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Language as Barrier Samuel Becketts Influence on J. M. Coetzee

Doctoraal Thesis English Language and Culture, Universiteit Utrecht Sjoerd Bruil 0031984 Supervisor: Paul Franssen 2nd reader: Onno Kosters 25-08-2006 17168 words.

Table of Contents
Introduction Chapter 1: Coetzee on Beckett Chapter 2: Comparison Chapter 3: Language Conclusion Works Consulted 3 6 18 32 46 48

Introduction
Coetzee is notorious for his unwillingness to comment on the content of his novels. He rarely gives interviews and when he does, he prefers to do it by post. This method allows him to receive the questions at home and think about his answers before he writes them down and mails them back. As a result, it has been impossible to find a loose, spontaneous interview with him, since he tends to shut down in a live interview situation. In a documentary by the Dutch VPRO television network, Coetzee is interviewed and, while he has requested to have all questions sent to him beforehand the interviewer cannot resist the temptation to ask new and therefore unrehearsed questions. Coetzee is visually displeased at this and gives the following reason for his discontent: Its my habit of mind to... to reflect and revise, and try to attain a certain completion and perfection in my responses and that is incompatible with the interview medium. Thats why Ive been so completely uncomfortable.1 His only public appearances are the odd reading or lecture, where, much to his readers despair, he refuses to answer any questions from the audience. His refusal to enter into a dialogue with his readers and scholars has led to a large amount of secondary literature. While this thesis may just be another one on the growing pile, I do hope it offers some refreshing insights as to what Coetzee might have "picked up" from his readings of the other writer I will be discussing: Samuel Beckett. Whilst reading Becketts trilogy2 of novels Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable I noticed some similarities with Coetzees writing, in particular his novels In the Heart of the Country and Life & Times of Michael K. My thesis will be a focused study of the use of language and narrative technique in the work of J.M. Coetzee in relation to the work of Samuel Beckett. I will try and compare both authors styles of writing and see if and how J.M. Coetzee might have been influenced by

This can be seen clearly in a documentary about Coetzee called Van de Schoonheid en de Troost VPRO Televisie, episode 17: Onschuld?, 23 April 2000. (available at: http://www.vpro.nl/programma/schoonheidentroost/afleveringen/2365352/ (last accessed: June 2006)). 2 According to a number of sources (for instance: James Knowlson, Damned to Fame : The life of Samuel Beckett. [London: Bloomsbury Publishing], 1996. 163), Beckett has expressed his discontent about this term because he thought it might diminish the individual strength of the novels. I will, however, continue to use it because it is the shortest, easiest term to refer to these three works together.

Beckett. More explicitly, I will take a look at how both authors deal with the notion of language being a possible obstacle between the speaker and the truth or meaning of what they are trying to convey to themselves and to the reader. This will be examined by taking a look at Becketts trilogy (particularly the first novel, Molloy,) and Coetzees early work (focusing on In the Heart of the Country and Life and Times of Michael K and including his writings on Beckett). Both authors will be examined regarding their use/disuse of language in general and the way they try to deal with this struggle between what is said and what is meant in their work. The manner in which they use and, mostly in Becketts case, abuse language is, at least partly, responsible for the ambiguity of protagonists in their novels. In order to discuss these items and determine Becketts formative influence on J. M. Coetzee, I have divided this thesis into the following three chapters:

Chapter 1 - Coetzee on Beckett.

Coetzee has written a number of short essays about Beckett. I will discuss these and try and situate where Coetzee stands regarding his view of Beckett. Though his essays focus mostly on the technical details of how Beckett constructs his work, some ideas about the content of his work and the use of language can be derived from these writings as well. Furthermore, there are some instances in Coetzees own work where one might detect intertextual references to Beckett: certain themes and situations that are very similar to those in Becketts books. While some of these may be coincidental it is not unlikely that certain themes have been used consciously (or even subconsciously, for that matter). He has also made a few comments about Beckett in some of the rare occasions he has been interviewed these last 25 years.

Chapter 2 - Comparison. The second chapter will consist of a detailed comparison between two of Coetzees novels written in the beginning of his career, Life and Times of Michael K and In the Heart of the Country, and Molloy, the first book in the trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable) by Beckett. A number of things will be taken into consideration: the style of writing, the subject matter, the literary devices that are used, a close study of the protagonist in each work and the theme or themes present in each work. I will try and point at the similarities and differences between Coetzees and Becketts work regarding the selected three works. By

doing this, I hope to make the point that there is an underlying theme present in both authors work, namely: a problem with communication caused by a distrust of language and its inability to represent anyones true emotions and motives. There are some parallels that can be drawn between Michael K. and Molloy, just like there are a number of comparisons that can be made between Magda (protagonist of In the Heart of the Country) and Becketts Molloy. Moreover, there are some striking simiarities to be found regarding structures as well as themes of these novels. These similarities will be explored and analysed.

