In a rare public appearence, the Nobel prize winning author, J.M. Coetzee, made a trip to York. Toby Hall explores the man who remains controversial yet distant

An anonymous academic leans across a row of chairs in the Jack Lyons concert hall and nudges me. “If someone set fire to this place there would be a lot of jobs going in postcolonial studies at departments all over the country”, he grins.

The sense of humour may a little odd, but he’s got a point, of sorts. The publicity surrounding JM Coetzee’s appearance and reading of previously unseen material at York has led to an unprecedented interest and turnout of academics, students and fans of literature.

The idea of such high demand for an English lecture that tickets have to be requested weeks in advance may seem absurd to students more used to lie-ins than 9.15s, but rarely has the department pulled off such a coup with a guest lecturer. The news made national papers, and staff were on hand to try and protect their visitor by preventing photographs and transcripts of the talk.

The South African novelist was in the United Kingdom for only 48 hours, enticed into one of his legendarily rare public appearances at the request of two old friends now working at York. Coetzee and Professors David Attwell and Derek Attridge from the English department go back over two decades, and while the novelist observed that he had been “looking forward to visiting one of the foremost literature departments in the UK,” it is no coincidence that Attridge heads it. Indeed, the whistle-stop tour fitted around a walk along the Yorkshire coastline, and a chance to catch up with ‘two old friends from the old days’.

Years ago JM Coetzee told David Attwell that “All autobiography is storytelling, all writing is autobiography”, and the theory seems just as applicable to his work today, as Coetzee presented fragments of a forthcoming book in the form of a fictional diary. The distance the author places between himself and his art is central to Coetzee’s work, and I got the impression that this has never been a purely a matter of literary style for him – it is a political, and moral, dilemma. There is a powerful belief that it is through art that one can truly express the complexities of human interaction, and that the current crises the world faces are the result of an abandonment of these values. Through his reading, Coetzee brands the American legal teams who defend Guantanamo Bay as “literature students who got mediocre grades, whose tutors believed that they never really understood the texts they studied,” merely going through the motions of literary analysis. They then stripped these analytical skills of any subtlety or sentiment in order to construct neat arguments for the justification of torture.During moments like these it became a conscious effort to realise that what we were hearing was not Coetzee’s views, but those of a fictional character mediated through his art. This calculated effect brings us back to the core of his artistic and political project, and seemed to me the only way to understand the reading. Coetzee is often labelled as the voice of the impassioned observer, placed in an existential crisis when confronted with the extremities of human behaviour and cruelty.

saving the human and ephemeral", " ", "right"); ?>Yet there is an uneasiness about tackling the questions raised in his novels as a true outsider – that is to say, from a disinterested political perspective. Coetzee’s character rages against Bush and US foreign policy, yet he is equivocal about Harold Pinter’s impassioned Nobel Prize acceptance speech. He points out the danger of fighting politicians on their own ground, not least because ‘they will be better than you – they’ve had years of practice’ in the field of justifying the unjustifiable. It is hard to imagine two more dissimilar figures – Pinter, with his fiery renunciation of his writing in favour of politics, and Coetzee, who continues to write, delivering his reading in tones as succinct and measured as his prose. Indeed, his works seem more careful and judiciously constructed as time goes on, and the latest novel, Slow Man, could be seen as an exploration of this idea. Nevertheless, the two artists are linked by the powerful moral compass which guides both men’s lives, and it is unsurprising that Coetzee should have chosen to use Pinter to discuss the problematic combination of politics and art.

It would be wrong to leave the impression that Coetzee’s reading painted a picture of an author grappling with only the largest of political issues and crises.

Man’s relationship with his natural world provides a consistent moral barometer in his work and it is against this backdrop that we were introduced to ‘Niet Verloren’, a traditional farm, rendered obsolete by technological and ideological progress and only maintained as a monument to a previous era. The focus on the minutiae of rural life and its repetition of names, places, and archaic agricultural terms served as a eulogy to a passing age. This is a balance which Coetzee always strives to maintain – morally holding one to account, while preserving the human and ephemeral.

Coetzee’s bibliography

In the Heart of the Country
Set in the oppressive atmosphere of colonial South Africa, a lonely sheep farmer seeks companionship from a black concubine. This has severe repercussions when the farmer’s spinster daughter Magda expresses her disgust, with the inter-racial relationship threatening to end an already unstable peace.

The Life and Times of Michael K
Michael K journeys with his mother back to her country home. Unfortunately she dies en route, leaving her son to survive amidst anarchy and rebel fighting. Michael is imprisoned, but, driven by claustrophobia, manages to escape and regain some dignity. A Booker Prize winner.

Waiting for the Barbarians
The Magistrate is the servant of the Empire and has long been running the affairs of a small frontier settlement. However, he has neglected the likely prospect of war between the Empire and barbarians. When interrogation experts arrive, though his sympathies switch to the barbarians.

Disgrace
Coetzee’s second Booker Prize winner tells the story of a tutor David Lurie’s retreat to his daughter’s farm after the fallout of an affair with a student. The farm is isolated, yet the pair are not immune from brutal and disturbing attacks. These attacks serve to highlight their flaws and insecurities

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