Despite what some newspaper editors may tell you, minimalism is not always a virtue. Some writers make stinginess and parsimony work: Hemingway, for instance, used words only when absolutely necessary. His novels are beautiful for what they don't say.
Modern literature has given rise to a feeling – an undercurrent, a subtle shift – that the big novel is outdated. That this movement has parallels in art and in music buttresses my theory that the change is societal and not merely a genetic mutation within the community of novelists. Art (in the general sense of the term) is really nothing more than a nebulous web of relationships, but movements in art (the specific sense this time) don't necessarily correspond with emerging trends in poetry; developments in filmmaking rarely echo new thoughts in literature. Only really big, important, paradigm-altering, institution-destroying events seem to influence the arts as a whole.
The classics of literature have remained more or less intact for a hundred years. Although plenty of exceptional writers wrote plenty of exceptional novels in the last century, Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy continue to stand on the summit of Mount Literature. (Shakespeare, plainly, is a deity and need not concern himself with the insane mountaineering trips that mortals insist on subjecting themselves to.) The great novels of our time are so firmly entrenched, so immutably locked into our collective conscience that they might never be supplanted by some upstart with a name like Faulkner or Fitzgerald.
Literature, I think, has always been anchored in history. All historiography is biography, and all novels are autobiography. Events and people need to happen before they can be immortalized on the page. The retrospection and reflection inherent to the project of writing novels has resulted in an entire ethic remaining cemented in the past. And because we apotheosize the great writers, we unconsciously adopt their style – relatively dense yet consistently well-written expressions of romantic and philosophic ideas – as archetypal. Despite what you may believe, the establishment is astonishingly reactionary: novelty and progression are not looked upon favourably. Before its inclusion into the fold of acceptability, Postmodernism languished on the periphery for fifty years or so; even with a champion in Gore Vidal historical fiction might require another half-century before it is deemed truly legitimate.
In contrast to its ruthless protection of the metaphysical centre, the literati have been remarkably open to changing styles and techniques. The most salient example of a stylistic shift is the move from the big, complex novel written in a heightened, quasi-Victorian voice to smaller and sparsely-written novels. Hemingway precipitated this movement, but its finest exemplar is J.M. Coetzee. The South African has had a luminous career, producing fifteen novels in thirty-six years of writing. He won the Man Booker Prize in 1983 for Life & Times of Michael K; his 1999 novel Disgrace again merited the award. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. His career has been incandescent, but Coetzee lurks in the umbra. He rarely consents to interviews and almost never signs books. His characters, I think, are more thoroughly (though no more admittedly) autobiographical than most.
I have read six Coetzee novels. My favourite, Youth, was published in 2002. It is the author's second fictionalized memoir. It is an earnest discussion of how Coetzee's romantic ambitions led him to the insipid cubicle of a computer programmer in England. Thematically, Youth is anything but a radical departure for the South African; virtually all of his work deals explicitly with alienation and marginalization. Brute force analysis might lead readers to the conclusion that Coetzee's work is fundamentally formulaic, the same story cast in a different cloak. This is not the case.
Coetzee's best characters are deeply flawed. They are pusillanimous and cowardly, fleeing the implications of reality and circumstance. Although salient parallels can be drawn between the titular Coetzee of Youth and Meursault, the existential hero of Albert Camus's The Stranger, they are essentially different. Whereas Meursault accepts absurdity and meets his fate with indignation and contempt, Coetzee – the character, not the writer: I very much doubt whether the real Coetzee was so craven – cannot seem to grasp the severity of his predicament. He does not rebel and he does not fight; he merely labours at a mind-numbingly awful job and dreams about the future, a future that is slipping further with each short sweep of the clock.
Modern literature has given rise to a feeling – an undercurrent, a subtle shift – that the big novel is outdated. That this movement has parallels in art and in music buttresses my theory that the change is societal and not merely a genetic mutation within the community of novelists. Art (in the general sense of the term) is really nothing more than a nebulous web of relationships, but movements in art (the specific sense this time) don't necessarily correspond with emerging trends in poetry; developments in filmmaking rarely echo new thoughts in literature. Only really big, important, paradigm-altering, institution-destroying events seem to influence the arts as a whole.
The classics of literature have remained more or less intact for a hundred years. Although plenty of exceptional writers wrote plenty of exceptional novels in the last century, Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy continue to stand on the summit of Mount Literature. (Shakespeare, plainly, is a deity and need not concern himself with the insane mountaineering trips that mortals insist on subjecting themselves to.) The great novels of our time are so firmly entrenched, so immutably locked into our collective conscience that they might never be supplanted by some upstart with a name like Faulkner or Fitzgerald.
