| Chapter 2: | Coetzee's Freedom |
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Youth has an epigraph which might be read in several ways. It comes from Goethe:
muß in Dichters Lande gehen.
[Whoever wants to understand the poet must go to the poet's country.]
Is the Dichter (poet) who is to be understood Coetzee himself? Are we, in Youth, to be taken into Coetzee's Lande in order to understand him, his Lande being the territory of his mind? Or is it a statement of what the young John was trying to do—enter the country of his favorite poets, Eliot and Pound, in order to understand them? Whichever way we take it, it is of course essential to remember that this memoir and its predecessor, Boyhood, were written years later, and however accurate or otherwise their accounts of the time might be, they are shaped to a purpose. Self-revelation has never been a favorite activity with him, and exactly why Coetzee wrote them will probably always be something of a mystery on which one might waste endless speculation. But whatever their purpose or motivation, they show the development of that stubborn spirit of resistance which has nothing to do with politics but sometimes seems almost to amount to a rejection of life in all its variety, with the trust in others and oneself and the compromises which it constantly demands. A rueful recognition of this tendency can be found in Diary of a Bad Year:
Despite the fact that this is a novel rather than a personal diary, one can surely hear the voice of the author here. He goes too far, however.