Chapter 3 - Language.

In this last chapter the focus will be on both authors use of language. It is my opinion that the majority of Becketts prosework is concerned with the way language is used to tell a story. I will point out several example of his work where this can be seen. The use of certain words and grammatical structures say something about the writer as well as the character that the writer invents to utter, think or describe his thoughts and actions. Beckett's fascination with language and perhaps the notion that language is not always to be trusted or taken for granted can be found in Coetzee's work as well. I will try and point out what Beckett's problems with language are and the manner in which he chooses to deal with them; whether he tries to solve, discard or ignore these problems by, for instance, using an unreliable narrator or juggling with clarity of time and place. After this is done, it is possible to see where and how these notions may be found in the novels by Coetzee and whether he uses the same issues in his own work.

Chapter 1

Coetzee on Beckett
1.1 Introduction Before I begin to compare the two authors that make up the subject of my thesis, it might be worthwile to take a look at what Coetzee himself has written and said about Beckett. After he had lost his interest in the world of mathematics and computer studies, Coetzee went on to study and tutor literature at the University of Texas3. By chance he found Becketts manuscripts of Watt in the university library. This discovery led him to write his doctoral dissertation on stylistic analysis, concentrating on Becketts fiction. During his career, Coetzee has written a number of short writings that deal with Beckett, three of which have been widely published and several others have found their way to the internet. He has also made some comments about Beckett in his rare interviews. Finally there is number of intertextual references to Beckett that can be found in his own fiction. I will discuss Coetzees writings on Beckett, in an attempt to find clues as to how he might have been influenced by him and what he thinks of Becketts work. Secondly, I will try and point out several cases where Coetzee may have made intertextual references to Becketts novels or way of writing. As I will try to demonstrate, there are some references to Becketts trilogy that can be found in a number of Coetzees novels. A deeper analysis involving thematic parallels between the works of both authors will be given in the next chapter, Comparison.

1.2 Writings About Beckett

While attending the University of Texas, Coetzee discovered Becketts manuscripts of Watt, the book that first attracted him to Beckett. He studied these manuscripts meticulously and wrote his masters thesis about Becketts prose work, The English Fiction of Samuel
3

All biographical information on Coetzee is taken from the following sources: J.M. Coetzee, Youth (New York: Viking Penguin, 2002). interview from David Attwell (Ed.), Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard Univ. Press, 1992).

7 Beckett: An Essay in Stylistic Analysis. Unfortunately, and perhaps by Coetzees own wish, his thesis was never published but remains in the library of the University of Texas. A shorter essay about the Watt manuscripts has been made available, along with some other essays. In the 1970s, before his first novel Duskland was published, Coetzee wrote three short essays on Beckett which have been reprinted in the collection Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (1992). At the same time Duskland was published, he wrote a fourth one that can be read as more of an experiment involving computers than a literary essay. All four of these pieces are concerned with the technical aspect of Beckett's writing. The fact that Coetzee has refrained from a thematical analysis is striking because there seem to be quite a few overlapping themes between the two authors. These will be discussed in greater detail in chapter two: Comparison. In The Comedy of Point of View in Beckett's Murphy, Coetzee analyses Beckett's playful use of point of view in his novel Murphy. He locates a number of instances where Beckett, according to Coetzee, does not play by the rules that are uniformly accepted by most authors in the process of writing a piece of fiction. Coetzees approach is that of a language scholar as well as a literary scholar: he discusses the ambiguity in Becketts use of grammar in relation to the readers difficult task of assigning a speaker to these ambiguous sentences. In this sense, grammar has a direct influence on the literary qualities of the text, as it lends a certain ambiguity to the words. He gives five examples of Becketts use of play on grammatical and literary conventions, which mostly involve a play on the relationship between author, character and omniscient narrator. Coetzee goes as far as saying that Becketts play with and disdain for literary conventions had become the main subject of his career by the time he was writing the trilogy. Beckett, it seems, was looking for new ways of telling his stories. The attitude is tentative and of questionable consistency, but it is neither peripheral nor transitory: it grows, and by the time of The Unnamable (1959), has become, in a fundamental sense, the subject of Becketts work. The Unnamable as a name is a token of an inability to attain the separation of creator and creature, namer and named, of which the act of creating, naming, begins...4 Coetzee links Becketts poetic of failure theme to his play on who is speaking to whom in his works of fiction. It could be said that Becketts disdain for clarity upon this matter is linked to his ambiguity towards the idea that a written text can or must convey a complete truth about the person that is speaking. The blurring of a clear separation between writer,
4

David Attwell (Ed.), Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, 37.

