Literary Newspaper · Read at night at the moment
Read it on the night before going to bed, a beautiful text, take you into the world of reading memory.
Night Reading / "Unparalleled Awakening"
Over the years, the writer Xia Yu has traveled the world, traveling to Stockholm, Oslo, Istanbul, Berlin, Warsaw, Prague, Tokyo and other places. Writing in a personal experiential style, he revisits the places of the 20th century, delving into conversations with Pamuk, Kundera, Kafka, Susan Sontag, Philip Ross, J.M. Coetzee, Milosz, Klima and other outstanding minds. He recently published this collection of essays, "Unparalleled Awakening", which focuses on the human geography of foreign cities and also explains the ideas of the masters of Chinese of the drastic changes of the times.
"The process of reading and writing is building a metaphysical temple within the spirit. Those who are truly outstanding are like the stars walking in the dark of the night, with light above our heads and the road under our feet instantly illuminated. More often than not, those heart-to-heart readings bring me spiritual trembling, Goethe said, 'Trembling is the best part of human nature'. ”
Read tonight to bring an interpretation of the literary life of South African Nobel Prize writer J.M. Coetzee.
Coetzee: You can't be an artist without going into the depths
(Excerpt)
Part.1
On August 10, 1995, the British poet Sir Stephen Spender passed away, and Joseph Brodsky remembered his friendship. In 1972, Brodsky was deported from the country and became a friendship under the warm care of the poets Auden and Spander while in exile in the West.
Poet Brodsky
Brodsky once recalled a game he played: at the Royal Café in London, Brodsky, who was visiting England, invited the Spenders to a party, and Isaiah Berlin was seated with them during the dinner. They made a list of "the greatest writers of the century": Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Musil, Faulkner, Beckett. But the list only went up to the 1950s, when the silver-haired Spander, who was eighty, asked Brodsky: "Is there such a writer today?" "John Coetzee may be one," Brodsky replied, "a South African writer who may be the only one who has the right to continue writing novels after Beckett." Flipder asked, "What's his name?" I found a piece of paper, wrote Coetzee's name, and added "Michael M. K's Life and Times". Brodsky wrote in the New Yorker's memorial essay, "In Memory of Stephen Spinder."
In October 2003, J.M. Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Announcing the news, Horace Engdal, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said: "We are all convinced of the enduring value of his contribution to literature. I don't mean the number of books, but the variety, and the very high standard. I think that as a writer, he will continue to be discussed and analyzed, and we believe that he should be included in our literary heritage. The Swedish Academy said in its official report:
Coetzee's novels are characterized by exquisite structure, timeless dialogue, and deep speculation. However, he was a morally principled skeptic, relentlessly critical of the shallow sense of morality and brutal rationalism in Western civilization today. He dissolves all foundations of self-solace with intellectual honesty, and distances himself from the vulgar and worthless dramatic enlightenment and confession.
I am no stranger to the Swedish Academy, and for three years I traveled to the Nordic country with short days and nights in the middle of winter. A castle-like building in Stockholm's Old Town that was once a stock exchange center and later home to the Swedish Academy. Step into the Swedish Academy building, step on the stone steps, or take the old elevator to enter any part of the building. I entered the conference hall of the Swedish Academy, where eighteen court-style seats were arranged around a long table. The Swedish Academy, which has 18 academicians, has only 15 members involved in daily work, and the Nobel Prize in Literature selection committee is composed of some academicians. The jury's award speech to Coetzee is the highest honor a writer can enjoy:
Coetzee's work is a rich and varied literary treasure. No two works here use the same creative approach. However, he presents a repeatedly constructed pattern in his numerous works: a spiraling destiny is a necessary way for his characters to save their souls. His protagonist, after being hit, degraded, or deprived of his external dignity, always miraculously gains the strength to get back on his feet.
At this moment, I think of Brodsky, who was Coetzee's outstanding confidant. Perhaps grateful, Coetzee wrote about his remembrance of Brodsky in his 2002 novel Youth. The young Coetzee, who dreamed of becoming a poet, came to London and lived an uncertain life. His only hope in between his busy livelihoods was to go back to his room and turn on the radio to listen to BBC Episode 3. In the "Poets and Poems" series, Coetzee hears an interview with Brodsky. Brodsky, then accused of being a "social parasite," was sentenced to five years of hard labor on the frozen Arkhangelsk Peninsula, while still serving his sentence. In London, Coetzee sat in his warm apartment, drinking coffee and nibbling on desserts with raisins and nuts, a man his age, sawing logs all day, carefully protecting his frostbitten fingers, mending his boots with rags, and living on fish heads and cabbage soup.
