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ABSTRACT
Coetzee’s early interest in photography provides the stimulus for this paper, which argues that photography serves as a useful gateway into his novel-writing, with a particular focus on his before-and-after pairing of school photographs. The paper traces a line between this early interest and themes of individual resistance to co-optation by the state that would later come to define Coetzee’s fictional work. It contends that his experimentation with ‘before-and-after’ technique in photography taught him valuable lessons that would later be used to disassemble narratives that compel individuals to conform to societal expectations. The paper includes a detailed examination of the way that Coetzee challenges the social structures of both family and the school in the ‘Jesus’ trilogy, developing methods which arguably have their origin in the early photography, techniques of juxtaposition, seriality and montage. The thesis is that ‘photographic thinking’ has remained an influential feature of Coetzee’s work throughout his writing career, albeit with significant changes that are discussed here.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Hermann Wittenberg, ed., J.M. Coetzee: Photographs from Boyhood (Cape Town: Protea, 2020). Hereafter cited as Photographs. This collection is drawn from a cache of 450 amateur black-and-white shots discovered by Wittenberg in 2014 when Coetzee sold his Cape Town apartment, which he had rented out since emigrating to Australia in 2003. Most of the cache had never been developed from negatives, which apparently lay forgotten in a suitcase.
2 Photographs, p. 16.
3 The trilogy is comprised of J.M. Coetzee, The Childhood of Jesus (London: Jonathan Cape, 2013), The Schooldays of Jesus (London: Harvill Secker, 2016), The Death of Jesus (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2019). Hereafter referred to as Childhood, Schooldays and Death.
4 J.M. Coetzee, Boyhood (London: Secker & Warburg, 1997).
5 J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man (London: Secker & Warburg, 2005).
6 I am not the first critic to identify something distinctively ‘Coetzeean’ even as early as the youthful photography. Peter Johnson observes that ‘in photographs from his schooldays, the young John looks down the camera with an immediately recognizable Coetzeean intelligence.’ See Mark Farrant, Kai Easton and Hermann Wittenberg eds., J.M. Coetzee and the Archive (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021) p. 95.
7 His semi-autobiographical novel Youth (London: Secker & Warburg, 2002) covers the period of Coetzee’s attempts as a young intellectual to immerse himself in European high modernism, with cinema as a major influence, as part of his turning away from apartheid-era South African politics.
8 J.M. Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country (London: Secker & Warburg, 1977).
9 J.M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 59. Hereafter cited as Doubling.
10 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982), p. 7.
11 Slow Man, p. 65.
12 Anthony Uhlmann, J.M. Coetzee: Truth, Meaning, Fiction (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), p. 178.
13 Coetzee’s interest in life after death has been commented on by numerous critics. Chris Danta refers to him as a ‘theorist of the afterlife’ in ‘Coetzee’s Animal Afterlives’, Southerly, 69.1 (2009), pp. 1–8 (1), which clearly resonates with the emphasis in this essay on Coetzee’s focus on the transition from before to after. Valeria Mosca notes of The Childhood of Jesus that ‘the whole narrative is permeated by an indefinite feeling of after-ness.’ See Valeria Mosca, ‘On the loss of fathers and letters: Reading Summertime and The Childhood of Jesus alongside Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever’, in Mark Farrant, Kai Easton and Hermann Wittenberg (eds), J.M. Coetzee and the Archive (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), pp. 43–56 (46).
14 The problem of how to begin creativity is described by Coetzee as follows: ‘[H]ow to get us from where we are, which is, as yet, nowhere, to the far bank. It is a simple bridging problem, a problem of knocking together a bridge […] Let us take it that the bridge is built and crossed, that we can put it out of our mind. We have left behind the territory in which we were. We are in the far territory, where we want to be.’ See J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (London: Secker & Warburg, 2003), p. 1.
15 See ‘Interview: Hermann Wittenberg on ‘J.M. Coetzee: Photographs from Boyhood’.’ https://collageadelaide.com/2018/11/22/interview-hermann-wittenberg-on-j-m-coetzee-photographs-from-boyhood/
16 J.M. Coetzee, Giving Offense (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 71.
17 Photographs, p. 176.
18 Coetzee seems to share the view of Barthes in his critique of photography for sucking the life out of images. This stricture fits the ‘before’ photograph in , while the ‘after’ image could meet Barthes’ approval: ‘looking at certain photographs I wanted to be a primitive, without culture.’ See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 7.
