attwell on mastering authority

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Social Dynamics

Vol. 36, No. 1, March 2010, 214–221

Mastering authority: J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year

David Attwell

University of York, United KingdomTaylorandFrancisRSDY_A_456733.sgm10.1080/02533950903562575Social Dynamics0253-3952 (print)/1940-7874 (online)Original Article2010Taylor&Francis361000000March2 [email protected]

J.M. Coetzee’s fiction has, from its inception, parodied language which claims tospeak as the public use of reason. Diary of a Bad Year departs from this positionto some degree by offering a series of public reflections on the times; however,these reflections are embedded within a narrative structure which disallows usfrom taking them at face value. Such narrative framing raises the question of authority: not only the authority of the reflections themselves, but the authority of the voice and the voice in the text. The relationship between fiction and the publicsphere is such that fiction foregrounds the problem of authority in public discourseand seeks to capture the position of authority through heightened forms of mimesisand self-consciousness.

Keywords: J.M. Coetzee; autobiography; fictionality; authority

The fictional pretext for J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year (2007) is an invitation

from a German publisher (Mittwoch Verlag of Herderstrasse, Berlin) to an ageingnovelist to contribute to a collection to be called Strong Opinions. The novelist’s

adopted country is Australia; South Africa is his country of birth. His name is with-

held, but he is referred to as Señor C by the young woman Anya who he employs as

a typist, and as Juan by Anya’s partner Alan.1 The initials J.C., together with manyother clues, imply that the text is meant to be taken as autobiographical, though in a

sharply qualified sense. The semi-detached autobiography is well established in

Coetzee, notably in the third-person memoirs Boyhood (1997), Youth (2002) and

Summertime (2009); arguably, this text falls into that category while including explic-itly fictional elements (certain details of J.C.’s life, such as the dates of his birth and

arrival in Australia, do not match up with Coetzee’s, and the narrative involving Anya

and Alan is fictional).

J.C. takes the opportunity of the invitation to contribute to Strong Opinions to

respond ‘to the present in which I find myself’ (p. 67), the response initially taking theform of a series of public reflections. The reflections of Part One, ‘Strong Opinions’,

are pithy essays frequently about world affairs, particularly in relation to the war on

terror, as it is known (although the topics cover a wide range, many of which come up

elsewhere in Coetzee’s writing). The form mimics what Immanuel Kant (1784)famously called the public performance of reason: a tradition at least as old as Michel

de Montaigne, it has since the eighteenth century come to be associated quintessen-

tially with an Enlightenment concept of the public sphere. The reflections of Part Two,

the ‘Second Diary’, are personal – contrasting the private sphere with the earlier

*Email: [email protected]



216 D. Attwell

Harold Pinter, the subject of one of the novel’s reflections. Pinter used his 2005

acceptance speech to attack Tony Blair, calling for him to be tried as a war criminal.To which J.C. responds:

When one speaks in one’s own person – that is, not through one’s art – to denounce some

politician or other, using the rhetoric of the agora, one embarks on a contest one is likelyto lose [… therefore] it takes some gumption to speak as Pinter has spoken […] therecome times when the outrage and shame are so great that all calculation, all prudence, isoverwhelmed and one must act, that is to say, speak. (p. 127)

Is this the point of the (seemingly anti-Coetzeean) accommodation in Coetzee’s text?And would this imply that he is performing a renunciation? The answer is both yes

and no. To begin with yes: anyone who knows anything about Coetzee’s work and

reputation will know that J.C.’s views are recognisably Coetzee’s. We might note in

passing that the fictional editor of Strong Opinions says he would prefer to leave open

the question of whether the views are firmly tied to the writer’s; the interest should

fall, he says, on ‘the quality of the opinions themselves – their variety, their power tostartle, the ways in which they match or do not match the reputations of their authors’

(pp. 132–133). Fiction shades into autobiography here, because the text anticipates

that the reader will gauge J.C.’s views alongside what we know of the author’s. Tothis extent, Coetzee is having his say. But to return to that part of the answer which is

no: he does this without the formal renunciation, because the reflections are wrapped

in a fictional situation and are presented in parallel (literally, in parallel on the page)

with the points of view of the various players in the narrative, including Anya’s and

Alan’s, who act as the countervoices in the text (though perhaps not as fully realisedcharacters; I’ll come back to this point).