8 narrator and protagonist is not something that is important in Coetzees own work. However, Becketts sense of failure when it comes to the ability to express a clear and single truth is certainly present in Coetzees oeuvre, for instance in In the Heart of the Country, where the reader is constantly left in the dark as to what is fact and what is fiction. Coetzees second essay on Beckett, The Manuscript Revisions of Watt, concerns a look at the beginnings of Watt and points out a few discrepancies between the manuscripts and the final version that got registered in 1953. As Coetzee points out, Watt had been finished eight years prior to its publication. This delay between the completion of a work and the actual release is not uncommon in Beckett's career. The most extreme example would have to be his first novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women, which was completed early in Beckett's career (1932) but was not published until four years after his death, in 1993.5 According to Coetzee, Watt is "an uneven and somewhat anarchic work.6 He argues that the long interval between completion and publication may have been due to Becketts discontent: Molloy, for example, was written after Watt but published before it. He goes on to review a number of instances where Beckett forgot to leave out references to certain people or objects he had already decided to leave out of the final draft. This could either be due to indifference or perhaps a desire to puzzle the reader even more than he might already have been. The essay in itself is not very interesting in view of Coetzees view of Beckett as he mainly points out a number of facts and comments upon them. In his words, he simply offers a compositional biography7 of the novel. In 1973, a year after his essay on the Watt manuscripts, Coetzee published another short essay called Samuel Beckett and the Temptations of Style. This piece is the last and perhaps most interesting of the three essays on Beckett because it does not just contain technical information. Coetzee gives his idea of Becketts style of writing and argues that, since Watt, Beckett has striven to achieve a formalization or stylization of autodestruction: that is, as the text becomes nothing but a destructive commentary upon itself by the encapsulating consciousness...8 A striking similarity with his first article on Beckett is that he makes a comparison to The Unnamable again, giving some comments about Becketts use of language. He comments on Becketts use of metalanguage, which allows the narrator to intervene during his own narration. That is to say, the narrator does not simply tell a story or
5

Beckett tried to get it published but grew frustrated after the continuous letters of rejection he received. 6 David Attwell (ed.), Doubling the Point: Essays & Interviews, 39 7 David Attwell (ed.), Doubling the Point: Essays & Interviews, 39 8 David Attwell (ed.), Doubling the Point: Essays & Interviews, 45.

9 voice the characters thoughts, but he also has an editorial function. The narrator can comment on the story itself and point towards the fact that the reader is reading a story about fictive characters in a world that does not necessarily exist. In the case of The Unnamable, Coetzee points out, this manifests itself mainly by wry comments about the use of language in the narration and the lack of plot in the story. This modernist way of writing is also present in Coetzees own In the Heart of the Country (during Magdas bitter comments about her life and her way of expressing it to the unknown reader) and Age of Iron (for instance during Currens comments on her own untrustworthyness and inability to write down her thoughts properly). Like Becketts characters in the trilogy these protagonists are writing and commenting upon the writing itself at the same time. Coetzees last work that deals with Beckett exclusively, Samuel Becketts Lessness: An Exercise in Decomposition, is, as I have stated before, more an excercise than a formal essay. It is based upon a computer-assisted reading of Lessness. Beckett wrote this short work in French in 1969 (its original title is Sans) and translated it into English a year later. As Becketts text reads more like a mathematical equation than a real story, it does not seem to be the kind of text that would lend itself to literary analysis. In an attempt to make out the manner in which it was constructed, Coetzee used a computer program called Univac 1106 in order to map out the systematic use of repetition that seems to make up this enigmatic piece. This program detected repetitions in the text concerning phrases, sentences and entire paragraphs. As it turns out, the text can be seen as consisting of two parts where the second mirrors the first. All the phrases in the first part are being recycled in a different order in the second part. The use of language is limited and Coetzee demonstrated that there are only 106 different segments in the work, varying from 1 to 12 words. While there are some exceptions to the rule, most sentences are reproduced using the same segments in a different order. While this analysis does, again, not offer any personal insights about Becketts work, Coetzees last sentence is interesting enough: This endless enterprise of splitting and recombining is language, and it offers not the promise of the charm, the ever-awaited magical combination that will bring wealth or salvation, but the solace of the game, the killing of time.9 This remark echoes not only sentiments expressed by Becketts characters in Molloy, Malone Dies

David Attwell (ed.), Doubling the Point: Essays & Interviews, 21.(original reference: J. M. Coetzee, Samuel Becketts Lessness: An Exercise in Decomposition. (Computers and the Humanities 7.4, 1973), 198.)