J.M. Coetzee| Wang Jiaxiang, trans. Zhejiang Literature |and Art Publishing House
"It's as black as the inside of a sewing needle." Brodsky wrote this in a poem. "He cannot drive away this line from his heart, and if he concentrates night after night, if he can force the grace of inspiration to come upon him with absolute concentration, he may be able to come up with something to match." Coetzee's "Youth" narrative shows his love for the poet in the midst of drifting.
"Just on the basis of poetry he heard on the radio, he got to know Brodsky, got to know him thoroughly. That's the power of poetry. Poetry is truth. But Brodsky knew nothing about him in London. How can one tell this frozen man that he is with him, by his side, day after day, day after day? "Between the universe, two people who are far apart, connected by heart, travel through time and space.
At midnight on October 5, 2021, I re-read Coetzee's "Youth" and found a detail in chapter eleven, and I was struck by this narrative:
Joseph Brodsky released his verses into the air from the lone valve that was bumping in the dark ocean of Europe, and the verses quickly reached his room with the airwaves. The verses of his contemporaries, once again told him what poetry could be, and therefore what he himself could be, filled him with joy because he lived on the same earth as them.
Part.2
On January 1, 1970, the 30-year-old Coetzee locked himself in his basement at 24 Park Avenue in Buffalo, N.Y. In his New Year's wish, he vowed never to go out if he didn't write a thousand words. He was determined to keep writing every day until he finished a draft of a novel, which was the prototype of the novel "A Dark Place".
J.M. Coetzee | Zheng Yun, translated | Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House
Coetzee's coat and cotton boots on his feet indicate that the room is not heated. He wrote with a black ballpoint pen on horizontal lattice paper, and the manuscript of The Dark Place is permanently preserved at the Halliray Center for the Study of the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin. The Dark Zone, a combination of The Vietnam Project and The Tale of Jacob Coetzee, was a gift to Coetzee during the Buffalo period in New York.
In October 2017, I traveled to New York with J.M. Coetzee, as if I were following Coetzee's trail around the United States. I know he used to work at the University at Buffalo, and even though New York City and New York State are not a concept in a geographical sense, I still feel a little closer to the relics of Coetzee's life.
[South Africa] J.C. Cannimiye| Wang Jinghui, translated | Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House
Coetzee was arrested in Buffalo in 1970, but not for participating in anti-war demonstrations. At the time, the president of the State University of New York at Buffalo had hundreds of police stationed on campus, while the president himself retreated from his office to an undisclosed location. Coetzee and more than 40 teachers were arrested after a sit-in protest. The incident marked a turning point in Coetzee's career, killing his chance to stay in the United States while kicking off his writing career. "After the sit-in, I taught in Buffalo until May 1971. Like the others of the 45, the charges were dropped, but because of my criminal record (although an appeal was successful), my visa was extremely complicated in the eyes of immigration and naturalization authorities. My re-entry visa was revoked, preventing me from returning to the United States. It was in large part for this reason that I decided to quit in 1971 and left the United States. ”
Coetzee began writing his first novel, A Dark Place. He sent the manuscript of The Tales of Jacob Coetzee to the New York-based James Brown literary agency. From the beginning he made it clear that he wanted to put his work on the international market, and he did not want to be defined as a writer from the colonies. The Narration of Jacob Coetzee was rejected by four publishers, and the original manuscript later enriched into A Dark Place was rejected by several publishers.
"Life without comfort, without dignity, without a commitment to kindness, the only responsibility we face – albeit inexplicable and futile, but still our responsibility – is not to lie to ourselves." This is Coetzee's 2007 reading of Samuel Beckett, his literary role model, in his anthology Inner Life. Every writer has his own professional role model, and Coetzee began reading Beckett's work extensively as a young man and was deeply influenced. In 2007, he published his insights on authors and books in the New York Review of Books, which were collected into Inner Life.
J.M. Coetzee| Huang Canran, translated | People's Literature Publishing House
In 1969, Coetzee was awarded a doctorate in his dissertation entitled "A Stylistic Study of Samuel Beckett's English Novels." In order to be able to quote Beckett's "In Vain", he wrote to Chato Windars on March 19, 1968. The publisher asked Coetzee to indicate the parts that needed to be cited, otherwise the permission was rejected. After Coetzee received the reply, he informed him of the exact quotation, and the publisher replied that he allowed him to put part of Beckett in the appendix of the paper, with one proviso that if Coetzee published his doctoral dissertation in the future, he would need to consult them again. Beckett's protection of copyright can be seen in Beckett's request quoted in the publisher's letter to Coetzee: "You are allowed to quote (up to ten times) no more than ten lines at a time (subject to the Chatowinda edition)." This gave Coetzee the first experience of how a famous writer strictly protects his copyright, and guided Coetzee to learn how to protect his creative rights. More importantly, Beckett's aesthetic principles and worldview had a crucial influence on Coetzee, just as Proust, Kafka, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky influenced him, constituting Coetzee's literary spiritual inheritance.
