Late Essays by JM Coetzee review – dos and don’ts of classic novel writing
Awriter of JM Coetzee’s stature needs no preamble, and Late Essays does not offer one, plunging the reader directly into the literary criticism that the novelist has accumulated over the past 11 years. Some are expanded versions of his articles for the New York Review of Books; others are published introductions to works of great literature, from Daniel Defoe’s Roxana to Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
Introductions to classic novels comprise an interesting genre of criticism, with its own formal mechanisms. I don’t mean critical pieces prepared by scholars, but “prestige” essays, written by famous writers with a fondness for the book at hand. Yet is there any form of writing more ripe for reinvention? While they are revealing about the culture in general, such introductions rarely tell us anything worthwhile about the text or the acclaimed author’s work. Coetzee’s essays are different; this book emerges as an engaging series of master classes in novel writing, from which we might distil a selection of dos and don’ts.
The 100 best novels: No 99 – Disgrace by JM Coetzee (1999)
Read moreFirst, know why you’re writing. Coetzee tells us that Ford Madox Ford wrote a number of mediocre novels before The Good Soldier, when he was finally able “to plumb the obscure, more personal sources of his urge to write”. The answer may be the question mirrored back to you. According to Coetzee, Samuel Beckett, across books and languages, asks who is writing and “why whoever it is that is writing goes on writing”.
Second, sometimes writers are unaware of the real reasons they write. Nathaniel Hawthorne tried to convince readers that his motivation was expiation of his Puritan ancestors’ sins. Coetzee has a much more agonistic reading of Hawthorne’s engagement with his subject, suggesting that fiction was, for him, “an arena where he in secret wrestled with inherited demons”.
Coetzee includes his introduction to Watthere; Beckett thought it an “unsatisfactory” novel, and it was the last he wrote in English. It’s worthwhile to see him writing on a novel abandoned by its own author, finding beneath the “surface comedy” a “dogged metaphysical quest to know the unknowable”. It opens up for Coetzee another area of the creative process, as in Tolstoy’s 1877 dismissal of his earlier work, which includes Anna Karenina, or Kafka’s request that Max Brod burn his letters.
Third, don’t start a new novel until the old one is finished. The ends of Irène Némirovsky’s novels tend to be “arbitrary” and “cursory”, writes Coetzee, perhaps because she failed to follow this advice.
Look for the richest narrative situation, writes Coetzee, then the unexpected angle – don't worry about plausibility
Fourth, write concisely, like Heinrich von Kleist, in whose work, Coetzee points out, “the scene is captured in language of steely precision, yet at the same time it seems to be constructing itself before our eyes”.
Fifth, look for the richest narrative situation, then try to find the unexpected angle. For example, in his novel The Assistant, Robert Walser introduces the servant Joseph into a wealthy household, where he could easily have pined after the mistress, or had a torrid affair with her. Instead, Walser has Joseph reproach her for neglecting her child.
Also, don’t worry about plausibility. This again comes from Némirovsky – her plot device in The Courilof Affair allows her “the space she needs to trace” her hero’s “erratic moral evolution”. Coetzee challenges realism at every turn, arguing that Leo Tolstoy, Gustave Flaubert, Antonio di Benedetto and Gerald Murnane were not writing the “old-fashioned realist novel” but were, rather, “radical idealists” and modernists.
The Schooldays of Jesus by JM Coetzee – digested read
Read moreAnd finally, don’t be sentimental. A consideration of Goethe’s first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), shows Coetzee’s talent for reading authors against the grain of their usual reception. The essay on Werther turns into a discussion of the Ossian poems and nationalism. Here he argues that the “wild popularity” of the supposedly rediscovered Gaelic poetry at the time that Goethe was starting out as a writer “signalled the rise of a new, assertive nationalism in which each European people would demand not only its national independence but its national language and national literature and unique national past, too”. In Werther, Goethe made a considerable contribution to his own national literature – going against the concept of Weltliteratur with which he is so often associated, but which he didn’t develop until the early 19th century.
Goethe was so “smitten” by Ossian that he taught himself Gaelic so he could translate more of him into German. But Coetzee finds that there’s too much Ossian in the novel, that it creates a “hold-up in the action which is a steep price to pay”; eventually Goethe “outgrew his taste for it”. The moral is: be mindful of letting your youthful enthusiasms impinge on your otherwise brilliant novel. See also Flaubert, who really wanted to write a novel about the temptation of Saint Anthony, but had to straitjacket himself into everyday life in provincial France to write his masterpiece.
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Read moreIt is interesting to reflect on which authors Coetzee gets asked to write about. Except for Némirovsky all the authors here are male, and with rare exception white and European. The culture believes the western male to be the image of genius, and enlists Coetzee, a male genius in the western tradition, to consider the subject. Though Coetzee himself is a wonderful critic and writer, a “radical idealist” perhaps, in the vein of Flaubert or Murnane, his list of recent commissions reveals that the highest echelons of literary criticism remain a conservative field. Is anyone surprised?
• Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse is published by Vintage. Late Essays: 2006-2017 by JM Coetzee is published by Harvill Secker. To order a copy for £15.29 (RRP £17.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/oct/12/late-essays-by-jm-coetzee-review
Introductions to classic novels comprise an interesting genre of criticism, with its own formal mechanisms. I don’t mean critical pieces prepared by scholars, but “prestige” essays, written by famous writers with a fondness for the book at hand. Yet is there any form of writing more ripe for reinvention? While they are revealing about the culture in general, such introductions rarely tell us anything worthwhile about the text or the acclaimed author’s work. Coetzee’s essays are different; this book emerges as an engaging series of master classes in novel writing, from which we might distil a selection of dos and don’ts.
The 100 best novels: No 99 – Disgrace by JM Coetzee (1999)
Read moreFirst, know why you’re writing. Coetzee tells us that Ford Madox Ford wrote a number of mediocre novels before The Good Soldier, when he was finally able “to plumb the obscure, more personal sources of his urge to write”. The answer may be the question mirrored back to you. According to Coetzee, Samuel Beckett, across books and languages, asks who is writing and “why whoever it is that is writing goes on writing”.
Second, sometimes writers are unaware of the real reasons they write. Nathaniel Hawthorne tried to convince readers that his motivation was expiation of his Puritan ancestors’ sins. Coetzee has a much more agonistic reading of Hawthorne’s engagement with his subject, suggesting that fiction was, for him, “an arena where he in secret wrestled with inherited demons”.
Coetzee includes his introduction to Watthere; Beckett thought it an “unsatisfactory” novel, and it was the last he wrote in English. It’s worthwhile to see him writing on a novel abandoned by its own author, finding beneath the “surface comedy” a “dogged metaphysical quest to know the unknowable”. It opens up for Coetzee another area of the creative process, as in Tolstoy’s 1877 dismissal of his earlier work, which includes Anna Karenina, or Kafka’s request that Max Brod burn his letters.
Third, don’t start a new novel until the old one is finished. The ends of Irène Némirovsky’s novels tend to be “arbitrary” and “cursory”, writes Coetzee, perhaps because she failed to follow this advice.
Look for the richest narrative situation, writes Coetzee, then the unexpected angle – don't worry about plausibility
Fourth, write concisely, like Heinrich von Kleist, in whose work, Coetzee points out, “the scene is captured in language of steely precision, yet at the same time it seems to be constructing itself before our eyes”.
Fifth, look for the richest narrative situation, then try to find the unexpected angle. For example, in his novel The Assistant, Robert Walser introduces the servant Joseph into a wealthy household, where he could easily have pined after the mistress, or had a torrid affair with her. Instead, Walser has Joseph reproach her for neglecting her child.
Also, don’t worry about plausibility. This again comes from Némirovsky – her plot device in The Courilof Affair allows her “the space she needs to trace” her hero’s “erratic moral evolution”. Coetzee challenges realism at every turn, arguing that Leo Tolstoy, Gustave Flaubert, Antonio di Benedetto and Gerald Murnane were not writing the “old-fashioned realist novel” but were, rather, “radical idealists” and modernists.
The Schooldays of Jesus by JM Coetzee – digested read
Read moreAnd finally, don’t be sentimental. A consideration of Goethe’s first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), shows Coetzee’s talent for reading authors against the grain of their usual reception. The essay on Werther turns into a discussion of the Ossian poems and nationalism. Here he argues that the “wild popularity” of the supposedly rediscovered Gaelic poetry at the time that Goethe was starting out as a writer “signalled the rise of a new, assertive nationalism in which each European people would demand not only its national independence but its national language and national literature and unique national past, too”. In Werther, Goethe made a considerable contribution to his own national literature – going against the concept of Weltliteratur with which he is so often associated, but which he didn’t develop until the early 19th century.
Goethe was so “smitten” by Ossian that he taught himself Gaelic so he could translate more of him into German. But Coetzee finds that there’s too much Ossian in the novel, that it creates a “hold-up in the action which is a steep price to pay”; eventually Goethe “outgrew his taste for it”. The moral is: be mindful of letting your youthful enthusiasms impinge on your otherwise brilliant novel. See also Flaubert, who really wanted to write a novel about the temptation of Saint Anthony, but had to straitjacket himself into everyday life in provincial France to write his masterpiece.
Sign up for the Bookmarks email
Read moreIt is interesting to reflect on which authors Coetzee gets asked to write about. Except for Némirovsky all the authors here are male, and with rare exception white and European. The culture believes the western male to be the image of genius, and enlists Coetzee, a male genius in the western tradition, to consider the subject. Though Coetzee himself is a wonderful critic and writer, a “radical idealist” perhaps, in the vein of Flaubert or Murnane, his list of recent commissions reveals that the highest echelons of literary criticism remain a conservative field. Is anyone surprised?
• Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse is published by Vintage. Late Essays: 2006-2017 by JM Coetzee is published by Harvill Secker. To order a copy for £15.29 (RRP £17.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/oct/12/late-essays-by-jm-coetzee-review