19 Boyhood, p. 37.
20 Photographs, p. 70.
21 Coetzee’s antipathy towards official use of photography to freeze and sum up a person’s being can be seen in later work, including The Death of Jesus. For a fuller discussion see below.
22 Jordan Bear and Kate Palmer Albers eds., Before-and-After Photography: Histories and Contexts (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), p. 2.
23 John Berger, quoting Brecht, argues, however, that it is the hallmark of ‘great photographs’ to capture a sense of movement through time, although provision of context, as will be illustrated by this paper, can achieve the same effect: ‘“To experience this Now on many levels, coming from Previously and / Merging into Afterwards, also having much else Now / Alongside it.” There are a few great photographs which practically achieve this by themselves. But any photograph may become such a “Now” if an adequate context is created for it. In general the better the photograph, the fuller the context which can be created.’ See John Berger, Understanding a Photograph, edited and introduced by Geoff Dyer (London: Penguin, 2013) p. 60.
24 Susan Sontag bemoans the ‘industrialization of photography’ that ‘permitted its rapid absorption into rational – that is bureaucratic – ways of running society.’ Coetzee’s hesitancy about photography, abandoned for novel writing, and his playful deconstruction of the authorized school photograph (), can be related to this process, already apparent in the use of photography to support the apartheid system in South Africa. As Sontag further notes, ‘Photographs were embroiled in the service of important institutions of control, notably the family and the police, as symbolic objects and as pieces of information.’ See Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin, 1979), p. 21.
25 Zoë Wicomb, ‘“Slow Man” and the Real: A Lesson in Reading and Writing’, JLS/TLW, 25.4 (2009), pp. 7–24 (21).
26 Childhood, p. 1.
27 Davíd is spelled ‘David’ in Childhood, but for the sake of consistency this paper will use the accented spelling adopted for the later novels in the trilogy.
28 A good example of such ideology is the snapshot of David Lurie in J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Secker & Warburg, 1999), where a newspaper photograph is used to sum him up as a fallen man. Consumption of such reductive images risks producing a public lacking discernment, susceptible to stereotyping.
29 In Coetzee’s words, ‘the Enlightenment simply replaced the old condemnation of idleness as disobedience to God with an emphasis on work as a duty owed by man to himself and his neighbor […] through work man becomes master of the world.’ See ‘Idleness in South Africa’, in J.M. Coetzee (ed.), White Writing: On The Culture of Letters in South Africa (New Haven: Yale U.P., 1988), pp. 12–35 (13).
30 J.M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K (London: Vintage, 1983). Hereafter cited as Michael K.
31 J.M. Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country (London: Secker & Warburg, 1977).
32 Doubling, p. 59.
33 Doubling, p. 60.
34 Hermann Wittenberg, ‘Film and Photography in J. M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K’, Texas Studies in Literature & Language, 58.4 (2016), pp. 473–92 (485).
35 Doubling, p. 59.
36 J.M. Coetzee, Dusklands (Johannesberg: Ravan Press, 1979).
37 Ayala Amir, ‘“What Used to Lie Outside the Frame”: Boundaries of Photography, Subjectivity and Fiction in Three Novels by J. M. Coetzee’, Journal of Literary Studies, 29.4 (2013), pp. 58–79 (70).
38 We know from Wittenberg that Coetzee considered using a similar device in an early novel that is directly concerned with passive resistance to apartheid, Michael K: ‘In his notebook he explored the following idea: “Suggestion: photographs scattered through the text. Each has an extended explanatory caption, and is overdrawn with arrows, letters, etc., for example: “The General Post Office, Plein St, a few seconds before the explosion that. … The grille marked A was blown out. The unnamed bystander B was killed”.” ’ See ‘Film and Photography’, p. 476. Again, the lapse is just a few seconds but the effect is literally explosive, as a post office is reduced to rubble, and the loss of the life of a ‘bystander’ is scarcely an endorsement of this example of subversion. The politicization of the ‘before-and-after’ pairing is also drawn attention to by the addition of captions steering the viewer’s response. In the event, Coetzee thought better of reinforcing his message about the dangerous aftermath of violence by means of before-and-after photography, its very starkness perhaps at odds with the novel’s subtle celebration of passive resistance.
