For Whom Nobel Tolls
A deserved prize for J.M. Coetzee.
by Michael S. Kochin
11/29/2003 12:03:00 AM, Volume 009, Issue 13

THE 2003 RECIPIENT of the Nobel Prize in Literature is not a surprise choice. J.M. Coetzee appeared on many lists of likely candidates, since his nine books of fiction, as well as his critical essays, have won him worldwide attention. This is no more than Coetzee deserves: His spare, disciplined style enables the expression of a magnificent imagination.

Yet perhaps the decision of the Swedish Academy should have come as more of a shock: Here is a man who does not believe that literature can save us. The prize is given, according to the terms of Alfred Nobel's bequest, for "the most outstanding work in an ideal direction," while J.M. Coetzee's works expound a critique of the ideals of the modern West and of the possibilities of literature as a vehicle for those ideals. Coetzee has tackled both the transient and the permanent difficulties of modernity: rationalist social engineering as exemplified in Western colonial projects from Vietnam to Zululand, modern humanism, and the hope for a rational system of ethics.

More important, Coetzee has in his fiction critically explored the notion that literature as we know it can promote humane ideals. His work constitutes a radical challenge to our learned prejudice that Western high culture can help twenty-first century men and women find a humane life together. Coetzee criticizes Western high culture from within: His essays reveal him as a penetrating critic of great figures of modernist fiction such as Robert Musil. Yet Coetzee's greatest literary debts as a novelist are to the ...