JM Coetzee and Other Writers

Bożena Kucała and Robert Kusek J.M. Coetzee and Other Writers The role played in history by the Slavic nations is greatly disproportionate to the extent of the territory occupied by them. (Herder 1997 [1791]: 299) I’ll be attending a conference on Samuel Beckett in the UK next month. Foolishly, I con- sented to do an e-mail interview with one of the organizers beforehand, on the subject of my relations with Beckett. As he and I are discovering, I don’t have anything new to say about Beckett, and perhaps don’t even have a relation with him. I certainly wouldn’t be the kind of writer I am if Beckett had never been born, but that sort of debt – call it a debt, for want of a better word – is best not scrutinized. (Auster & Coetzee 2013: 242) What one learns from Herbert is not a body of ideas but a certain style, hard, durable: a style that is also an approach to the world and to experience, political experience included. Ideas are certainly important – who would deny that? – but the fact is, the ideas that operate in novels and poems, once they are unpicked from their context and laid out on the laboratory table, usually turn out to be uncomplicated, even banal. Whereas a style, an attitude to the world, as it soaks in, becomes part of the personality, part of the self, ultimately indistinguishable from the self. To put it another way: in the process of responding to the writers one intuitively chooses to respond to, one makes oneself into the person whom in the most intractable but also perhaps in the most deeply ethical sense one wants to be. (Coetzee 1993: 7) Despite the almost gargantuan “critical industry” that has been built around the life and works of J.M. Coetzee over the last two or so decades, limited attention appears to have been paid to an investigation of mutual influences and inspirations between the 2003 Nobel Prize winner and other writers. Though the writer himself as well as a number of critics have acknowledged Coetzee’s ostensible “debt” to such literary giants as Samuel Beckett, Daniel Defoe, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka, and Leo Tolstoy, few have shown interest in tracing the links between Coetzee and a whole group of less “canonical” writers, Cen- tral and Eastern European authors in particular, with whom Coetzee has long remained in creative dialogue. Addressing the issues of censorship, oppression, totalitarianism and the role of the writer – all particularly pertinent not only to the countries which were once trapped behind the Iron Curtain, but, despite the geographical distance, to the Republic of South Africa – Coetzee has often turned to Central and Eastern European history, experience and literary works. Aharon Appelfeld, Josif Brodski, Günter Grass, Zbigniew Herbert, Milan Kun- dera, Osip Mandelstam, Sándor Márai, Rainer Maria Rilke, Joseph Roth, Bruno 14 Bożena Kucała and Robert Kusek Schulz, Josef Škvorecký, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – these are just a few of the writers from the region that Coetzee, as both novelist and literary critic, has os- tensibly shown interest in. Engaged in reading and writing about Coetzee from Kraków, from the “European core” (Purchla 2008), we have been acutely aware of the fact that – to paraphrase Herder’s famous dictum – the real impact of Cen- tral and Eastern European writers on Coetzee and his oeuvre has been greatly disproportionate to the attention paid to the phenomenon by the representatives of the critical world. It was precisely this claim that served as a starting point for our research project titled “Travelling Texts: Encounters of Literatures” which was dedicated to identifying mutual influences between Coetzee and other writers. Despite Coetzee’s inevitable centrality, the project, which included, among others, an academic conference held at the Institute of English Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków on March 13–15, 2014, inspired us to trace other, often less conspicuous links between Central and Eastern European literatures and South African writing and to investigate the way the latter resonates with readers and critics from all over the world. The project culminates with the publication of the present volume. The collection consists of four parts. Chapter One, entitled “From a Far Coun- try,” comprises five essays by Johan Geertsema, Bożena Kucała, Wojciech Drąg, Robert Kusek and Zofia Ziemann, which trace the links – often deeply hidden – between J.M. Coetzee and Poland. The first two essays examine connections between J.M. Coetzee and the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert. Stressing Coetzee’s well-known resistance to interpretation, Johan Geerstema discusses Coetzee’s, Beckett’s and Herbert’s engagement with language, and argues that inherent in their suspicion of figurative language is an attempt to “touch reality,” to reach the real beyond language. In the other essay concerned with parallels between Coetzee and Herbert, Bożena Kucała – borrowing her title from