Kuche. Photo/Visual China
Regarding Couche, there is still no answer
Text/Kang
Published in China News Weekly, No. 1018 on November 1, 2021
With the award of Tanzanian novelist Abdul-Razak Gürna, Kuche is no longer Africa's latest Nobel Laureate in Literature.
By the time he won the prize in 2003, Coetzee had left South Africa, and his subsequent novels no longer used Africa as a backdrop.
Three jesus novels are perhaps the most confusing works of Coetzee's later years. Now, a Chinese translation of the last book in the series, The Death of Jesus, has also been published.
The mystery of what he was writing was revealed, and the question of what he was trying to express remained unanswered.
Jesus' novel has a grand finale
The Jesus in the title of the book seems to have nothing to do with the orthodox Jesus of the Bible. This is Coetzee's philosophical fable.
The protagonists of all three novels are refugee boy David. In the 2013 issue of The Childhood of Jesus, five-year-old David was separated from his family, lost his identity documents, and was taken by Simon, an old man in the same boat, to emigrate to a Spanish-speaking socialist country to erase old memories and learn new languages. Simon was trained to work as a docker, and took David to look for his mother after work, but no one knew the origin of the boy, the boy did not know his mother's name, and "David" was not even his real name. They have a crush on Ines, a thirty-five-year-old rich woman who is playing tennis, and Simon asks her if she would like to be David's mother.
"I don't understand. In fact, I didn't understand it at all. You suggest I adopt your son? ”
"Not adoption. It was to be his mother, his real mother. We all have only one mother, each of us. Would you like to be his only mother? ”
He somehow persuaded the unworldly Ines to become David's mother before she was married, just as Mary gave birth to Jesus as a virgin. David liked Don Quixote, but rejected mathematics because he treated numbers as separate things rather than counting them. The public school concluded that he had a learning disability and sent him to a special school, but he ran home through the barbed wire, and Simon and Ines had to flee with him.
Published three years later (2019), Six-year-old David went to boarding school and fell in love with dance teacher Anna and janitor Dmitry, but Dmitry killed Anna, and the police then discovered that the deceased was his lover.
The last in the series, The Death of Jesus, came out in 2019 (the Chinese translation was published in August this year), and David has reached the age of ten, is a brilliant dance student, and has shown great talent in football. He read no books except Don Quixote. He treated the book as real history, not fictional fiction. Julio, the director of a nearby orphanage, invited David and others to form a youth soccer team. David felt that Simon and Ines did not understand him because they were not his biological parents, so he resented them and decided to leave them and live with Julio. But it didn't take long for him to develop a mysterious illness. Simon and Ines were horrified to find that Dmitry had become a handyman at the hospital. Like the secret revealed in the title, David died. Before dying, he asked Simon what death would look like. Simon said that when people die, they will forget the past and usher in a new world. David had another idea of death: he wanted to get rid of "this boy," he said, pointing to his body. In this last book, David becomes like Jesus. He had disciples and followers. The orphans came to the hospital and listened to him preach the gospel of Don Quixote from his hospital bed: two pegasus, one black and one white, called shadows, and white called ivory, and they pulled the flying chariot and led Don Quixote into the desert and the storm.
Three of Cooche's Jesus novels.
"Now," the last sentence of the book reads, "we will never know, in David's eyes, what the message of this book was, or what the most important thing he read was." ”
The Death of Jesus marks the end of three Jesus novels, and the response has been mixed upon publication. The Los Angeles Review of Books praised it for not only impressing and confusing, but also moving people to tears. The Guardian, however, said the trilogy was an "elaborate joke intended to mock the reader". In his 2017 book Imagining The Unthinkable: Coetzee's View of Fiction Creation and Its Postmodern Context, Duan Feng, an associate professor at Fudan University's School of Foreign Languages, speculated that The reason why Kuche "shaped such a plausible religious fable was that he hoped that readers would re-examine their own myths of longing for a Savior in the failure of this religious allegorical interpretation and in the process of pursuing a relatively complete ethical life."
Lust is honorable – who is the Joker now?
When The Death of Jesus was published, Coetzee was nearly eighty years old and had already achieved fame. A Nobel laureate and two-time Booker Prize winner, he is a world-renowned novelist and essayist, critic, translator, post-structuralist linguist, and university professor.
John Maxwell Coochet was born on 9 February 1940 in the Mowbray Nursing Home in Cape Town, South Africa, to a lawyer father, an elementary school teacher to a mother and Dutch immigrants. Kuchetton is Afrikaans, but written in English and is American.
In 1960 and 1961, Coetzee received his B.A. in English and Mathematics from the University of Cape Town. In 1962, he moved to England to work as a computer programmer at the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) in London, and the following year earned a Master of Arts degree for a thesis on the British writer Ford Maddox Ford. In 1965, he went to the United States for further study, and four years later became a Ph.D. in English and Linguistics from the University of Texas, where his dissertation focused on computer-aided statistical analysis of Beckett's English work. He has since taken up teaching positions at New York University at Buffalo, the University of Cape Town, the University of Chicago and the University of Adelaide in Australia.
Coetzee began publishing poetry as a student and devoted himself to fiction writing during his teaching days. Published in 1974, his debut novel, The Dark Lands, is divided into two parts, each with a different narrator, an American professor involved in the vietnam war escalation program, and a Dutch colonist who traveled to South Africa in the 18th century. What they have in common is selfishness, arrogance, adoration of violence, and there is never a sense of guilt.
