JM Coetzee And The Idea Of The Public Intellectual – J Poyner

A responsible reading, for Attridge, does “not attempt to pigeonhole a work”: “To read a work re- sponsibly . . . is to read it without placing over it a grid of possible uses, as historical evidence, moral lesson, path to truth, political inspiration, or personal encouragement. It is to trust in the unpredictability of reading, its openness to the future” (“Ethics,” 34).6 This would seem to represent the critical equivalent of Coetzee’s insistence on the autonomy of the writer and the novel, especially the felt need to establish a position of “rivalry” with history, when the only other option seems to be “supplementarity” (Coetzee, “Novel Today,” 3).

But insofar as Attridge is consciously constructing a ver- sion of critical reading—an ethical event—in which the inventiveness of the work is matched, or at least responded to, by the inventiveness of the critic, we may wonder if he points the way to the “equal marriage” between critic and work that Coetzee implies is virtually impossible. Here is not the place to debate the degree to which such an equal mar- riage is desirable (or the extent to which it might indicate a loss of proper critical distance).

But it is appropriate to add this qualification: that the idea of this equal marriage, when applied to a single author and the ideas about writing and criticism his fictional works seem to stimulate, can op- erate at only a very generalized level. The connection is vulnerable at every turn to the shifting emphases in successive works.

Tracing some of these shifting emphases, however, can be instructive. I defend the idea that the title character of Life and Times of Michael K, at one plane of significance, makes us think about the problem of textual meaning and, by extension, the danger of critical “betrayal” or “overpower- ing.” The probing of the medical officer in the second section of the novel, whose desire is to make K “yield” his story, serves to overemphasize the sense in which the character’s elusiveness is also an allegory of textual mean- ing (152).

The important moment here is when the medical officer imag- ines pursuing K, calling out to him his interpretation that K’s stay in the camp was an allegory of “how outrageously a meaning can take up resi- dence in a system without becoming a term in it” (166). This is complex because different ideas of allegory are in play: the political allegory that K inhabits yet resists, the allegory of the deferral of meaning that is also un- dercut by the dogged earthiness of K, and the allegory of reading.

In the A Belief in Frogs connection with the latter, we must have a dual response to the medical officer, whose sense of urgency to interpret K gives him, on the one hand, the hue of an “overpowering” reader.

In 2003 the novelist and essayist J. M. Coetzee was awatded the Nobel Prize in Literature, confirming his reputation as one of the most influential writers of our time. /. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual addresses the contribu- tion Coetzee has made to contemporary literature, not least for the contentious interventions his work makes in South African political discourse and the field of postcolonial studies. Taking the author’s ethical writing as its subject, this thought-provoking collection is an important aid to under- standing Coetzee’s fiction and critical thinking.

While the contributors to this volume examine Coetzee’s singularly modernist response to the apartheid and postapartheid situations in his fiction, this book is the first to engage at length with the later works, Disgrace, The Lives of Animals, and Elizabeth Costello. J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual explores Coetzee’s roles as an intellectual and a novelist in the specific contexts of South Africa; his stance on matters of allegory and his evasion of the apartheid censor; his tacit critique of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission; his per- formance at public lectures as his alter ego, Elizabeth Costello; and his explo- rations into ecofeminism and animal rights.

The essays cottected here, which include an interviey, «ith the Nobel laureate, provide new vantages from which to consider Coetzee’s writing. a a. Ores be yt a 7 5 Ais : 7 J Pee ke Pe a ee ae oe ees ; Digitized by the Internet Archive In 2022 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation https://archive.org/details/jmcoetzeeideaofp0000unse (iis ROMP? ee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual J.

4 flee Gael) el 7 ead and the Idea of the Public Intellectual edited by Jane Poyner Property of St. John Fisher College Lavery Libra Rochester, N.Y. 14618 OUHD YT, Ov SUGNED NOE URYS TD Yo DER: EaSz5: AT WHEN’S Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701 www.ohio.edu/oupress © 2006 by Ohio University Press The following chapters have been revised from previously published material: Chapter 2, by Peter D.

McDonald, in Book History 7 (2004): 285-302. Reprinted by permission of Penn State Press and the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing. Chapter 3, by Derek Attridge, in J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Scottsville: University of KwaZulu- Natal Press, 2004). © 2004 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Chapter 7, by Elleke Boehmer, in “J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace,” ed. Derek Attridge and Peter D.

McDonald, special issue, /nterventions 4, no. 3 (2002): 342—Sl. Chapter 10, by Laura Wright, in Writing “Out of All the Camps”: J. M. Coetzees Narratives of Displacement, by Laura Wright, 109-19 (New York: Routledge, 2006).

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: af705260de3bf8db
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 13,526,354 bytes (12.9 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• ISBN: 9780821416860, 9780821416877, 0821416863, 0821416871
• Pages: 265
• Language: English (en)

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