Here's Coetzee again. (Forgive me, I suspect he's becoming my favourite writer. And I speak of not only his writing per se, but the persona - carefully constructed, no doubt, but ultimately still constructed by a self that thinks, feels and judges; and therefore a reflection, however incomplete, of that self - that comes across in his criticism, interviews, and so on.)
Here are some uncharacteristically open comments from Coetzee on his motivations and his art. Taken from
Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (ed. David Atwell).
On suffering:"(Let me add,
entirely parenthetically, that I, as a person, as a personality, am overwhelmed, that my thinking is thrown into confusion and helplessness, by the fact of suffering in the world, and not only human suffering. These fictional constructions of mine are paltry, ludicrous defences against that being-overwhelmed, and, to me, transparently so.)"
On his engagement (or lack thereof) in South African politics:"I tested the possibility of retreating to the sidelines. I was offered jobs in Canada and Hong Kong. At the last minute I turned both down. Why? A certain fatality, perhaps, a will to remain in crisis. A
real resolution would have been to hurl myself bodily into the anti-imperialist struggle (I use that language in a spirit of irony; yet what other language is there?). But the picture of myself marching into the fray - I, with my craving for privacy, my distaste for crowds, for slogans, my almost physical revulsion against obeying orders, I who by dint of utterly uncharacteristic, single-minded cunning had got through four years of high school without doing military drill - the picture was simply comic.
Why that revulsion? I can only say that violence and death, my own death, are to me, intuitively, the same thing. Violence, as soon as I sense its presence within me, becomes introverted as violence against myself: I cannot project it outward. I am unable to, or refuse to, conceive of a liberating violence... I cannot but think: if all of us imagined violence as violence against ourselves, perhaps we would have peace. (Whether peace is what we most deeply want is another story.) Or, to explain myself another way: I understand the Crucifixion as a refusal and an introversion of retributive violence, a refusal so deliberate, so conscious, and so powerful that it overwhelms any reinterpretation, Freudian, Marxian, or whatever, that we can give to it."
On truth and justice:"Why should one choose the side of justice when it is not in one's material interest to do so?... Because we are born with the idea of justice. Why should I be interested in the truth about myself when the truth may not be in my interest?... Because we are born with the idea of the truth."
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