39 Boyhood, pp. 61–2.
40 See Paul Auster and J.M. Coetzee, Here and Now: Letters 2008–2011 (London: Faber and Faber, 2013). Hereafter cited as Here and Now.
41 See John Kannemeyer, J.M. Coetzee: A Life in Writing (London: Scribe, 2012), pp. 43 and 76.
42 Boyhood, p. 136. Such bitterness anticipates the pronounced hostility of his adopted mother, Ines, in the Jesus trilogy, to the various inadequate schools in which Davíd is placed.
43 Doubling, p. 394.
44 Eric Margolis, ‘Class Pictures: Representations of Race, Gender and Ability in a Century of School Photography’, Education Policy Analysis Archives, 8.31 (2000), pp. 1–28 (1). Hereafter cited as Margolis.
45 Margolis, p. 3.
46 This imposing setting is part of the mansion built on his Belmont Park estate by John Bardwell Ebdon (1787–1873), which became the administrative centre of St. Joseph’s. Ebdon was a prominent Cape Town businessman and slave owner. Like Crusoe, this British born man was shipwrecked and, aged eighteen, swam ashore to Cape Town gripping a bag of gold. See http://www.maristsj.co.za/st-josephs/heritage/.
47 Margolis, p. 9. In contrast, Margolis notes that photographs of black American schoolchildren were taken to reassure white Americans that they were unfit for education: ‘In place of order, book learning or scholarship, we see playfulness’, Margolis, p. 9. This ‘black’ playfulness, associated with resistance to official ‘white’ education, is precisely what young Coetzee captured in his ‘after’ photograph, with formal discipline suspended, in the transgressive figure of the running boy.
48 He can be identified as Mr Scully, described as follows in Boyhood, where he is renamed Mr. Whelan: ‘he has the bloodless face of a corpse. What he is doing in South Africa is not clear. He seems to disapprove of the country and everything that happens in it’ (p. 138). Coetzee’s note to a photograph of Scully states that he was, ‘A great hater of communists and of the English (he was an Irish Catholic); disdainful of Afrikaners, with their comically unpronounceable names.’ See Wittenberg, Photographs, p. 126.
49 See J.M. Coetzee, ‘Photographs of South Africa’, in Stranger Shores: Essays 1986–1999 (London: Secker & Warburg, 2001), pp. 344–50 (344–5). Hereafter cited as ‘Photographs’.
50 For a fuller discussion of the role of photography in Afrikaner nationalism see Marijke du Toit, ‘Blank Verbeeld, or the Incredible Whiteness of Being: Amateur Photography and Afrikaner Nationalist Historical Narrative’, Kronos: Journal of Cape History, 27.1 (2001), pp. 77–113. She observes that ‘Afrikaner nationalist discursive practices were crucially visual as well as verbal’ (p. 111). Notably, children were the primary focus of the government’s propaganda effort at this time to secure white domination. Communism was depicted as the enemy, with the National Party aligning itself with the West against the Cold War threat from Russia. Coetzee’s marginalization at this time is indicated by his dalliance with Russia, to which he confesses in Boyhood: ‘Preferring the Russians to the Americans is a secret so dark that he can reveal it to no one’ (p. 26).
51 Boyhood, p. 112.
52 Boyhood, p. 124.
53 Boyhood, p. 124.
54 Boyhood, p. 125.
55 Charlotte Elmgren, ‘“Let us keep going and see what comes up”: The Poetics of Study in J. M. Coetzee's The Childhood of Jesus’, ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 50.2–3 (2019), pp. 163–90 (167).
