On Coetzee's Fiction Writings

Discussing Coetzee's work recently with a dear friend, this is what he said, 

I think, I liked and disliked him all for exactly the same reasons! Namely, and in his fiction at least, for his remarkable ability to conceptually knit events within each book he wrote, that turned the original premises round. He deals brilliantly with hypocrisy! But I suppose it is that very skill he has, the way he made art of writing, instead of simply writing to the default of art that turned me off a touch. Dont mind me, his books are amazing regardless.

Spot on. Even though, Coetzee leaves no opportunity to be clinical (I sometimes wonder if he does that intentionally), his work still remains stellar. 

The Misfits (1961)

While Steve Jobs had his version of misfits who thought differently, thinking of an older conversation with a friend, made me come back to the idea of misfits and understand it differently, perhaps. He had described a certain set of professional set-up as dusty, lawless, territorial. All those epithets that come to our mind when we think of Wild West. I had agreed with him wholeheartedly, then. But then,

Here is an excerpt from an essay by Coetzee on The Misfits that I ran into while reading Inner Workings:

The misfits (1961) was put together by a notable set of creative people. The film is based on an original screenplay by Arthur Miller. It was directed by John Huston; and it starred Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable in what turned out to be their last big roles. The plot is simple. A woman, Roslyn, visiting Reno, Nevada, for a quick divorce, gets friendly with a group of part-time cowboys and goes off with them into the desert on a jaunt to trap wild horses. There she discovers that the horses will end up not as riding mounts but as pet food. The discovery precipitates a breakdown of trust between her and the men, a breakdown that film patches over only in the most uneasy and unconvincing of ways.

Aside from the ending, the script is a strong one. Miller is operating at the tail end of a long literary tradition of reflecting on the closing of America's western frontier, and the effects of that closing on the American psyche. Huckleberry Finn, at the end of the book about him by Mark Twain, still had the recourse of lighting out for the territories so as to escape civilization (and Nevada, in the 1840s of Huck's childhood, was one of the territories in question).

Miller's cowboys, a century or so later, are trapped in the States with nowhere to go. One of them, Gaye (Clark Gable), has become a gigolo preying on divorcees. Another, Perce (Montgomery Clift) scrapes together a living as a rodeo performer. The third, Guido (Eli Wallach), exhibits the dark side of the male homosociality of the frontier, namely a vicious misogyny.

These are Miller's misfits, men who have either failed to make the transition to the modern world or are making that transition in an ignominious way. The three are presented with a rounded ness that is rare in cinema, the result of Miller's deft professional stagecraft.

But of course Miller's title has a second ironic meaning. If the cowboys are misfits in Eisenhower's America, the Nevada mustangs are even more deeply so. There used to ten of thousands of them; now they are pitiful troops up in the hills, barely worth being exploited. From being an embodiment of the freedom of the frontier, they have become anachronism, creatures with no useful role in mechanized civilization. It is their lot to be herded and hunted from the air; if they are not actually being shot from the air, that is only because the flesh would spoil before the horse-butcher could arrive with his refrigerated truck.

 It dispelled my notion of our transition to mechanized civilization and our precarious origins, evolution and our current belonging and perception towards it.

Coetzee on Naipaul

Why might one be drawn to read a collection of the book reviews from a writer who himself is an accomplished fiction writer? In Inner Workings, J.M.Coetzee analyzes and penetrates few of the literary work by others and through his own voice, gives detailed reviews, explain nuances of work from his, sometimes, detached lens of understanding. In an essay on V.S.Naipaul he explains:

 One of the more consistent strains in the story Naipaul tells of his own life is that it was by a pure effort of will that he became a writer. He was not gifted with fantasy; he had only his childhood in paltry Port of Spain to call on, no larger historical memory (this was where Trinidad failed him, and, behind Trinidad, India); he seemed to have no subject. Only after a decades-long labour of writing did he finally come to the Proustian realization that he had known his true subject all along, and his subject was himself- himself and his efforts, as a colonial raised in a culture that did not (he was told) belong to him and without (he was told) a history, to find a way in the world.