vindicated

"... Coetzee's fiction wavers between the unacceptable alternatives of frustrated Utopianism and apocalyptic despair. (Or are these alternatives interchangeable? As Patrician Merivale remarks of Life and Times of Michael K: "The book's crypto-pastoral ending, with its ironic paean to the spirit of survival, might be Faulknerian were it not so doubtfully subjunctive' (emphasis added).).... Coetzee's parables yield no obvious morals, yet they are 'ethically saturated'... What is most characteristic of Coetzee's novels (and, one suspects also, of their author), is that they brook no compromise: they refrain from uttering 'truths' when they know these to be relative; they uncover the material conditions that produce the lie of 'transcendent value'. The obliquity of Coetzee's writing is the sign of its precision."

(Graham Huggan and Stephen Watson, 'Introduction', Critical Perspectives on J.M. Coetzee)


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I suppose one could say that this is a sign of a fundamental intellectual insecurity - always wanting to find some critical affirmation for my own instinctive responses to the things I read. Still, perhaps all I need are a few more such happy affirmations, and I'll be on my Lit M.A. way.

The extract echoes what I feel, intuitively, about Coetzee's work: that it's impossible to pin it down to a single interpretation or 'truth' that cannot be immediately contested even within the framework of that interpretation. And I suppose that, besides its linguistic precision and economy, it is this aspect of his writing that has such a hold on me: its integrity, its refusal to settle for easy answers - even at the cost of not finding an answer.

'Doubtfully subjunctive' - what a wonderful way of saying that the last paragraph of Michael K leaves one feeling cheated into hope.
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