10 and The Unnamable but also Coetzees own Magda in In The Heart Of The Country. The cynical notion of language being a means to kill time is present in both authors work. In 1993, Coetzee wrote a short piece called Homage in which he acknowledged a number of writers that have inspired him throughout his life. Beckett is one of them, amongst Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, Rainer Maria Rilke, William Faulkner and Robert Musil. Coetzee writes about Becketts use of rhythm and thought being the two main things he has found attractive in his work. Becketts use of rhythm, in particular, seems to have caught his interest, since he claims that the most important lessons he has learned from other writers concern matters of rhythm: Thus far I have concentrated on the elements of rhythm and syntax -- the rhythm and syntax not only of words but, so to speak, of thought too. This is proper: the deepest lessons one learns from other writers are, I suspect, matters of rhythm, broadly conceived.10 Apart from these lessons in rhythm, one of the things Coetzee found appealing in Becketts novels was an energy of quite a savage order. He was amazed by Becketts anarchic use of language and playful attitude towards literary conventions. While Coetzee may have paid attention to the writers he describes in Homage, he does not copy or imitate their style. It seems the most important thing he has put into his writing, in relation to Beckett, is a skeptical attitude towards language and literature. Coetzee has recently finished writing an introduction for a collection of Becketts miscellaneous writings in the latter part of his life, which is yet to be released. This collection contains four volumes and Coetzee has been commisioned to introduce the volume that contains the short prose work Beckett wrote after he finished his trilogy. In an interview with Joanna Scott11, he has said: "I have great admiration for Beckett, particularly the Beckett of the middle period. Beckett criticism nowadays is more interested in the last phase of his career. The last phase--I'm not sure what to think about it. But I'm not fond of it. However, in my earlier twenties I read the books of the middle phase, which runs from Watt, composed during the war, through The Unnamable [...]. I read these books over and over again. That kind of close, repeated reading tends to influence the cadences of one's prose and perhaps even one's habits of thinking (85). As he finds this period to be the least interesting, he offers the following opinion: The next three decades, will see Beckett, in his prose fictions, unable to move on stalled, in fact, on
10

From Homage. I found this text online about a year ago (November 2005) but it has since disappeared. Regrettably, I have not been able to find the printed text in any library. As a result, I do not have the original page numbers of the quotes from this work.
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11 the very question of what it means to move on, why one should move on.12 This is a familiar statement, since it echoes his own doubts as a young man described in the semiautobiographical work Youth. In Youth, his autobiography in the third person, Coetzee writes about himself as a struggling writer, caught in a disappointing office job in London. Near the end of the book, he discovers a book called Watt in a second-hand bookstore. This book is to be his introduction to Becketts prosework. He falls in love with the book instantly and exclaims: Why did people not tell him Beckett wrote novels? (155). Before, he had only been familiar with Beckett's theatre works like Waiting for Godot and, while he might have appreciated these works, they did not leave a lasting impression on him. This changed when he read the prose works. It seems the discovery of Becketts works of fiction opened a new world for him, exposing a new kind of writing. As he wrote in Homage: Beckett in English, that is to say, principally Beckett's translations of his own French works, made up something the like of which I had not seen before in the language.13 Coetzee did not start writing seriously for a number of years but he acknowledges Becketts influence in this short scene, where he confesses to a feeling of immediate kinship. Describing the sensation he felt when reading Watt for the first time, he writes: Watt is quite unlike any of Becketts plays. There is no clash, no conflict, just the flow of a voice telling a story, a flow continually checked by doubts and scruples, its pace fitted exactly to the pace of his own mind. (155) Watt, with its ambiguous narrator, protagonist and its vague setting in time and place must have left a lasting impression on Coetzee. This is evident in his focus on the novel during the early years of his scholarly career and the fact that he would use the same aforementioned literary characteristics during his literary career.

1.3 Intertextual references

Judging from the articles he wrote during the beginning of his career, it appears Coetzee has paid most attention to Becketts technical and stylistical approach to writing fiction. There are, however, a number of thematical influences to be found as well. Most of