56 Slow Man, p. 65.
57 Here and Now, p. 179.
58 J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (London: Harvill Secker, 2007). Hereafter cited as Diary.
59 Diary, p. 74.
60 Diary, p. 75.
61 We can compare his attraction for and revulsion against the wider impact of computing, as discussed in two articles by Rebecca Roach. With Roach’s research in mind, it can be persuasively argued that Coetzee’s wariness was due to the openness of both photography and computing to recruitment by the state for anti-humanitarian purposes. Neither could provide Coetzee with the ethical engagement with otherness that he sought, though both technologies would continue to figure significantly in his fiction. As in the case of photography, Roach has shown Coetzee’s time spent on computer programming continued to have a profound impact on his novel-writing, even as he wrote against its destructive application: ‘Coetzee would incorporate computer processes into his fiction as a method for encouraging readers to resist the cultural automatization that computational thinking propagated […] to promote a reader, not an automaton, who can think critically and resist the logic of binaries, substitution and functionalism.’ See Rebecca Roach, ‘Hero and Bad Motherland: J. M. Coetzee's Computational Critique’, Contemporary Literature, 59.1 (2018), pp. 80–111 (82). See also Rebecca Roach, ‘J. M. Coetzee's Aesthetic Automatism’, Modern Fiction Studies, 65.2 (2019), pp. 308–37.
62 Slow Man, p. 48.
63 Amel Benia, Abdullah Dagamseh and Fadia Suyoufie, ‘The Camera Lens: Representation, Authenticity, and Manipulation in Penelope Lively's The Photograph and J. M. Coetzee's Slow Man’, College Literature, 48.1 (2021), pp. 143–71 (158).
64 Gillian Phillips, ‘Precarious Life and Labor in J.M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron, Slow Man, and Diary of a Bad Year’, Studies in the Novel, 53.4 (2021), pp. 368–84 (376).
65 Slow Man, p. 31.
66 Schooldays, p. 19. Campbell Birch notes Coetzee’s fear of how, ‘regressive group psychologies, particularly racist and nationalistic ones, may manifest as a result of telling, indeed of telling together, a self-serving story about the past.’ See Campbell Johnston Birch, ‘The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy by J. M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz’ (review), Literature and Medicine, 38.1 (2020), pp. 219–25 (224–5).
67 See Jacqueline Fear-Segal’s discussion of federal use of before-and-after photography, as part of a ‘campaign of cultural transformation’, with photographs providing ‘indisputable proof’ that native children had undergone ‘a seemingly straightforward and easy transition from “savagery” to “civilization”’. Jacqueline Fear-Segal, ‘Facing the Binary: Native American Students in the Camera’s Lens’, in Jordan Bear and Kate Palmer Albers (eds), Before-and-After Technology: Histories and Contexts (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), pp. 153–73 (153).
68 Death, p. 69.
69 Death, p. 69.
70 J.M. Coetzee, ‘Photographs’, p. 176.
71 Age of Iron, p. 193.
72 Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin, 1979), p. 14.
73 J.M. Coetzee, ‘Photographs’, p. 176.
74 Death, p. 182.
75 Death, p. 113.
76 Death, p. 1.
77 J.M. Coetzee, ‘Four Notes on Rugby,’ Doubling, pp. 121–6 (125).
78 Ibid.
79 J.M. Coetzee, ‘Photographs’, p. 350.
80 Xiaoran Hu, ‘J. M. Coetzee: Politics of the Child, Politics of Nonposition’, Textual Practice, 34.6 (2020), pp. 975–93 (985).
81 Schooldays, p. 246.
82 J.M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz, The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy (London: Harvill Secker, 2015), p. 156. Hereafter cited as The Good Story.
83 Megan Jane Laverty, ‘J.M. Coetzee, Eros and Education’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 53.3 (2019), pp. 574–88 (586).
84 Death, p. 3.
85 Death, p. 20.
86 Death, p. 254.
87 Compare the similarly moralistic stoning scene in The Brothers Karamazov (1880) when a group of boys gangs up against a solitary child.
88 Age of Iron, p. 116.
89 Childhood, p. 261.
90 Death, p. 195.
91 Childhood, p. 29.
92 In the Forward to The Good Story, Coetzee writes, ‘All over the world, as governments retreat from their traditional duty to foster the common good and reconceive of themselves as mere managers of national economies, universities have been coming under pressure to turn themselves into training schools equipping young people with the skills required by a modern economy’ (p. xi).
93 Dostoevsky concluded that you could not reason your way into faith – in Joseph Frank’s terms ‘a paradoxical “leap of faith” was the only source of religious certainty, against Feuerbach’s demand that religion be brought down to earth and submit to the criterion of human reason.’ See Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2010), p. 128.