While J.C.’s opinions present themselves as rational disquisitions (and featureAustralian public life more frequently than the Africa of his past), they are deeply

marked by Coetzee’s own formation. They begin with a theory of the State as a formof banditry: Akira Kurosawa’s film The Seven Samurai is commended for its ‘Shakes-

pearean clarity and comprehensiveness’ in demonstrating that State-formation is

about men in armed sects securing hegemony, pure and simple. The compromise

developed in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan in which the citizen gives up some freedom

in order to shelter under the State’s protection, does not ease the subject’s fears; some-how the State is always an arbitrary and alien imposition. Although the novel does not

say so, we begin to wonder if Hobbes’s version of the cultural settlement that makes

the State acceptable depends on a relatively homogeneous culture in which tacitunderstandings about power are tradable for security. It may be that under Africanconditions, however, where postcoloniality ensures that one lives permanently with

power as difference, the idea of the State as inherently theirs rather than ours has

become entrenched. Certainly, J.C.’s account of how we are born into the State is in

sympathy with Achille Mbembe’s description of the phenomenology of power in On

the Postcolony (2001). In the African postcolony one experiences power as comman-dement , that is, one experiences it in terms of a logic that does not have to justify itself

because its power is self-justifying. According to Mahmood Mamdani in Citizen and

Subject (1996), in colonial and postcolonial Africa citizenship is a gift in the hands of

a State whose purpose is to regulate the boundaries between settlers or elites, who are

granted admission, and peasants, who are not; for the peasantry, subjection withoutcitizenship is the norm (neocolonial states took over this legal and cultural structure



Social Dynamics 217

Africa was no exception to the pattern, Mamdani argues; it was a neocolonial African

state par excellence. In one of Diary of a Bad Year ’s reflections, ‘On Raiding’, the pillaging of one’s neighbours’ goods is seen as a practice encouraged by colonial

conditions and continuing in contemporary crime in South Africa (pp. 103–106); this

is entirely consistent with the views J.C. expresses on the origins of the State. When

Alan complains that J.C. doesn’t understand contemporary world politics and should

go back to Africa where he would feel at home, he is dead right; Alan becomes aneffective, truth-telling countervoice at this point (p. 99). What Alan doesn’t suffi-

ciently appreciate, however, is that since J.C. moved to Australia, the African model

has emerged as the template of the State globally. On several points, such as censor-

ship and torture, which are the subject of several reflections, J.C. finds himself in acondition of déjà vu as he watches apartheid-era practice becoming the global norm.

Since flight from the State has become impossible, since we are born into it, the solu-

tion that proposes itself is the same as the one developed in the bad old days by

marginalised intellectuals in South Africa: quietist anarchism, or ‘inner emigration’

(p. 12). Universally, more than ever, the novel seems to suggest, Enlightenment prin-ciples about publics, the right to speak and the rule of reason are collapsing under the

weight of their contradictions. If we are to salvage anything, it might as well be in

premodern terms; frequently the categories that J.C. brings to his reflections are

premodern ones such as honour and shame and the curse – the premodern is invokedin a postmodern critique of the modern.

This is all well-covered ground in Coetzee’s early fiction. In this late novel, it is

offered in the terms of political analysis, but it has proved its worth as the living mise

en scene of novels such as Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) and Life and Times of

Michael K (1983). In the former, the magistrate’s orderly life on the periphery of a

fictional Empire is thrown into crisis by the arrival of Colonel Joll, a securocrat fromthe metropole who brings the arbitrary rule of the imperial State to bear on the magis-

trate’s outpost. Michael K is the perennial escapee, evading the perimeter fences and

the subtler, conceptual forms of entrapment that an increasingly totalitarian societythrows at him. Arguably the bleakest form of this vision in the fiction is in The Master

of Petersburg (1994), in which a fictional Fyodor Dostoevsky risks a Faustian solu-

tion, giving himself over to repugnant forms of transgression in an effort to match and

sublimate the hold of the State as well as the resistance politics it has spawned, aconflict which is presented as a brutal all-or-nothing stasis of oppression and counter-

culture that has led to the murder of his son, Pavel.