Literature, I think, has always been anchored in history. All historiography is biography, and all novels are autobiography. Events and people need to happen before they can be immortalized on the page. The retrospection and reflection inherent to the project of writing novels has resulted in an entire ethic remaining cemented in the past. And because we apotheosize the great writers, we unconsciously adopt their style – relatively dense yet consistently well-written expressions of romantic and philosophic ideas – as archetypal. Despite what you may believe, the establishment is astonishingly reactionary: novelty and progression are not looked upon favourably. Before its inclusion into the fold of acceptability, Postmodernism languished on the periphery for fifty years or so; even with a champion in Gore Vidal historical fiction might require another half-century before it is deemed truly legitimate.
In contrast to its ruthless protection of the metaphysical centre, the literati have been remarkably open to changing styles and techniques. The most salient example of a stylistic shift is the move from the big, complex novel written in a heightened, quasi-Victorian voice to smaller and sparsely-written novels. Hemingway precipitated this movement, but its finest exemplar is J.M. Coetzee. The South African has had a luminous career, producing fifteen novels in thirty-six years of writing. He won the Man Booker Prize in 1983 for Life & Times of Michael K; his 1999 novel Disgrace again merited the award. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. His career has been incandescent, but Coetzee lurks in the umbra. He rarely consents to interviews and almost never signs books. His characters, I think, are more thoroughly (though no more admittedly) autobiographical than most.
I have read six Coetzee novels. My favourite, Youth, was published in 2002. It is the author's second fictionalized memoir. It is an earnest discussion of how Coetzee's romantic ambitions led him to the insipid cubicle of a computer programmer in England. Thematically, Youth is anything but a radical departure for the South African; virtually all of his work deals explicitly with alienation and marginalization. Brute force analysis might lead readers to the conclusion that Coetzee's work is fundamentally formulaic, the same story cast in a different cloak. This is not the case.
Coetzee's best characters are deeply flawed. They are pusillanimous and cowardly, fleeing the implications of reality and circumstance. Although salient parallels can be drawn between the titular Coetzee of Youth and Meursault, the existential hero of Albert Camus's The Stranger, they are essentially different. Whereas Meursault accepts absurdity and meets his fate with indignation and contempt, Coetzee – the character, not the writer: I very much doubt whether the real Coetzee was so craven – cannot seem to grasp the severity of his predicament. He does not rebel and he does not fight; he merely labours at a mind-numbingly awful job and dreams about the future, a future that is slipping further with each short sweep of the clock.
Youth deals with the unrequited love between a man and his dreams. In many ways Youth resembles The Trial, Kafka's under-appreciated masterpiece. In fact, Coetzee himself affirmed his intellectual and philosophical connections with the troubled German by naming one of his characters, the eponymous Michael K, after Kafka's own Josef K. Youth and The Trial are both imperishably bleak examinations of the crippling power of absurdity. There is no redemption here. Even hope is suspended by drudgery, bureaucracy, and an overwhelming loneliness.
Great novels are about everyone. The characters in great novels transcend the limitations of the page to become everyone. We can all conceive of ourselves in similar predicaments. Both the pain and the sheer unadulterated joy of existence reside within us all. Youth is a great novel because it demonstrates how the futility of mindless labour inexorably leads to unrealized hopes and desires, for mindless labour is sustenance while dreams can only be dreams if they are imagined. Realization kills the dreamer just as surely as it kills the dream.
Coetzee's spare, almost utilitarian style fuses structure with narrative. The utter simplicity of Coetzee's predicament, the unabashed intrusion of his eternal dilemma is echoed in the physical appearance of the novel. Just as nothing is concealed from the character – everyone understands the gentle caress of the absurd – nothing is hidden from the reader. The text is simple. It is so simple, in fact, that I found myself re-reading, searching (in vain, I might add) for some thread of disguised meaning or concealed implication. It took me awhile to realize that everything worth gleaning from the novel was lying bare on the page. Minimalism is not easy in the same way that abstract painting is not easy: it's simple to claim otherwise but difficult to prove it. Coetzee is a master because he can say what might take others a lifetime in 169 pages.
Great novels are about everyone. The characters in great novels transcend the limitations of the page to become everyone. We can all conceive of ourselves in similar predicaments. Both the pain and the sheer unadulterated joy of existence reside within us all. Youth is a great novel because it demonstrates how the futility of mindless labour inexorably leads to unrealized hopes and desires, for mindless labour is sustenance while dreams can only be dreams if they are imagined. Realization kills the dreamer just as surely as it kills the dream.
Coetzee's spare, almost utilitarian style fuses structure with narrative. The utter simplicity of Coetzee's predicament, the unabashed intrusion of his eternal dilemma is echoed in the physical appearance of the novel. Just as nothing is concealed from the character – everyone understands the gentle caress of the absurd – nothing is hidden from the reader. The text is simple. It is so simple, in fact, that I found myself re-reading, searching (in vain, I might add) for some thread of disguised meaning or concealed implication. It took me awhile to realize that everything worth gleaning from the novel was lying bare on the page. Minimalism is not easy in the same way that abstract painting is not easy: it's simple to claim otherwise but difficult to prove it. Coetzee is a master because he can say what might take others a lifetime in 169 pages.
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