Williamson September 07

The reader of Diary of a Bad Year should be forgiven a similar perplexity. J.M. Coetzee has used his formidable skills to produce a novel whose overriding concern with ‘the real thing’ also plunges it into a sphere outside of art. Given a main narrative that purports to be a work of non-fiction by the author of Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), one that battles quixotically with a world gone awry, and in a manner not so far removed from Coetzee’s own public efforts, it is hard to escape the connection with Tolstoy’s didactic period: a time when the author’s ethical impulses – the agonising question of how to live well – overwhelmed aesthetic ones, in what the critic Philip Rahv called a ‘wilful inflation of the idea of moral utility at the expense of the values of the imagination’.

Things have been heading in this direction for some time. In recent works such as Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (2003) and The Lives of Animals (2000), readers were presented with a fictional character who had lost her faith in the efficacy of fiction; one, moreover, who took positions on ‘real’ subjects – religion, politics or animal rights, for instance – that may or may not have been consonant with Coetzee’s own. Many threw up their hands when, in his last novel, Slow Man (2005), Coetzee once again inserted Costello into the narrative, only to have her strangle it.

And now we have Diary of a Bad Year, which takes this hybrid approach to its logical conclusion: a collection of opinions on subjects like those addressed in earlier novels, this time without the mediating figure of Elizabeth Costello. Instead, Coetzee, or someone who shares enough of his ontological baggage to pass for him, offers a direct rebuke to fiction’s special claims while still seeing fit to provide two accompanying fictional strands. ‘Reality’, which has hitherto been folded into the fictive like sugar in cake mix, is reconstituted here as a separate ingredient, inassimil-able into any larger recipe. We are left with nothing but raw materials: a cup of water, a mound of flour, an uncracked egg.

The first question, then, is how Diary of a Bad Year should be consumed. Each of its pages is divided into two or, more often, three narratives, divided by broken lines. On top is the text of a contribution, made by a well-known writer – unnamed at first, but Coetzee according to internal evidence – to a book entitled Strong Opinions (Nabokovians who picked up on the title will find traces of that earlier figure liberally scattered about), in which leading authors are given space to argue freely about what they think wrong with the world, the more contentious the better.

Beneath this flow of pure rhetoric lie two attendant stories. The first relates, mainly from the primary author’s perspective, his relationship with Anya, a youngish, sexually attractive Filipino woman living in an apartment in the same inner-Sydney high-rise as the author. She is largely uncultured, but street-smart. While she has scant appreciation for the writer’s minor fame or his pronouncements on current affairs, she is canny enough to take on (for a handsome fee) the role of amanuensis, and generous enough to do so in the full knowledge that the offer is inspired more by the old man’s residual erotic urges than by her secretarial skills.

The second story is Anya’s own. She recounts teasing arguments with the writer she calls ‘Señor C’ about the content of the manuscript pages she types each day, as well as her efforts to provoke him using her feminine charms. This narrative shifts to reflect her growing fondness for a lonely man, a deepening complicity that she seeks to conceal from her lover, Alan, a cunning and morally neutral city-type who encourages Anya to help him defraud the author of his money.

The effort of reading each page through, of holding in the mind each incremental shift in the secondary narratives while also making the larger leap between rhetorical and fictional modes, is jarring – a rolling structural discontinuity that frustrates the reader’s desire to sink in and suspend disbelief in the universe summoned by ur-Coetzee’s imagination. The alternative (and the one I eventually settled on), to read each narrative straight through while ignoring the others, feels like cheating, but at least offers a semblance of coherence.

But while these narratives lie separately, like sedimentary layers, there is subtle evidence of leaching. The subject matter and tone of the Strong Opinions pieces are affected, especially in their second section, in response to Anya’s requests for more personal material. Abstract arguments made by Señor C – about neo-liberal competition and social Darwinism, for example – take on fictional flesh and bone in the person of Alan: a breathing exemplar of much that the primary author finds disturbing in modern life.

There is a sense, too, in which subjects alluded to in the non-fiction strand reappear in the structure of the text itself. References to Tolstoy have already been touched upon, but there are others. Like Nabokov’s ‘The Vane Sisters’, a short story in which the narrative of a haunting is acrostically encoded with a message from beyond the grave, so does a celebration of the music of Bach from Strong Opinions find an echo in the book’s construction. The composer who struggled with how music might (in Adorno’s words) ‘justify its progression as meaningful and at the same time organise itself polyphonically, through a simultaneity of independent voices’, would recognise a kindred spirit in Coetzee. But to borrow Bach’s vocabulary, what is the basso continuo of Diary of a Bad Year? The rhetorical strand is the dominant one (at least initially), suggesting that we should read its subsidiary fictions as a kind of discourse analysis, a running critique of the opinions put forward. Just how seriously are we to take these ideas, however? They are elegantly formulated and often persuasive, with much of the essayistic verve of Robert Musil’s in The Man Without Qualities. And yet, as Coetzee once observed in a review of the novelist, none of those was meant to mean anything, since Musil believed that it was ‘the mark of a poet to be open to ideas but to hold none’.

Señor C’s willingness to weaken his rhetorical positions on occasion, pre-perforating them (punch holes in argument here) – when discussing Islamic fundamentalism or paedophilia, say – suggests an alternative reading. We should invert the structure and view the abstract and hyper-rational tenor of the opinions (their ‘reactionary idealism’) as the one strand divorced from true reality. The anarchy of contingency, and the crooked timber of the human, whether reflected by greed (Alan) or love (Anya), is best represented by fictional constructions. To admit this paradox, however, undermines any claim about the primacy of ethics over aesthetics. And yet these subsidiary narratives are attenuated by their position; they are literally second and third rank. Hobbes, whose account of the origin of the state opens the primary narrative, writes that ‘form is powre’, and this holds as true for the shaping of a novel as the political realm.

In 1978 the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori noticed that the more humanlike his robots became, the more people were attracted to them – but only up to a point. If an android became too realistic and lifelike, attraction turned to repellence. Mori realized the problem lay in how we identify with robots. When an android looks partially human, we are unthreatened. But when it achieves an almost total likeness, we are disturbed by the minuscule differences that remain. Mori called this gap ‘the Uncanny Valley’: the paradoxical point at which a simulation of life becomes so good it’s bad.
The problem with Diary of a Bad Year arises from something similar. Its efforts to be taken at face value as an object ‘in the world’ are concerted; and yet it is willing to emend itself according to the dictates of an invented one. The result is a descent into that tiny chasm, between the real and the fictive. It inspires the disquiet of the almost but not quite.