Part.3
Coetzee's autobiographical trilogy "Boy", "Youth", "Summer" and its general theme "Scenes of Provincial Life" are reminiscent of Tolstoy's trilogy "Childhood", "Youth" and "Youth". Writer Rosemary Edmonds' review of Tolstoy's penguin trilogy is also Coetzee's own story:
When he was a 19-year-old boy, Tolstoy confided in his notebook, he wanted to know himself thoroughly, and from then until his death at the age of 82, he observed and described the state of his soul ... This is not curiosity about knowledge, nor is it a thirst for wisdom. What allowed Tolstoy to observe and record throughout his life was the despair and fear of death and nothingness.
In the 1970s, Coetzee returned to South Africa, where he had always wanted to break ties. Back in 1962, when Coetzee began working as a computer programmer in London, his home country passed the Sabotage Act. Many of the detainees were college classmates Coetzee knew in his early years, many were humiliated, tortured and held incommunicado, and some left South Africa permanently. Coetzee wrote in Double Perspective: "The dark, forbidden chamber is essentially the origin of the novel's fantasy. In the process of creating these despicable acts and adding mystery, the state itself unwittingly creates the prerequisites for the reproduction of the novel. Coetzee's "Waiting for the Barbarian" is about the impact of the torture chamber on a person of conscience.
J.M. Coetzee| Wen Min, translated | People's Literature Publishing House
The novel was written on September 20, 1977, and an early version was written on exam paper at the University of Cape Town. There are three versions of the novel, which are also a reflection of Coetzee's life, he was in Cape Town when he began writing, and in the process he had already traveled to the United States, first at the University of Texas and then at the University of California, Berkeley.
It wasn't until decades of hard writing that he finally understood as Proust had always known his true subject. And his subject is himself—himself and all his efforts as a colonizer who grew up in a culture that was not for him (he was told) and had no history (he was told), trying to find a way out of the world. Since there are no good conditions, he must make a way in the world on his own.
This is the commentary of the South African writer J.C. Cannimiye in the biography of J.M. Coetzee. With a thin figure, a gray beard, a deep voice, and glasses, he has a taciturn demeanor and a pure appearance. For years, Coetzee used silence and refusal to protect himself from outside intrusions, interviews with journalists were difficult, and his private life was outside the public domain. He divorced and lived with his two children, Nicholas and Gisela, in a house on a narrow street in the suburbs. His partner, Dorothy Driver, had his own place to live instead of always living with him. He is a vegetarian who was diagnosed with lactase deficiency in the 1980s and cannot eat any dairy products. When he makes rare appearances in social situations, he prefers to stand in a corner and talk to people.
I had a long time reading of Coetzee, initially Summer, about his life, his writing, his emotions and desires, his frustrations and frustrations. It is a dark and desolate book, and a text that enters Coetzee's inner world and examines his spiritual landscape.
Following T.S. Eliot's 1944 essay "What is a Classic," Coetzee delivered a speech of the same name in Graz, Austria, in 1991
Coetzee's job is to study the world and then write. His writing is a vast project of existential exploration. I enjoyed all of Coetzee's published books in China—novels and collections of literary criticism. Such as the poignant elegy "Master Petersburg", the icy "Iron Age", and the meticulous investigation of fragile human nature "Michael M. K's Life and Times", "Chronicle of the Murderous Years", which speaks directly about evil and injustice, "Shame", which is cruel and sad, and "The Son of Jesus" that drives away the fire and is calm, all of these works make me feel the precision and fascination of Coetzee's narrative, and experience the cold beauty and cruel poetry unique to Coetzee's writing. Including the essay collections "Inner Life" and "The Land of Strangers", we can also glimpse his ideals and beliefs in writing.
However, I felt that these readings were not enough to understand Coetzee's value, and Coetzee Chinese the world was still simplified until I read J.M. Coetzee in October 2017. This is a spiritual investigation of an outstanding writer in a broader and deeper context, and it is also a presentation of the mind of an outstanding intellectual in a more diverse and open context. Most importantly, I saw the moral dimension and personality of a brilliant novelist.
Selected from
"Unparalleled Awakening"
Author: Xia Yu, Nanjing University Press, November 2022
New Media Editor: Zheng Zhouming
Pictured: Historical data
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