Jonathan Kalb. Beckett the Difficult, Beckett the Brash, Beckett the Prolific. (The New York Times, April 13, 2006). http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/13/books/13kalb.html 13 Homage, Threepenny Review 1993.
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12 these will be investigated in the following chapter but I will try and point out several instances where one might speak of intertextual references to Becketts novels. One of the clear examples of Beckett's influence on Coetzee is the constant recurring of the same type of characters throughout their careers. There may have been other writers before and after Beckett to have characters recur in different novels, but none of them made it into such an important part of the work itself as Beckett did. In the trilogy, for instance, the same names occur and reoccur throughout the three books. In fact, one might go so far as to suggest that Molloy, Moran, Malone and Mahood are all the same character. Furthermore, he lets these characters make remarks about characters in previous novels, like Mercier and Murphy. But other than just referring to each other they could also be read as different versions of the same character. It seems Beckett had one main character in mind when writing his prose work, choosing to simply reinvent that same character for every other new novel. Whether or not this main character was always a reflection of one side of his own personality, remains debatable. Coetzee does something similar in his work, although he is less obvious about it. One example can be seen in his novel Disgrace, where the main characters, David Lurie and his daughter show striking similarities with the main characters in Waiting for the Barbarians, namely the magistrate and the barbarian girl he takes under his wing. In both novels, Coetzee offers two persons who have a dysfunctional father-daughter relationship. Admittedly, the magistrate and the barbarian girl are not related by blood but it could be argued that at times the magistrate considers the girl as a daughter-figure.14 In both pairs, the girl, or daughter, suffers a humiliation but chooses not to speak of the violation to her father-figure. As Gilbert Yeoh has pointed out, the intertextual link between these two books can also be seen in the text itself. Both David Lurie and the magistrate try to stop an atrocity they witness and both get hit by one of the men involved. Consider the scene where Lurie is hit by assailants in his daughters home: "A blow catches him on the crown of the head". (Disgrace, 93) and compare this to the magistrate being beaten by a military sergeant: "I hear the blow coming across the face and turn to meet it. It catches me full across the face." (Waiting for the Barbarians, 117). Both scenes seem to echo one another.

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Even though they share the same bed at some period, he takes her under his protection and likens himself to her father when he too is thrown in jail: I gave the girl my protection, offering in my equivocal way to be her father. (88)

13 In his last novel, Slow Man, Coetzee goes a step further and reintroduces a character from a previous novel, namely Elisabeth Costello. Costello first appeared in a book called The Lives of Animals where she served as an alias for Coetzees own stance on the abuse of animals by humans. Large parts of the novel are dedicated to two long lectures she is invited to give which are in fact the exact same lectures Coetzee had given at an American university before the book was completed. After this Costello was made the protagonist in Elisabeth Costello where she is again portrayed as a writer but who is now pestered by her surroundings to explain her message as a novelist. She, like Coetzee tries to disarm the idea of the writer as a moral conscience of the public and proclaims to have no real message to the world except that she wants to write. Finally, she appeared in a recent short story called As a Woman Grows Older.15 In his latest full-length novel, Slow Man, Costello appears as some sort of irritating angel who is just as unhappy to be assigned to the protagonist, Paul, as he is to be stuck with her. Nevertheless she tries to help Paul in making the right decisions and coming to terms with his age and diminishing physique. One could argue that Elisabeth Costello is a version of Coetzee himself. In Slow Man, it is very apparent that Costello acts as a harsh judge on Pauls character and thinks as a writer when it comes to Pauls decisions. She remains coolly objective in his dillemas and does not always advise in his best interest. In Elisabeth Costello and As a Woman Grows Older, she struggles with the same problems as Paul, namely getting older and finding peace with the fact that her physique is decreasing and her mind is becoming less flexible. Furthermore, she, not unlike Coetzee, is disappointed in the relation between language and truth. There are a number of striking similarities between Coetzee and his creation Costello. They are both celebrated lecturers in their 60s who dislike travelling and the pedestal they are offered because of their fame. Costello is Australian and Coetzee moved to Australia four years ago. In a similar vein, Molloy and Malone can be seen as alter egos of Beckett. They both communicate to an unknown reader by writing down their thoughts and, occasionally, made up stories to pass the time. At the same time, like Beckett, they despair of the shortcomings of writing as a medium to express oneself. Also, Molloys writing is about his quest for his mother and he seems to have a troubled relationship with her. Beckett started the novel in his mothers room during a visit to her and witnessing her deterioration because of Parkinsons

