Youth : J.M.Coetzee

‘Youth’ is Coetzee’s semi autobiographical novel drawing heavily from the author’s personal experiences as a young man in England. This is a novel of search, a search for a place the protagonist can call home, a search for the realization of his true artistic abilities, sandwiched between the daily grinds of life. That the work should be dark and pessimistic is no surprise, Coetzee’s generation in South Africa has lived through a time of immense tribulation, both physical and moral and it is interesting to note how the author himself tries to tackle this situation.

To the form of this work, surely no modern reader can raise an objection. Among all living authors today, and that is quite some statement to make, no one else, without a single exception, can hold the reader’s attention as it rambles through Byron and Henry James. This exceptional quality comes from Coetzee’s skills as a craftsman and also that other rare quality which is missing in most writers, the setting down on paper, of thoughts, exactly and with no ambiguousness whatsoever.

It however, is a different tale altogether if we examine this work from a realistic point of view. What is it in South Africa that compels the author to leave for England? Of course everybody knows what happened in South Africa and there are references too, but these references are sprinkled about, like insufficient garnish on a main course. England, then is the place where the young man thinks he can find himself, why England? Because it is, according to the young man, the place where his idols lived and wrote, London! Sorry, Mr. Coetzee, that’s a bit too hard to buy. The real reason is something else, something that even Mr. Coetzee himself would not agree with perhaps, but nevertheless, an interesting postulate. The whole answer to this question and also the reason for the lack of appeal of his work is Mr. Coetzee’s selective realism. Mr. Coetzee is a realist in so far as he is the member of the white middle class in South Africa. For this class his realism is precise and incisive but the events that Mr. Coetzee’s class lived through can not be analyzed by selective white middle class realism. It is almost as if the novel cries out, ‘Look, we made them suffer, but are we too not suffering now?’ The answer of course is yes, but are they suffering the same destitution and acrimony for as long a period as the ones that they made suffer? The answer is, no, no, no and a thousand times no. Mr. Coetzee chooses to ignore the realism of that class which has suffered for ages and such suffering, which nothing can ever compensate for. That is the reason the young man wants to go to England, it is a white man’s city, that’s it. Even in his descriptions of England, Mr. Coetzee leaves out the realism of the lower classes. It is inconceivable that the young man had not come across such realism and even more so in South Africa than in England. The plain truth is this, the young man was fleeing, fleeing away because the dominance that his class once held was no longer there, and while fleeing he is so much ridden with the guilt of what his class has made the indigenous people suffer, that he wishes to close his eyes and find solace in the sufferings that his class now has to go through as a result of the same. All that pain and all that misery is depicted from the point of view of Mr. Coetzee’s class and that is what leaves this work one sided and unfinished.

What is the end result of this novel? A stylistically brilliant piece of work, formally terrific, naturally class conscious and realistically desperately one sided and inadequate. A situation of perennial hopelessness, to which the protagonist submits with as meek a resignation as Robespierre before the guillotine and over which one would like to believe, the protagonist had no control, which however is not the truth. It is the fleeing from a situation that the protagonist is not prepared to face, it is the abandonment of participation to render justice to the victims of one’s own class’ atrocities, the benefits of which were doubtless enjoyed by the author himself and therefore in the participation of which he had a moral right to be involved in, that gives this work its anguishing climax.

What a pity this is! For when he chooses to be and in those rare instances where Mr. Coetzee allows himself the permission to assess the situation from the other class’ point of view, he does it admiringly well. Even a work like ‘Disgrace’ can not hide this white man’s lament and seemingly penance like quality without an exposition of the other class’ situation. From any other artist, perhaps this is a bit too much to ask for, but we are talking of Coetzee here. He is a brilliant artist, he really is. One just wishes he is not so much blinded by the position of his own class. Mr. Coetzee must realize that he is writing about a situation that is extremely rare in the annals of human history; such a situation makes great demands from the true artist and certainly from an artist like Mr. Coetzee. He is more than capable enough, is he wiling enough though?