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    On J. M. Coetzee: Writers on Writers
    On J. M. Coetzee: Writers on Writers
    On J. M. Coetzee: Writers on Writers
    Ebook54 pages37 minutes

    On J. M. Coetzee: Writers on Writers

    By Ceridwen Dovey

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    I was born in the year J.M. Coetzee published his third novel, Waiting for the Barbarians. My mother read this dark, disturbing book with its multiple scenes of torture as she breastfed me at night, while my older sister slept and the house was quiet. It was 1980. The apartheid government had declared a state of emergency in the face of growing internal revolt, and my parents were thinking of leaving South Africa again.

    For Ceridwen Dovey, J.M. Coetzee has ‘always been there’, ‘challenging the rest of us to keep up, resisting our attempts to pin him down.’ Her mother wrote the first critical study of Coetzee’s early novels, uncovering their startlingly original ways of bringing together literature and politics. With tenderness and insight, Dovey draws on this family history to explore the Nobel Prize–winner’s work.

    In the Writers on Writers series, leading writers reflect on another Australian writer who has inspired and fascinated them. Provocative and crisp, these books start a fresh conversation between past and present, shed new light on the craft of writing, and introduce some intriguing and talented authors and their work.

    Published by Black Inc. in association with the University of Melbourne and State Library Victoria.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBlack Inc. Books
    Release dateOct 1, 2018
    ISBN9781743820650
    On J. M. Coetzee: Writers on Writers
    Author

    Ceridwen Dovey

    Ceridwen Dovey's debut novel, Blood Kin, was published in fifteen countries, shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and selected for the U.S. National Book Foundation's prestigious 5 Under 35 honours list. She studied social anthropology at Harvard and New York University, and now lives with her husband and son in Sydney.Only the Animals won the 2014 Readings New Australian Writing Award. Her website is www.ceridwendovey.com

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      Book preview

      On J. M. Coetzee - Ceridwen Dovey

      7

      I was born in the year J.M. Coetzee published his third novel, Waiting for the Barbarians. My mother read this dark, disturbing novel with its many scenes of torture as she breastfed me at night, while my older sister slept and the house was quiet. It was 1980. The apartheid government had declared a state of emergency in the face of growing internal revolt, and my parents were thinking of leaving South Africa again.

      My mother nursed me in the spare room so the lamplight wouldn’t wake my father, and, as she read, her somatic response to the words on the page would have coursed through her into me: elation and despair, trepidation and longing. I feel I’m still marked by that embodied encounter with his writing, via my mother, as a newborn. Coetzee, who anticipates everything, would say I am inhabiting a fiction in imagining my way back to my neonate self, though even he allows for the possibility of flickerings of insight into other selves, or our own younger selves.

      Several years later, when I was no longer a baby and my mother was on her way to becoming the first scholar to publish a book on Coetzee’s work, I formed one of my earliest visual memories. It is of the striking cover of this same novel, which lay on the kitchen table in our Melbourne home, surrounded by the detritus of a midday meal: half-eaten sandwiches, apple cores. A picture of a white man on his knees, washing a pair of jagged black feet that have been sawn off at the ankles.

      That image haunted me. I wanted to know what was inside the book that kept my mother in its thrall. I could sometimes pinpoint the moment when she fell through the trapdoor into the secret world of her mind, and I knew this book was one of the portals through which I might one day follow her there. She had taken over our dining room as her study, where she’d work from four until eight each morning, sitting on the floor in front of the heater in the chilly dawn hours, writing by hand in foolscap pads. When she came through to join us for breakfast, with rosy cheeks and bright eyes, I was aware that something special had happened to her in those hours, something to which I was not privy.

      In Coetzee’s 2003 novel Elizabeth Costello, the adult son, John, remembers that his mother ‘secluded herself in the mornings to do her writing’, while he and his sister would ‘slump outside the locked door and make tiny whining sounds’. I felt no bitterness at having a door temporarily closed between my mother’s world and mine, for there was never any doubt that my sister and I were front and centre of her life; her pleasure in the work of mothering was very evident to us throughout the long days we spent in her care. Instead, I was mesmerised by the way she could switch roles – effortlessly, it seemed to me then – and become immersed in these books written by a mysterious man whom she referred to only as ‘J.M.’

      Coetzee has always been there, an unseen but strongly felt presence in our small family drama. I suspect that it was at least in part owing to his presence that I first learned to take what psychoanalysts refer to as ‘the third position’ so crucial to a child’s maturation, to let somebody else into the intense dyad of mother and

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