J.M. Coetzee, As a Woman Grows Older, The New York Review of Books (volume 51, number 1 (January 15, 2004)). Taken from: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16872.
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14 Disease.16 Consequently, the first line in Molloy reads: I am in my mothers room (3). Becketts protagonists, like Molloy and Moran, slowly seem to lose the plot as their story progresses. They begin to diminish both physically and mentally during the journey they undertake. This goes for Coetzees protagonists as well. Coetzee places his protagonists in conflict with themselves or their environment and subjects them to a variety of degradations such as illness (Mrs Curren), social disgrace (David Lurie), insanity (Magda) and even starvation (Michael K) and imprisonment (the Magistrate). Each main character has to undergo a hardship before the novel ends but this does not mean that there is a solution to his or her problem at the end. Coetzee appears to strip away the dignity and strength of his characters to make the reader an accomplice to the protagonists breakdown. As with Beckett, the protagonists keep going towards an uncertain goal because they do not know what else to do. This is voiced in a remark made by Elisabeth Curren in Coetzees Age of Iron that strongly echoes Beckett: I have no voice, and that is that. The rest should be silence. But with this whatever it is this voice that is no voice, I go on. On and on.17 This can be seen as a clear nod to Becketts famous last line in The Unnamable: I cant go on, Ill go on18 and his fondness of the word on in general.19 There are more instances where Coetzees use of words and themes strongly echoes that of Beckett, whether intentionally or not. For the sake of argument, I will give another example: It seemed to him, coming from his island, where until Friday arrived he lived a silent life, that there was too much speech in the world. In bed beside his wife he felt as if a shower of pebbles were being poured upon his head, in an unending rustle and clatter, when all he desired was to sleep.20 This sentiment described in this quote from Coetzees acceptance speech at the Nobel Prize ceremony, echoes the narrators attempt to describe the feelings of Murphys wife towards his stream of words: She felt, as she felt so often with Murphy, spattered with words that went dead as soon as they sounded; each word obliterated, before it had time to make sense, by the word
Lawrence Shainberg, Exorcising Beckett The Paris Review No. 104. (Fall 1987). J. M. Coetzee, Age of Iron (London: Secker & Warburg, 1990), 149. 18 Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, 476. 19 Note, for instance the first segment in Worstward Ho: On. Say on. Be said on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on. (Samuel Beckett, Nohow On (Grove Press 1996) 89.). 20 J.M. Coetzee, He and his Man (Nobel Lecture, 2003).
16 17

15 that came next; so that in the end she did not know what had been said. It was like difficult music heard for the first time. (Murphy, 40) There are other, more general features Coetzee may have picked up in Becketts work. Beckett has always had a tramp theme going through his work. Tramps have been the main characters in a large part of his work, from the novels Mercier & Camier and Molloy to his most famous play Waiting for Godot. The same can be said for Coetzee. Although Coetzee is less explicit about his fascination with the tramp as protagonist, it is clearly present in the majority of his work, his early novels in particular. In Life & Times of Michael K, for instance, the protagonist is a man who, like so many of Becketts protagonists, sets off on a journey without knowing his exact destination. He is forced to live off whatever he finds and has no real home. In Age of Iron one of the most important characters, mr. Vercueil, is a tramp. Even the main character of that novel, Elisabeth Curren, is reduced to a tramp-like state when she leaves her house and finds herself somewhere on the street, being poked and ridiculed by little children and stinking of urine. Susan Barton spends a long time in need of food and money in an abandoned house. Furthermore, there is a fascination with physical flaws or the decay of physical elements to be found in both authors novels. For example, in Becketts trilogy, both Molloy and Moran gradually lose the use of one of their legs, Malone is already bedridden and the narrator in The Unnamable seems to have no body at all. In Coetzees work, there is a long list of main characters that have a physical flaw, from Michael Ks harelip, to Paul Rayments loss of his leg in Slow Man. Another case of inter-textual reference is the use of a mirror-story. In Molloy, Beckett splits the novel up in two parts, both containing a story of a man that is travelling to an unknown destination. This same technique is used by Coetzee in The Life & Times of Michael K, where the bulk of the story is told by an omniscient narrator and one chapter by a medical officer assigned to take care of Michael. The relationship between Michael K and the medical officer is comparable to that of Molloy and Moran. Both the medical officer and Moran have a subject they cannot quite get a hold on both mentally and physically. Both want to get hold of their subject but do not succeed. A big difference: the medical officer claims he wants to get closer to Michael K because of a positive fascination for his way of life; he wants to understand his patient and perhaps learn from him. Morans interest, however, is that of a hunter trying to catch his victim. In a way, it can be said that Michael K is a victim of the medical officer as well, since he is confined to the medical ward and not allowed to leave and live his life the way he wants to. Moran has no idea why his victim is Molloy, just as the