Edward Said’s essay “On Lost Causes” – claims that Herbert in his poetry and Coetzee in his novels address the dilemma identified by Said as the proper mode of conduct in the face of loss and defeat. The articles by Wojciech Drąg and Robert Kusek both analyse Coetzeean inspirations in the theatre of Krzysztof Warlikowski, and focus on the func- tion of excerpts from Elizabeth Costello as a key text constituting Warlikowski’s theatrical production (A)pollonia. Furthermore, Robert Kusek reveals the in- tertextual links between Elizabeth Costello and two works by the Polish novelist and essayist Olga Tokarczuk, demonstrating how Coetzee’s text has travelled to a different location and has been appropriated to address specific political and cultural issues. J.M. Coetzee and Other Writers 15 Zofia Ziemann’s article illustrates the fact that texts travel not only between countries and cultures, but languages as well. The role of translators and literary critics in facilitating the process (or hindering it, as the case may be) cannot be overemphasised. Ziemann argues that the current international fame of the Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz is partly due to Coetzee’s essay on him which has been included in Inner Workings. Ziemann traces the influence of Coetzee the literary critic in the reception of Bruno Schulz in Celina Wieniewska’s Eng- lish translation. The papers by Pojanut Suthipinittharm, Hania A.M. Nashef and Angelika Re- ichmann, which make up Chapter Two entitled “Notes from the East,” are all singularly concerned with Coetzee’s 1994 novel The Master of Petersburg. Pojanut Suthipinittharm points out the biographical connection between J.M. Coetzee and Dostoevsky as a character in his novel, as well as Coetzee’s deliberate altera- tion of the real Dostoevsky’s life. She claims that despite its biographical disin- genuousness The Master of Petersburg retains its authenticity as a confessional narrative. Likewise, Hania A.M. Nashef acknowledges the writer’s use and misuse of biographical facts in The Master of Petersburg and underlies the novel’s hidden relevance to Coetzee’s own biography. Her discussion focuses predominantly on the relations between parents and children as well as the nature of evil in the novel. To broaden her discussion, Nashef shows how The Master of Petersburg engages intertextually with Dostoevsky’s Devils. Angelika Reichmann’s article is also concerned with the Dostoevskian allusions in Coetzee’s novel, but from a different perspective. Referring to Coetzee’s remarks on secular confession in his essay “Confession and Double Thoughts: Rousseau, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky,” Reichmann analyses The Master of Petersburg in terms of its poststructuralist reading of Stavrogin’s confession in Devils. Chapter Three, entitled “In the European Core,” testifies to a fruitful dialogue conducted between Coetzee and – mostly – Central European writers, as the articles by Joanna Jeziorska-Haładyj, Duncan McColl Chesney, Kamil Michta, Olga Glebova, Ottilia Veres, Krystyna Stamirowska, Marek Pawlicki and Jan Tlustý unmistakably prove. Joanna Jeziorska-Haładyj’s article is an overview of the Central European literary heritage in Coetzee’s writings. Emphasising his remarkable familiarity with the literatures of Central Europe, Jeziorska-Haładyj distinguishes formal parallels such as style and narrative techniques between Coetzee and Central European authors. Duncan McColl Chesney employs the notion of “serious fiction” to trace a line of influence from Kafka to Coetzee and to Imre Kertész. The article highlights con- vergences between aspects of Kafka’s style and worldview and the work of Coetzee 16 Bożena Kucała and Robert Kusek and Kertész. Karol Michta focuses his analysis on a specific connection between Kafka and Coetzee. Referring to the mention of shame in the conclusion of The Trial, Michta evokes Walter Benjamin’s discussion of the concept in his interpretation of Kafka’s book as well as Adorno’s reflections on shame inAesthetic Theory, in order to underscore the significance of this concept in Disgrace. Kafka’s impact on Coetzee’s writing is also the subject of the next essay, by Olga Glebova, who explores allusions to Kafka in Elizabeth Costello , and, by drawing attention to the questions of the representation of reality in literature and the role of literary tradition in Coetzee’s work, emphasises the modernist legacy in his fiction. Ottilia Veres explores Coetzee’s indebtedness to the work of Beckett and discusses the close links that exist between Molloy and Life and Times of Michael K. Krystyna Stamirowska reads Life and Times of Michael K in parallel with Kafka’s Metamorphosis, foregrounding the problem of the relations between the self and others in both texts. Marek Pawlicki’s article considers the Levinasian concept of the Other in Coetzee’s fiction. The starting point of his argument is a discussion of Coetzee’s critical reading of Robert Musil.

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