Today we’re going to look at the prose of J. M. Coetzee. He is a South African writer and is known for his controversial topics.
His 1980 work Waiting for the Barbarians is about a town magistrate that takes on disturbing power by preying on the fears of the people about an incumbent attack by the barbarians.
This novel is now seen as an eerie and accurate premonition of the events in the U.S. after 9/11 that led to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the forfeit of our freedoms in the name of safety.
The novel I actually want to look at is his more recent 1999 novel Disgrace.
J. M. Coetzee Prose Style
The main character is a disgraced English professor who loses his job after having sex with a student under dubious circumstances. He moves in with his daughter in the countryside to recover from the affair and try to turn his life around.
While there, the two suffer a brutal attack coming from lingering apartheid tensions.
I won’t give more away, but a hallmark of Coetzee’s writing is how much he packs into so little space.
This novel is short, more like a novella, yet it contains more plot and emotional content than many 90,000 word novels. And this is where I’d like to start with his prose.
If you’ve never read him, I highly recommend taking one or two days to go through one of his novels. The bare and exposed prose breaks every rule we’ve been taught, yet it suits his subject matter perfectly. It is unlike anything I’ve read.
I can’t even compare him to other people.
Minimal Prose
To set the scene, the professor has just called Melanie, the student, at her house. Her mother answered and has left the phone to get her.
Melanie—melody: a meretricious rhyme. Not a good name for her. Shift the accent. Meláni: the dark one.
‘Hello?’
In the one word he hears all her uncertainty. Too young. She will not know how to deal with him; he ought to let her go. But he is in the grip of something. Beauty’s rose: the poem drives straight as an arrow. She does not own herself; perhaps he does not own himself either.
The first segment is the professor’s thoughts. Part of the slimness of Coetzee’s writing comes from how he slides into and out of the head of the main character with no frills.
No italics. No “he thought” to punctuate and emphasize what is already obvious.
I like this style, and find some writer’s overemphasis on pointing out character’s thoughts as needless distrust of the reader’s comprehension.
The punctuation through this segment is brilliant. It also allows Coetzee to do away with excess words that the professor wouldn’t be thinking anyway.
It flows as quickly as actual thoughts would. It’s word association rather than something logical.
Word Choice
Then we get to the actual words.
He notes the rhyme between Melanie and melody. But the brilliant thing is calling it a “meretricious” rhyme. This word does so much work in the passage.
On the face of it, he wants the rhyme to be deceiving because he doesn’t want a melodic girl but a devious one.
The word meretricious doesn’t merely mean deceiving though; it has the archaic meaning “of, like, or relating to a prostitute,” exactly how the professor views the student at that moment.
In four sentences, we, as readers, feel so much.
We get to watch how the professor thinks about this student. We watch how his mind turns things around. We see how he starts to justify his actions to himself.
In context, these four sentences give us a sense of revulsion at the main character’s true self that we wouldn’t get from a mere surface description of the act. There’s something deeper and more disturbing about the scene playing out this way.
Manipulating the Reader
After she answers the phone, the point of view shifts out of his thoughts, but things only get worse. Now we see that he understands that what he is doing is wrong. He understands that he needs to leave, but the narrator joins in on the justification.
He’s out of control. She’s out of control.
As a reader, we start to feel helpless. Even the narrator is pushing the act along, and we learn that we cannot trust the narrator to show us the moral condemnation we hope for.
We want to shout, “No! He does own himself! Stop making excuses for him. Lust is not reason enough to lose control of one’s actions.”
Shakespeare is quoted with “beauty’s rose,” reemphasizing the fact that the English professor knows his stuff, but it is more significant than that.
This comes from Shakespeare’s first sonnet, and this is the first scene to start the plot of the novel. The full sonnet is about an older man who self-destructs under his selfish and gluttonous ways.
That brief phrase “beauty’s rose” is a deep foreshadowing into the rest of the novel.
This is what makes Coetzee such an experience to read.
His sparse prose strikes immediate emotional response into readers with no analysis necessary. But upon deeper reading, we can find a shocking amount of extra information layered in through precise word choice.
More in the Series
- Examining Michael Chabon’s Prose
- Examing Ian McEwan’s Prose
- Examining John Cheever’s Prose
- Examining Nell Zink’s Prose
- Examining Jonathan Franzen’s Prose
- Examining Philip Roth’s Prose
- Examining Ethan Canin’s Prose
- Examining F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Prose
- Examining David Foster Wallace’s Prose
- Examining John Irving’s Prose
- Examining Graham Greene’s Prose
- Examining J.K. Rowling’s Prose
