Introduction: J.M. Coetzee and His Doubles (Critical Essay‪)‬

In J.M. Coetzee's most recent novel, Diary of a Bad Year (2007), the narrator, Senor C, an internationally known writer whose Strong Opinions on the state of the world have been solicited for publication, broaches the problem of novelistic authority. Related etymologically to the figure of the "author", authority presents a paradox: whether one wishes to demonstrate one's own or attribute it to another, authority as a particular kind of integrity tends to disintegrate. The author's authority is perhaps nothing more than "a bagful of rhetorical tricks", a species of imposture, as Barthes and Foucault, and Diderot and Sterne before them, had suggested (Coetzee 2007: 149). That possibility notwithstanding, if the author perseveres in his search for an authoritative voice, he discovers that it can be "attained only by opening the poet-self to some higher force, by ceasing to be oneself and beginning to speak vatically" (Coetzee 2007: 151). The price of authority, in other words, is self-nullification: in view of this difficulty, the narrator cites Kierkegaard's admonition--"Learn to speak without authority"--and, having in so doing made an authority of the gainsayer of authority, is caught in the kind of absurdity exemplified by the Liar Paradox in which an assertion and its disclaimer coincide (Coetzee 2007: 151). The intention of the present volume is to ask how the phenomenon of doubling in Coetzee's fiction responds to this crisis of authority, as the entire cast of his narrators and characters--and, by implication, also the author--experience it, politically, existentially, and ethically. The work of two writers predominates in scholarship on J.M. Coetzee. With J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event, Derek Attridge (2004) made a powerful case for reading Coetzee's fiction as an exploration of the literary. Reacting against a critical tradition that has read Coetzee for coded pronouncements about life in South Africa during and after apartheid, Attridge's book, inspired by Levinas, Blanchot and Derrida, emphasises the alterity and singularity of the literary work. By concentrating on the ethics of reading, Attridge's book opens an illuminating dialogue with David Attwell, whose J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (Attwell 1993) had been the standard monograph on Coetzee's fiction. Reading Coetzee in the context of South African currents in literature and politics of the 1970s and 1980s, Attwell argued that his novels be regarded as "situational metafiction" (Attwell 1993: 20). What is at stake between these two scholars is the nature of literature's political inscription. Whereas Attwell writes in a South African tradition of criticism absorbed with how literary works engage with the representation of history, and thus with contending discourses and ideologies, Attridge's interest lies in how a literary work compels its reader to engage with processes of meaning-making that are singular to it. For Attridge, literary works head off the ready assimilation of the good to some form of political militancy, which has over the years been the tendency of a number of Coetzee's critics, not least Nadine Gordimer (1984) in her infamous review of Life & Times of Michael K. Scholars who follow in the footsteps of Attwell and Attridge have, like them, to reflect on the basic nature of literature and on how it is political or ethical. They must, in so doing, also come to terms with what it is to be an author.