In these and other examples, Coetzee brings the aesthetic and the ethical together indissolubly, drawing the reader into visceral, disturbing, open-ended encounters

with prevailing historical conditions, without the comfort of a countervailing spaceof rational detachment. In order to make such fiction possible, Coetzee has had to

conduct a form of guerrilla warfare with the public sphere, refusing to play by its

rules, entering the fray only occasionally, and then with unexpected but explosive

results. A question raised by the formal play, even the whimsy, of Coetzee’s recentwork, in particular Diary of a Bad Year , is whether this epistemologically far-

reaching and combative mode can be sustained. The overriding subject of Elizabeth

Costello (2003), Slow Man (2005) and Diary is really the practice of authorship

itself, a question always in the background of earlier work, but it has now become

the fabric and substance. Beyond Roland Barthes’s death of the author, the ontologyof the writer as agent of the writing has begun to return, though in some recon-



218 D. Attwell

Coetzee’s Nobel Lecture (2003) is like the Costello stories in drawing public

discourse into the procedures of fiction. It reflects on the spaces of intimacy anddistance between the self-of-writing and the writer’s historical–biographical being.

The former (the Crusoe figure of the story) is the persona that comes together in the

act of giving oneself over to writing’s unpredictable processes; the latter is the histor-

ical being (the Defoe figure), the author who, after a lifetime of writing, seems to owe

his very existence to the success of his creature and counterpart. At the end of thelecture these selves are like

deckhands toiling in the rigging, the one on a ship sailing west, the other on a ship sailingeast. Their ships pass close, close enough to hail. But the seas are rough, the weather isstormy: their eyes lashed by the spray, their hands burned by the cordage, they pass eachother by, too busy even to wave. (p. 7)

The pathos of this passage reflects an anguish of self-division, a longing that the sepa-

rate spheres might be brought together. I also detect this pathos (and the longing) in

the unusually thin fictional material in Diary of a Bad Year . Anya, as I mentionedearlier, is hardly developed, and the same is true of Alan, although his role as the arch

neoliberal is an interesting one. The richness of the text lies wholly in the experience

of reading , as one follows the opinions and the narrative sequences printed below

them, wondering (often inconclusively) about the connections between them. But asfor the narrative itself in which the opinions are embedded, there is something slightly

perfunctory about it, as if the text were assuming that the assertion of the presence of

fictionality were enough to give one the experience of fiction. From the point of view

of fiction in these more traditional terms, the most successful moment in the novel isin the reflections, not in the narrative. It is no. 18 of the ‘Second Diary’, which is a

brilliant rendering of the interior life of a magpie that makes itself known to J.C.during his regular visits to the park across the road from the apartment. Here, the spark

of fiction is properly ignited; by comparison, in the narrative itself, it burns dimly.

It is tempting to conclude that what J.C. says of many writers as they get older isalso true of Diary of a Bad Year – ‘[the] prose becomes thinner, [the] treatment of

character and action more schematic’ (p. 193) – except that the novel invites us to

draw this conclusion, so its thinness, if that is what it is, is counterbalanced by a

certain metafictional thickness. J.C. says that what looks like an attenuation of powersfrom the outside may be, from the inside, ‘a liberation, a clearing of the mind to take

on more important tasks’ (p. 193). The example he gives is that of Leo Tolstoy, who

is generally thought to have succumbed to simplification and didacticism, but whomust have felt that ‘he was ridding himself of the shackles that had enslaved him to

appearances, enabling him to face directly the one question that truly engaged hissoul: how to live’ (p. 193). This observation is similar to the conclusion Coetzee

reaches about Tolstoy in his essay ‘Confession and Double Thoughts’. Here Coetzee

speculates whether having tested the psychology of self-deception and the endless

abysses of self-doubt, Tolstoy was capable of deciding (‘rashly’?) ‘to set down thetruth, finally, as though after a lifetime of exploring one had acquired the credentials,

amassed the authority, to do so’ (Coetzee 1992, p. 293).