The Life and Times of Michael K. came out in 1983. The story takes place during the South African Civil War in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the protagonist, Michael K, is about 40 years old and has a rabbit lip. Because of the South African censorship system, we have only a vague hint as to whether he is a man of color or not. Unemployed and unable to gain a foothold in Cape Town, he pushed his mother on a trolley and returned to her hometown. His mother died on the road, he was also looted by government forces, and was treated as a blind stream by the police, arrested as a coolie, and imprisoned for being a guerrilla. He refused to eat for a while, and finally escaped from prison, met a group of homeless people on the beach, and got his first sexual life. The novel won that year's Booker Prize, sending Coetzee to the ranks of famous writers.
In 1993, Apartheid ended in South Africa, and the following year, Mandela was elected president. In the face of the moral celebration of the whole people, Coetzee was worried about the widening gap between ideals and reality. He thought about it again and again, and finally wrote his most famous work, Shame, in 1999.
The novel depicts Luri, a white professor in Cape Town, who seduces a girl and is reported. He presented himself as an uncompromising liberal, lamenting that it was the era of the Puritans, when "private life became a public affair, and lust should be honorable... In fact, all they wanted to see was a TV show. I won't buy it. He refused to apologize, was expelled from school and had to move to the farm to live with his gay daughter Lucy. Soon, three black men robbed the farm, raped Lucy, and drove away in Lurie's car. The father and daughter tried to recover from the incident, but the relationship between them gradually changed. Lucy discovers that she is pregnant from rape, and one of the perpetrators blatantly enters her life.
Shame is a masterpiece. Set in post-apartheid South Africa, Coetzee brilliantly depicts the changes in power relations and exposes a sad reality: promises of new institutions and new morals have not been fulfilled, while violence and exploitation continue in new forms.
Not only that, but kuche had long ago had a premonition of the additional harm that sporty moral revelry might bring. When the South African scholar David Atwell reviewed the notes on shame, he found that Couché was once interested in adding to the story of intellectuals wearing high hats at the criticism meeting during the Cultural Revolution to illustrate his inner uneasiness. Although he removed the words about the Cultural Revolution before Fu Zi, he retained specific scenes — a student newspaper interviewing Lu Li, convicted of seduction, and taking a top hat photo of him:
"The photo was published in a student newspaper published the next day, and the text below read: 'Who is the clown now?' In the photo, he has his eyes facing the sky and one hand reaching for the camera, trying to grab it. Such a pose is absurd enough in itself, but what makes this photo even more noticeable is that a young man next to him, grinning, holds a flipped word paper basket on his head. Through the visual effect of perspective, the paper basket is like a hat on the clown's head. With such an image, what chance does he have to dodge? ”
Shame won the 1999 Booker Prize, making Coetzee the first winner in the history of the award. In 2008, Australian director Steve Jacobs brought it to the big screen, with star John Markovich playing Luri in the film.
You eat this carrot while it's hot
In 1997, Coetzee submitted his resignation, leaving the University of Cape Town and South Africa to join his family in Australia, where he co-taught at the University of Adelaide with his partner, Dorothy Dreifer. Nine years later, he was officially naturalized in Australia.
The success of Shame turned into a powerful thrust that eventually put Kuche on the podium in Stockholm in 2003. He became the second South African and the fourth Nobel Laureate in Literature in Africa – three others being his compatriot Nadine Gordimer, Nigeria's Voley Soyinka and Egypt's Najib Mahafuz. According to the Swedish Academy, Coetzee's work is "structurally ingenious, dialogue is profound, and analytically superior... At the same time, he went to the bottom and ruthlessly criticized the cruel rationalism and the whitewashed and hypocritical morality of Western civilization."
The Nobel Prize's speech also mentions Coetzee's other works. The Heart of the Nation (1977): a blend of Edwardian style and depictions of the African environment; Waiting for the Barbarians (1980): a political horror novel inheriting Conrad's approach; Foo (1986): a game-like allegorical novel; The Master of Petersburg (1994): an interpretation of Dostoevsky's world of life and creation; two autobiographical novels, Childhood (1997) and Youth (2002) is a cold dissection of paternity and the author himself.
Yet in his home country, there was little celebration with much fanfare. France's Le Monde said few people in South Africa read and understood his work. Shortly before that, the ruling ancillary anNU and President Mbeki accused him of being racist. Although the Presidential Office issued a congratulatory statement for his award, the ANC still believes that there is no contradiction between calling Coetzee a racist and congratulating him on his award.
"It was not Coetzee's writing that was under attack," the South African novelist Christopher Hope noted, "but his attitude toward life, his liberation, and the new South Africa." He is an inflammatory, reason-touching novelist obsessed with the questions of loneliness, freedom, and guilt. This is politically worrying and less South African. One commentator wrote, "Coetzee was a 'Western' writer, just happened to live in Africa, a 'white' writer who wrote for 'The West.'" ”
That winter, at the grand and lavish Nobel Dinner, Coetzee delivered an impromptu speech. He said that if he told his deceased mother that he had won the award, the mother's reaction would be: "Great, dear." You eat this carrot while it's hot. ”
His novels after his farewell to South Africa, such as Elisabeth Costello (2003), Slow Man (2005) and Murder Age Affair (2007), are set in Australia. The three most recent "Jesus" are set in an unnamed Spanish-speaking country, but they are still inseparable from immigrants and immigrant life.
It is worth mentioning the genre of Elisabeth Costello. Featuring the fictional old Australian writer Costello, it is based on eight lectures she gave around the world on issues of realism, animal rights, reason, evil, eroticism, and theology, interspersed with the memories of the professor himself, the reactions of his audience, and the interactions in his itinerary. Famous author David Lodge said it was too much to call the book a "novel." But Coetzee reiterated the principle he had been adhering to since his debut film, The Dark Places: "If there is a better, clearer, and shorter way to tell the story, why not leave the novel behind?" ”