94 Death, p. 138.
95 Doubling, p. 249.
96 Doubling, p. 250. Patrick Hayes has identified in Coetzee’s work ‘a debate of fundamental importance between “cynicism” and “grace,”’ which pits ‘the denial of any ultimate base for values’ against ‘a condition in which truth can be told clearly, without blindness.’ See Patrick Hayes, ‘“An Author I Have Not Read”: Coetzee's ‘Foe’, Dostoevsky's ‘Crime and Punishment’, and the Problem of the Novel’, The Review of English Studies, 2006, 57.232 (2006), pp. 273–90 (275). Jay Rajiva comments that, ‘Hayes locates the turn from cynicism to grace as a watershed moment for Coetzee, whose later work […] pits the endlessly self-serving individuality of cynicism against the struggle, however blind or obdurate, for some notion of earthly Christianity and salvation.’ See Jay Rajiva, ‘Secrecy, Sacrifice, and God on the Island: Christianity and Colonialism in Coetzee’s Foe and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe’, Twentieth-Century Literature, 63.1 (2017), pp. 1–20 (2).
97 Richard Alan Northover, ‘Schopenhauer and Secular Salvation in the Work of J. M. Coetzee’, English in Africa, 41.1 (2014), pp. 35–54 (40).
98 Doubling, p. 249.
99 Coetzee quotes with approval from Notes from the Underground where Dostoevsky sets out his credo that desire for individual freedom trumps any and all rational appeal to material wellbeing, that humans will do anything to escape from the restriction of their actions being determined by circumstances: ‘But the truth is that every now and again man will desire what is injurious to himself precisely “in order to have the right to desire for himself” without being bound by any law. And he desires that freedom from determination in order to assert “what is most precious and most important – that is, our personality, our individuality”. The primal desire is therefore the desire for a freedom that the hero identifies with unique individuality.’ See Doubling, p. 280.
100 J.M. Coetzee, Summertime (London: Secker & Warburg, 2009).
101 Nadine Gordimer famously argued that Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K, demonstrated ‘a revulsion against all political and revolutionary solutions’. See Nadine Gordimer, ‘The Idea of Gardening’, Review of Life & Times of Michael K, New York Times, Feb. 2, 1984, p. 3.
102 Summertime, p. 229.
103 Summertime, p. 230.
104 Summertime, pp. 12–13.
105 Justin Neuman, ’Unexpected Cosmopolitans: Media and Diaspora in J. M. Coetzee's Summertime’, Criticism, 53.1 (2011), pp. 127–36 (135).
106 Death, p. 197.
107 Katherine Hallemeier, ‘J. M. Coetzee’s Literature of Hospice’, Modern Fiction Studies, 62.3 (2016), pp. 481–98 (489).
108 J.M.Coetzee, The Pole and Other Stories (London: Harvill Secker, 2023).
109 The Pole, pp. 101–2.
110 Note Herbillon’s reference to, ‘the need to move towards a view of history that would seek to transcend reductive binary oppositions instead of reproducing them’ (402). Coetzee attacks binarization as ‘the logic of either/or’ in Youth (160) and states in 2016 that ‘it is up to the poets’ to keep us from ‘binary thinking, and the corresponding spread of a form of mental constraint that conceives of itself quite innocently as freedom’ (‘On Literary Thinking’ 1152).
111 Matthew Mutter, ‘“Stands for Itself Certainly”: Coetzee’s Jesus Trilogy’, Common Knowledge, 27.3 (2021), pp. 422–81 (455).
112 Slow Man, p. 65.
113 This bridging process is brilliantly described by Robert Musil in Young Torless: ‘But these two lots of real numbers are connected by something that simply doesn’t exist. Isn’t that like a bridge where the piles are there only at the beginning and at the end, with none in the middle, and yet one crosses it just as surely and as safely as if the whole of it were there.’ See Robert Musil, Young Torless, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser (London: Secker and Warburg, 1955), p. 98.
114 Wittenberg draws attention to Coetzee’s commitment to this kind of narrative movement: ‘Montage allowed Coetzee to develop an episodic narrative style in which he could rapidly move from one scene to the next without having to labor over connecting passages.’ See ‘Film and Photography,’ p. 477. He also notes that montage, heightened when it is before-and-after, has the power to shock and destabilize: ‘the disjunctive effects that could be achieved by presenting a succession of still images.’ See ‘Film and Photography,’ p. 477.