Does J.C. – or the novel – reach an equivalent point, at which the text addresses

the reader with a similar power and the author and the masks coalesce? Authority is

the key term from the essay on confession. The truth Coetzee refers to there is nottranscendent; it does not reveal itself: the writer has to have amassed sufficient author-



Social Dynamics 219

regarded as a thinker in her day but whose philosophical power he questions:

‘Generally, it is not important that writers have good ideas. Rather, it is a matter of seeing a mimesis of intellectual engagement’.5 What is true of Schreiner is, according

to Diary, true of Tolstoy and also of Walt Whitman: ‘neither had much wisdom to

offer; wisdom was not what they dealt in. They were poets above all; otherwise they

were ordinary men with ordinary, fallible opinions. The disciples who swarmed to

them in quest of enlightenment look sadly foolish in retrospect’ (p. 151). Instead of wisdom:

What the great authors are masters of is authority. What is the source of authority, or of what the formalists called the authority-effect? If authority could be achieved simply bytricks of rhetoric, then Plato was surely justified in expelling poets from his idealrepublic. But what if authority can be attained only by opening the poet-self to somehigher force, by ceasing to be oneself and beginning to speak vatically?

The god can be invoked, but does not necessarily come. Learn to speak without authority, says Kierkegaard. By copying Kierkegaard’s words here, I make Kierkegaardinto an authority. Authority cannot be caught, cannot be learned. The paradox is a trueone. (p. 151)

Authority would appear to be associated with the mimesis or the performance of a

particular kind of voice, a vatic speech in which the self is open to a ‘higher force’ (in

Søren Kierkegaard this was a straightforward question: the higher force was God).

The clearest illustration of such speech in the novel is given in the last of J.C.’s reflec-

tions which is on Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, in particular the passage inwhich Ivan ‘hands back his ticket of admission to the universe God has created’, and

mounts a ‘tirade against forgiveness’ (pp. 231, 233). What moves J.C. is not Ivan’sself-damning argument but ‘the accents of anguish, the personal anguish of a soul

unable to bear the horrors of this world. It is the voice of Ivan, as realized byDostoevsky, not his reasoning that sweeps me along’ (p. 233).

Authority comes, then, not from crafting a position, still less from persuading an

audience or a readership of the rightness of one’s views. In an essay on Desiderius

Erasmus’s figure of Folly, Coetzee has argued that crafting a non-position may be a

desirable goal. Such thinking is consistent with the modes of fiction that Coetzeedevelops in his earliest work: distrustful, even hostile to self-deceiving, self-assured

language and to rational calculation, the narrators speak most powerfully from strange

sources – from dreams, wounded bodies and defenceless longings. By definition,given their quality of public reasonableness, the ‘strong opinions’ in Diary of a Bad Year are incapable of delivering this kind of speech. The private opinions of the

‘Second Diary’, on the other hand, are more open to vatic promptings and there is a

power of feeling in some of the more confessional entries where we might glimpse

them; for example, in the entry about J.C.’s father’s wartime memorabilia, which

include a note written in the father’s hand on a torn-off scrap of newspaper, ‘cansomething be done Im [ sic] dying’ (p. 165).

The place where the text achieves most authority, however, is in the voice of Anya

as she imagines herself attending to J.C. soon after his death (the presence of death

would seem to be a sine qua non). The power of this moment derives partly from the

fact that he has told her of a dream of a young woman who does this for him. Thewish-fulfilment therefore becomes the fiction’s reality, although it should be noted



220 D. Attwell

Anya are shed. At the end, it is Anya’s matter-of-factness, her lack of pretension, her

tolerance of his whims and ultimately her forgiveness of his inappropriate desires, her moral authority in death’s company, in other words, that overwhelm J.C. and close the

narrative. Despite the thinness of her fictional realisation for most of the text, her

voice rises to prominence at the close of the novel, as if to demonstrate J.C.’s

argument that what seems to be an attenuation of an author’s powers might in fact be

a case of ‘ridding [one]self of the shackles that had enslaved [one] to appearances’(p. 193).

