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

that “every one of the 700 tongues of Borneo was as coherent and complex and intractable to analysis as English,” he wondered

It is only a question, but implicit in the question is the resistance to cultural and social imperatives which surfaces periodically throughout his work. Of course, Coetzee is not a philistine. His resistance to received opinion is not a rejection of the objects of that opinion—of Shakespeare and Beethoven, although we see from Youth that, at least when young, he preferred the solitary savagery of Swift (Y 21), and the intricate, intellectual music of J. S. Bach holds greater appeal for him (SS 8; DBY 173). Individual tastes aside, this is a larger attitude that steps back and allows room to consider points of view which not only do not occur to most other people, but would be regarded by many with horrified dismay.

In Youth, the ten-year-old who had shouted “I hate normal people” (B 78) at his mother has become a teenager so alienated from other people that he can form normal relations with no one. At nineteen, he is living alone in Cape Town, a student precariously but stubbornly independent of his family. His only ambition is to be a poet, and his every thought is directed towards discovering the poet's mode of being. Over the five years covered in Youth, in Cape Town and then in England, he gropes his way through life guided only by literature. T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound are his principal mentors, and Ford Madox Ford, admired by Pound, on whom he is writing a dutiful but increasingly disenchanted master's thesis. Unable to establish any friendships, behaving shamefully to the women he sleeps with, he is immersed in misery: “[I]f misery were to be abolished, he would not know what to do with himself” (Y 65). Luckily, there seems to be no question of that: he is occasionally ambushed by joy—the word is used twice in Youth—but misery returns to claim