16 officer has no idea why or how Michael K ended up in his infirmary, nor why he seems to be so fascinated by him. Coetzee uses the technique of the allegory in almost all of his novels. This same technique is used by Beckett in his trilogy. Molloys voyage to an unknown destination, to his mother whose address he has never known, shows striking parrallels with Becketts voyage into the unknown, switching from English to French and trying to describe a new feeling, namely that truthful narration cannot possibly be attained through language alone. Beckett started working on Molloys quest for his mother after he had visited his own mother, who was ill. Beckett was shaken and determined to try and dig deeper inside himself in his work instead of focusing on style alone.21 Molloy was the first novel Beckett wrote in a renewed style, not in the least because he switched from his mother tongue to writing in French. All stories in the trilogy were narrated by an ambiguous and unreliable narrator. While earlier novels such as Murphy and Watt were told by an omniscient narrator, the characters and at times a third, unidentified party (who were always equally unreliable), Beckett started to write exclusively from a first-person perspective for his trilogy. This use of an unreliable narrator who does not know where he or she is going and is unable to explain the motive for their journey is a recurring theme in Coetzee's work as well. In In the Heart of The Country, for example, Magda is the sole narrator and makes it evident that the story presented to the reader is her version and not necessarily the truth. There are many inconsistencies, which she does not bother to cover up, and at times she offers different versions of the same scene. Another, more peculiar thing Coetzee has in common with Beckett is a preference for names beginning with an M, such as Becketts Mercier, Murphy, Molloy, Moran, Malone and Coetzees Magda, Michael K, Mandel and, more recently, Marijana (Pauls nurse in Slow Man). Even the characters with no disclosed first name are called the Magistrate, the Medical officer, and the Master of Petersburg. The reason for this phenomenon might be purely coincidental but it is worth noting since it is so consistent throughout his work. Like Beckett, Coetzee is fascinated by the weight of words and all the cultural and historical nuances they carry within them. He has taken some cues from Becketts way of thinking and found a way to incorporate some of this influence in his novels by using some of the same features such as unreliable narrators, ambiguous characters, and refusing to offer the reader a clear moral judgment towards the characters and their actions. Becketts influence on
21

This idea will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 2.

17 Coetzees writing will be discussed in the following chapter. As we will see, not only do their novels share certain things in content and way of storytelling, there are some thematical similarities that can be detected between the two authors as well.

18

Chapter 2

Comparison.
2.1 Introduction
This second chapter will contain a detailed comparison between selected works by Beckett and Coetzee. By taking a look at Molloy by Beckett and In the Heart of the Country and Life & Times of Michael K by Coetzee, some striking similarities in the themes they use will be emphasised. Furthermore, their motives to write these works can be explained as political. In these particular books, both authors seem to be struggling with the concept of language. They create protagonists that are aware of their position and show their weaknesses when it comes to delivering their narrative. The main dilemma that is faced by the authors and their narrators, centres on a sense of failure regarding language as an adequate tool to express oneself fully and truly. While Beckett tries to investigate the shortcomings of language as a means of communication between two human beings, Coetzees protagonists find they also have difficulties communicating with others because of their position in society or, in Magdas case, the pollution of language by a power structure that does not represent her intentions. Before discussing these matters more thoroughly, a brief introduction to the selected novels will be given. What follows is a thematic comparison between the three works, focusing on the following three subjects: the ambiguity of truth, the difficult relationship between the protagonists and their families and, lastly but most central to this thesis, the ambiguity towards language. The end of this chapter will consist of a discussion concerning both authors motives for writing their works in an attempt to show they both may be regarded as political, though in a different manner.

19

2.2 Introduction to the novels.

Molloy is the first part of Becketts trilogy, published in 1961. The book itself consists of two parts, of which the first is narrated by Molloy and deals with his travels through unnamed territory in search of his mother, whose whereabouts he does not know. He, however, starts his discourse by telling the reader he is in his mothers room and a man comes every now and then to take his writings. It seems he has ended up in his mothers room after her death and tries to recount his way there. He then goes on to write about his journey, during which he has a small number of encounters with strangers. One of these encounters involves a lady who takes him to her home after he has unwittingly killed her dog. He, as it were, seems to have been taken to live with her to serve as a substitute for her pet. After an undisclosed amount of time, he realises he is not physically chained to the property in any way and, without any feeling of joy, accomplishment or retrieval of his lost freedom, he takes off to continue his journey, still not knowing where to go or why he is going. During the course of his journey, his body rapidly deteriorates and he slowly loses the use of both his legs. Unwilling to stop, he continues his journey crawling. He ends up crippled and blind, lying in a ditch. He does not reach his mother and his story ends without any solution or revelation. The second part of Molloy is narrated by Moran and his story reads as a mirror to that of Molloy. Moran is asked to find Molloy but is not told where to go or what to do should he find him. Though he has a home (Molloy never speaks of any home) and a son, Moran seems just as socially handicapped as the object of his impending quest. He takes joy in using his power as man of the house and has a desire to block every emotional impulse he sees in himself as well as his son, whom he regards as mentally and emotionally inferior. He takes his son along for the trip without telling him where or why they are going (as he does not know this himself). On his journey, they have several encounters of which none seem to have any importance to the story. After his son has abandoned him, Moran finds himself alone and meets his informer who tells him his mission has ended. On his way home, his body deteriorates in much the same manner as Molloys. In the end, Moran has not reached his destination either but manages to get back to his home, which he finds abandoned and deteriorated in much the same manner as his physical and, possibly, mental condition.