In J.C.’s reflections about authority, he distances himself from ‘[a]nnouncements

of the death of the author and of authorship made by Roland Barthes and Michel

Foucault a quarter of a century ago’, which ‘came down to the claim that the authorityof the author has never amounted to anything more than a bagful of rhetorical tricks’

(p. 149). This rejection of the Barthesian credo is an abjuration on Coetzee’s part,

because he has often implicitly positioned himself in the tradition it represents, the

tradition of anti-illusionism which culminates for Coetzee in Samuel Beckett. Now

that ‘the dust has settled’ on the ‘death of the author’, as J.C. puts it, however, he isthankful that the ‘mystery of Tolstoy’s authority’ (p. 150) has remained untouched

despite the exposure of his rhetorical tricks; he is thankful, too, to Tolstoy and

Dostoevsky and even to ‘mother Russia’ for ‘setting before us the standards toward

which any serious novelist must toil’ (p. 227).‘Slava, Fyodor Michailovich! May your name resound for ever in the halls of

fame!’ says J.C. of Dostoevsky, in particular (p. 234). Is this the kind of vatic utter-

ance which Diary commends? That would be a naïve assessment, because the state-

ment involves J.C. archly imitating a Russian compliment to be paid to Dostoevsky.The tone is peculiar: although it is an imitation, even a parody, it is also genuinely

honorific and therefore un-ironic. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and mother Russia are allcapable of vatic speech; J.C. is content to write in their tracks, hoping to hit the right

note. That these illusionists should be elevated in this way at the close of the novel

suggests the frame of mind that J.C. has reached: art may transform, but the life sotransformed stubbornly persists in its need of consolation. This observation sits

awkwardly with critical orthodoxy which has yet to let go of anti-illusionism, but it

may come close to naming the source of the authority captured by Diary of a Bad

Year .

Notes

1. The name Anya alludes to Dostoevsky’s relationship with Anna or Anya Snitkina, thestenographer who produced the text of The gambler and who he later married.

2. Roland Barthes’s essays ‘To write: An intransitive verb’? (2001b) and ‘The death of theauthor’ (2001a) provide the theoretical contexts for this emphasis.

3. Coetzee explores this question in an essay on Erasmus in Giving offense (1997).4. Dusklands assumes this philosophical pedigree in its portrayal of the protagonists, Eugene

Dawn and Jacobus Coetzee.5. Coetzee Papers, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown. Unsorted lecture notes

on Comparative South African Literature, University of Cape Town, 1993.

Notes on contributor

David Attwell is Head of the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York, UK. He is the author of J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (Univer-sity of California Press 1993)



Social Dynamics 221

References

Barthes, R., 2001a. The death of the author. In: P. Rice and P. Waugh, eds. Modern literarytheory. 4th ed. London: Arnold, 185–189.

Barthes, R., 2001b. To write: an intransitive verb? In: P. Rice and P. Waugh, eds. Modernliterary theory. 4th ed. London: Arnold, 76–85.

Coetzee, J.M., 1992. Doubling the point: essays and interviews. D. Attwell, ed. Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press.Coetzee, J.M., 1997. Giving offense: essays on censorship. University of Chicago Press.Coetzee, J.M., 2007. Diary of a bad year. London: Harvill Secker.Eliot, T.S., 1963. The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock. In: Collected poems: 1909–1962.

London: Faber and Faber, 13–17.Foucault, M., 2001. Madness and civilisation: a history of insanity in the age of reason. Trans.

R. Howard. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.Hobbes, T., 2005. Leviathan. London: Continuum.Kant, I., 1784. An answer to the question: what is Enlightenment? [online]. Available from:

http://www.english.upenn.edu/∼mgamer/Etexts/kant.html. [Accessed 11 December 2009]Mamdani, M., 1996. Citizen and subject: contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonial-

ism. Ithaca, NY: Princeton University Press.Mbembe, A., 2001. On the postcolony. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Shakespeare, W., 1987. Hamlet. G.R. Hibbard, ed. New York: Oxford University Press.



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