J.M. Coetzee and the Problems of Literature by Benjamin H. Ogden A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in English written under the direction of Myra Jehlen and Derek Attridge and approved by ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey May, 2013 Abstract of the Dissertation J.M. Coetzee and the Problems of Literature by Benjamin H. Ogden Dissertation Directors: Myra Jehlen and Derek Attridge This dissertation traces the evolution of J.M. Coetzee’s thinking concerning literary form in the non-fiction he wrote between 1963 and 1984. During the first two decades of his career, Coetzee completed a Master’s thesis on Ford Madox Ford, a doctoral dissertation on Samuel Beckett, and numerous articles on topics ranging from quantitative stylistics, to linguistics, to classical rhetoric. Although Coetzee’s novels have become among the most widely studied contemporary fiction in the world, his earliest writing about literature has been widely ignored. I argue that in neglecting Coetzee’s early work on literary form scholars have neglected much of his most important thinking concerning both the nature of the novel as a literary genre and literary form itself. If Coetzee’s novels are important in large part because of how they rethink the conventions of fiction, then it is critical to understand that his novels are extensions of the thinking he did as a doctoral candidate in linguistics and literature, and as a professor. This dissertation is also a study of how practicing novelists conceive of fiction writing. Coetzee’s thinking about literary form and the novel genre cannot be properly understood without understanding how practicing writers generally, and Coetzee in particular, understand the craft of fiction writing. A full grasp of Coetzee’s writing is ii unattainable in isolation from his ideas about writing as a vocation. These ideas, in turn, are inaccessible without an understanding of his early writing on literary form and stylistics. As I study Coetzee’s work on Ford Madox Ford (Chapter One), Samuel Beckett (Chapter Two), and Gerrit Achterberg/Franz Kafka (Chapter Three), I demonstrate how Coetzee’s studies of literature are uniquely shaped by a novelist’s conception of fiction writing. iii Acknowledgements and Dedication This dissertation would not have been possible without the support of my committee: Myra Jehlen, Derek Attridge, John McClure, and Carrol Clarkson. I am grateful beyond words to have been guided by a committee with such a light, but discerning, touch. At every fork, you have coaxed me down the best path. As professors and mentors, you have shaped forever the way I think, work, teach, and write. I would also like to thank the entire faculty and administration of the Rutgers English department, not only for what you have taught me, and for what your support has allowed me to do as a scholar, but for the care you have shown to me at every stage of this long process. I am particularly appreciative of the financial support that the English department, the School or Arts and Sciences, and the Mellon Foundation have provided me. I can only hope that my work has not led you to regret your tremendous generosity. And, of course, I would like to thank my parents, my family, and my friends. I think of you, and I feel fortunate, and loved, to the very deepest levels. iv Table of Contents Title Page…………………………………………………………………………………..i Abstract of the Dissertation……………………………………….....................................ii Acknowledgments and Dedication………………………………………….....................iv Introduction: Solving the Problems of Literature…………………………………………1 Chapter One: The Early Coetzee: Ford Madox Ford and Literary Mathematics……......36 Chapter Two: J.M. Coetzee in America: On Beckett and Stylistics……………………..78 Chapter Three: Playing the Game of the Rules: J.M. Coetzee as Literary Critic………124 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………….183 v 1 Introduction Solving the Problems of Literature: On the Writing of J.M. Coetzee The purpose of this dissertation is to develop ideas that have their origins in several feelings I have had, and continue to have, about the writing of J.M. Coetzee and the field of study that surrounds him. I use the word “feelings” not because I wish to be less than precise in my thinking, but because the ideas and arguments that fill this dissertation began as feelings—as acutely felt intuitions about the workings of the literature I was trying to understand: as a feeling of conviction about what was missing in Coetzee studies; as a feeling of frustration about what seemed to be a lack of concern among literary scholars for the unique ways in which novelists think and write about the fiction writing process; and as a feeling of excitement about the importance of Coetzee’s early writing to both a proper understanding of his novels and to a proper understanding of how Coetzee’s thoughts on the craft of writing color his theories on literature in profound ways. This dissertation is my attempt to transform these feelings and beliefs into writing. It is also my attempt to explore what I call problems of literature as they appear, and are worked through, in Coetzee’s essays and fiction. What I mean by the term problems of literature, and how these problems (and Coetzee’s attempts to solve them) figure into my greater project, is discussed in the latter half of this introduction. As a way 2 of explaining how the arguments in this book came about, and as a way of putting the problems of literature in their relevant contexts, I explain below where these intuitions and feelings came from, and what sort of arguments and forms of thinking they led to. When I first began reading criticism of J.M. Coetzee’s novels (this was six or seven years ago), I felt that nearly all of the criticism on his work portrayed Coetzee as an author who wrote fiction that could just as well be read as literary theory, or that was actually political allegory (a kind of facile literary journalism written in code), or whose interest was primarily as an example of modernist or postmodernist forms and themes. Criticism was less about Coetzee’s writing understood on its own terms and more about what his work meant to a set of debates that were then going on in the field. The early books on Coetzee were of this sort: Teresa Dovey’s work was explicitly Lacanian, Dick Penner’s Countries of the Mind delved into the colonial and Cartesian heritage of Coetzee’s early fiction, Sue Kossew published A Post-Colonial Reading of J.M. Coetzee and André Brink, and David Attwell, in J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing, elegantly put Coetzee’s novels in their political and literary-historical contexts. With rare exception, the articles and anthologies and special journal issues devoted to Coetzee followed suit. Politics and history were dominant; attention to form was mostly hedged toward allegory, or to matching up the metafictional components of Coetzee’s writing to some corresponding epoch in the development of literary style. Appreciation for Coetzee’s writing on its own terms – as constituting a way in which literature takes on meaning, and seeks out and embodies truth, that is superordinate to the political and historical realities of which it is a part and from which it emerges – was barely existent. My feeling, then and now, about the general spirit that characterizes 3 Coetzee studies is: Writing about Coetzee is mostly a matter of figuring out how to slot him in to history, or politics, or literary theory. Upon re-reading much of the early criticism, I continue to feel much the same way, though there was more writing against the grain than I had initially believed there to be (for instance, the early work of Mike Marais). I also (for the most part) found the early neo-Marxist criticism of Peter Knox- Shaw, Michael Vaughan, and Michael Chapman urgent and passionately connected to South African reality, as opposed to naïve about Coetzee’s motives as a writer (which, I confess, was my original response). Then Derek Attridge wrote J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading. Principally, it is a deeply critical response to the way of understanding Coetzee’s fiction that I have just described. But it is also an attempt to explain what it is about literature that makes programmatic historical and political readings unequal to the singular inventiveness and complexity of literary fiction. In Attridge’s hands, Coetzee’s writing is representative of the singular nature and power of literature; Attridge calls for critics of literature generally – and of Coetzee in particular – to write in a way that does justice to the singularity of the literary by being equal to the challenges that that singularity poses to the critic who faces the task of writing thoughtfully and accurately in response to it. “A literary work is not an object or a thesis;” writes Attridge, “literature happens” (xii). “The singularity of the literary work is produced not just by its difference from all other works, but by the new possibilities for thought and feeling it opens up in its creative transformation of familiar norms and habits: singularity is thus inseparable from inventiveness” (11). And, he says, “What I am trying to counter is the common view of the literary work…as a static, self- sufficient, formal entity which, while it may be the product of historical processes and the 4 occasion for various interpretations across time, is a fixed linguistic structure without a temporal or performative dimension” (10).