J.M. Coetzee and the Power of Narrative By Gillian Dooley

him soon enough. The few flashes of delight are sparked mainly by literature. Firstly, he discovers Joseph Brodsky, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Zbigniew Herbert, who tell him “of what poetry can be and therefore of what he can be, filling him with joy that he inhabits the same earth as they” (Y 91). Later, when he has begun to think that prose might suit his talents better than poetry, he reads Samuel Beckett's Watt, which is “so funny that he rolls about laughing” (Y 155). Laughing! Nothing in the previous 150 pages has prepared us for laughter. At last, he has found a model: “How could he have imagined he wanted to write in the manner of Ford when Beckett was around all the time?…Beckett is classless, or outside class, as he himself would prefer to be” (Y 155).

Earlier, he had found books in the British Museum, accounts of “the South Africa of the old days” (Y 137), which give him the idea of writing a book about South Africa, “a book whose horizon of knowledge will be that of…the 1820s” (Y 138). Years later, this idea grew into the second part of his first novel, Dusklands. But the “ugly new South Africa” (Y 137) still repels him. He has left Cape Town for London hurriedly to escape being drafted into military service after the Sharpeville massacre and is under no illusions about the welcome to be expected in England by “forlorn South African whites cluttering their doorstep like orphans in search of parents” (Y 87). His solution to the problem of South Africa is a Russian invasion: “They should land paratroops in Pretoria, take Verwoerd and his cronies captive, line them up against a wall, and shoot them.” He is not concerned about what happens then: “Justice must be done, that is all that matters; the rest is politics, and he is not interested in politics” (Y 100). He attends a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament rally, but “fist-shaking and slogan-chanting, the whipping up of passion in general, repel him. Only love and art are, in his opinion, worthy of giving oneself to without reserve” (Y 85). Love and art must be taken seriously: he disapproves of flirting, and throughout a course of dancing lessons, “he remained rigid with resistance” (Y 89). He seems above all afraid of losing control. The watchfulness he learned as a child can rarely be relaxed, though one Sunday afternoon in spring on Hampstead Heath, he “sinks into a sleep or