable a memoir’s impact.
Laura Tingle, the Australian Financial Review’s political editor, has possibly read them all. According to Tingle, the “young things” in the current caucus are “hoovering up” Gareth Evans’ Inside the Hawke–Keating Government: A Cabinet Diary (2014) to gain an understanding of how the government worked.
Knowing what happened is not of course equivalent to energetic debate and discourse, but it is a starting point.
Jesse Matheson/AAP
Tingle nominated three other books of influence from recent years. Tony Abbott’s Battlelines (2013) continues to “reverberate” as readers realise it has not clarified Abbott’s beliefs, but just added to the mix. Malcolm Fraser’s Dangerous Allies (2014), which followed on from his Political Memoirs, is having impact because of the quality of its insights and argument, though strictly speaking it is not a memoir.
Tingle also nominates Bob Carr’s Diary of a Foreign Minister (2014), despite it blowing up across social media over Carr’s love of activated almonds and other personal nonsense about his abs and pyjamas. But from Tingle’s perspective, Carr’s diary holds value for its uniquely positioned observations of the Gillard cabinet.
You effectively had an outsider/ journalist reporting on what he saw in a government that was crumbling. For that reason, I think it is going to be an on-going source for many years on what happened in the Gillard period.
Margaret Simons, Director of the Centre for Advanced Journalism and co-author of Malcolm Fraser: The Political Memoirs, pointed to other works as influential, but again, they’re not wholly memoirs, nor all recent: suggesting the genre does indeed have limitations.
Simons identified the Latham Diaries, the late John Button’s 2002 Quarterly Essay, Beyond Belief: what future for Labour (part memoir, part critique), and thirdly, Clare O’Neil and Tim Watts’ 2015 Two Futures: Australia at a Critical Moment.
Too young to be documenting their political lives through memoir, this pair are not looking back, but forwards.
Jane Messer, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
The links below are to articles reporting on what has been decided as Australia’s top 100 books by Better Reading. What do you think of the list?
For more visit:
– http://www.theguardian.com/books/australia-books-blog/2015/sep/08/better-reading-names-australias-top-100-books-not-all-great-novels-but-good-reads
– http://www.betterreading.com.au/book_list/better-reading-presents-australias-top-100-books/
The link below is to an article that looks at making time for reading.
For more visit:
https://hbr.org/2015/09/how-making-time-for-books-made-me-feel-less-busy
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