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Most autobiographies, as we are aware, are expressions of an
egotistical sublime that selects, shapes and orders its
material, concentrating on the positive and flattering aspects
of one’s personal history, ignoring all that is unpleasant or
base. It is this tendency to glorify his childhood that makes
Wordsworth loftily exclaim: "Fair seed-time had my soul
and I grew up / Fostered alike by Beauty and by Fear," and
inspires Dylan Thomas to sing of "once below a time when
[he] was young and easy," embarking on a memory trip
where all was green and golden, a luminous prelapsarian world of
innocent childhood.
Not so with J. M.
Coetzee: in his memoir there are no intimations of immortality.
There is nothing innocent or holy about the childhood of his
protagonist. Au contraire, it is a period fraught with
wickedness, desire and guilt. And now a sequel to Boyhood
has been published as Youth, which carries further the
relentless process of self-probing and self-recrimination. Here
the protagonist (still addressed in the third person) is a young
adult who leaves his motherland in search of greener pastures
but the rainbow he chases is elusive: the more he pursues it,
the farther it recedes.
Struggling to be a
writer, the protagonist of Youth seems caught in an
existential trap. He has left the familiar scenes of his
childhood behind and relocated to London where, he imagines,
real life awaits him. Symbolically, the move is from the known
to the unknown, a leap into existential chaos. It is a severing
of the umbilical cord, a cutting himself off from oppressive
family bonds on the one hand, and from the mother country on the
other. But moving from the third world to the first, to a life
on strange shores, he finds himself cast adrift without
moorings, rootless in a shifting world. His job gives him no
satisfaction and the company of women provides no solace. Like
Meursault in Camus’ L’Etranger, he remains a
robot-like figure, a functionary more than a human being,
mechanically carrying out the tasks assigned to him. Somewhere
outside his cocoon the Cuban crisis is taking place and the
Vietnam War is being fought, but these events are registered
only perfunctorily. What the narrative consciousness continues
to focus on is his repeated sense of meaninglessness and
worthlessness.
This relentless
fixation on the humiliations and failures of life is what places
Youth in the confessional genre. One recalls the failures
of Rousseau in his Confessions, or of St. Augustine who
lamented that "a cauldron of unholy loves sang all about
[his] ears" when he came to Carthage burning, burning,
burning. It is in this vein that Coetzee narrates how his
unheroic hero arrives in London and burns in the fire of infamy
and worthlessness. As such, Youth may be an outstanding
personal narrative but it makes heavy reading. It is a harsh
book that takes the reader on an inexorable trip, tracing human
lapses and failures. Often, the reader squirms in discomfort as
the novelist’s unflinching gaze lays before the public eye
failures and inadequacies that would not normally see the light
of the day.
All this makes
surprising confession, coming from a celebrated name like J. M.
Coetzee. Is this, we wonder, what celebrity writers are made of?
Is this what lies behind the mask? No doubt, it must have been a
painful exercise for the author, but evidently he believes that
great art has its origin in great suffering and that the
purgation of suffering is a necessary perquisite of art.
After great
sorrow, a formal feeling comes, so said a poet once. The formal
feeling in Coetzee re-orders his experience and presents before
us the indelible portrait of a man who suffers – a man
stripped to the bone, plumbing "the depths of coldness,
callousness, caddishness." This is a man who has realised
the true meaning of "Myself am Hell." He has seen it
all, has been to the depths of hell, and returned to tell his
story to the world. He is a man like you, like me. And his hell,
like yours and mine, lies somewhere deep in the recesses of the
memory, a nagging part of the psyche that refuses to be still.
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ON
reading the major novels of J. M. Coetzee (Age of Iron, Life
and Times of Michael K., Disgrace, and Foe, to
name a few) one does not get any information about the man behind
the work. The novels stand as independent fictitious worlds created
by an invisible author hidden somewhere behind the scenes. It seems
as though Coetzee believes, like T. S. Eliot, that the more perfect
the artist, the more separate in him will be the man who suffers and
the mind that creates. Evident in a Coetzee novel, then, is the
presence of the mind that creates – a brilliant, if somewhat
reclusive mind, prone to contemplating the malaise of the society,
whether the focus is on apartheid and its aftermath, involving a
large segment of society, or whether it is an inner turmoil related
to choices and relationships in the personal lives of individuals.
But, just when we accept Coetzee as one of those ivory-tower writers
hidden from the readers’ view, comes a book like his Boyhood:
Scenes from Provincial Life (1998) which seems to be an
autobiographical account of the writer’s early adolescent years.
It is different from other personal narratives not only in its
third-person narration but also in the perspective through which the
narrator chooses to focus on past events.