20 Coetzees In the Heart of the Country (1977) is a novel made up of 265 short to very short parts told by Magda. It is written like a kind of diary and contains her story of living on a remote farm in the Karoo in South Africa. The other people on the farm are her father and four black servants. Her father shows her no love and ignores her while the servants keep their distance as well because of their social position. When the two older servants leave only Hendrik and his young wife Klein-Anna are left. Her father shows a romantic interest in Klein-Anna, which in turn fuels Magdas jealousy. She shoots him and after this her mental health, which may have to be viewed as questionable from the beginning, deteriorates. She tries to break the barrier between her and the two remaining servants but fails. In the end, she is left alone on the farm, totally isolated and slowy sinking into a state of insanity. She begins to hear voices and tries to communicate with planes that she sees, imagining them to be skygods that might take her with them. Michael, the protagonist in Coetzees Life & Times of Michael K (1983) undertakes a journey, just like Molloy and Moran. In his case, he is spurred on by his sick mother to take her to the house she grew up in in Prince Albert, somewhere in the countryside. Their country, South Africa, is in the middle of a civil war and they lack the necessary documents to leave Cape Town, their home. Early on during their trip, she dies and leaves him without a home or real purpose. He travels on, not knowing where to and, probably because of the suggestion he is coloured (or so it is suggested) and travelling without permission, he is put in several working camps. Michael seems to go wherever he is told to go without any struggle and at the same time wants to find a place where he can live alone with nature. He desires a life outside of society and does not feel he has a part in the war or any other activity brought on by his countrys history. The novel consists of three parts, of which the second is narrated in the first person by a doctor of one of the camps Michael has been taken to. He is fascinated by this particular patient, who spends most of his stay in his sickbed due to severe undernourishment, and he tries to understand why his patient refuses to eat and why he refrains from conversing with anybody. He constructs his own version of Michael and his narrative ends with a long letter imploring him to show him his way of life, as though Michael were some kind of messianic figure. The third part describes Michaels return to Cape Town, finding it in ruins, rethinking his journey and planning a new one.

21

2.3 Thematic parallels.

2.3.1 Ambiguity concerning truth Molloys two main characters, Molloy and Moran, seem to talk directly to the reader. Their stories are written like a memoir but do not intend to always tell the truth. They both freely admit their ambiguity as a storyteller and, at times, they confess a hidden agenda they might have for telling certain things and leaving other things out. Taking all their flaws into consideration, they appear to be under a compulsion to tell their tale. It is not their choice but something stronger than themselves that urges them to keep talking, as it were, to the reader, no matter how often they get stuck or how willfully inconsistent their narratives are. The reader is frequently urged to question whether he is reading a story (made up by the narrator) or the story (as experienced by the narrator) since both Molloy and Moran seem to have no qualms about making absurd statements, as can be read in the following scene where Molloy finds himself on the run from a disturbing situation: So I got up, adjusted my crutches and went down to the road, where I found my bicycle (I didn't know I had one) in the same place I must have left it. (13) Molloy refers to himself as the writer of his story therefore being able to decide what the reader gets to know and what things to leave in the dark. He even goes as far as to change a characters name. He changes the name of the woman that takes him to live with her from Sophie to Lousse, for unknown reasons. While he confesses to having forgotten a number of things, the reader is made aware that some things are left out on purpose, often leaving the reader frustrated. I should add, before I get down to the facts, that with this deaf, blind, impotent, mad old woman, who called me Dan and whom I called Mag, and with her alone, I -- no, I can't say it. That is to say, I could say it, but I won't say it, yes, I could say it easily, because it wouldn't be true. (17) The last sentence of the remark above conveys a view of reality that is cynical and honest at the same time: it is easier to lie than to tell the truth, especially for a storyteller. The second narrator of the novel, Moran, demands the same freedom in his narrative, although he seems slightly more occupied with the notion that his report will be read by someone. Some important situations, however, are mentioned but not explained. While he is able to spend an entire paragraph defending in detail that he insists his son should knock

22 before entering his study, lest he might find his father masturbating, the one occurrence where he kills a man is dealt with in a brisk manner. In this respect, the narrator, much like Coetzees Magda, has very different views of what is of importance to their story as opposed to that of the average reader. I am sorry I cannot indicate more clearly how this result was obtained, it would have been worth reading. But it is not at this late stage of my relation that I intend to give way to literature. (117) Besides not telling the reader how it happened he is also not ready to admit that he did it. According to Moran, the victim was suddenly dead, his head smashed in. The reader knows there could have been no other killer, since the murder happened in a forest where Moran and the murdered man where the only ones present at the scene. This same type of narrative is also used by Magda in In the Heart of the Country. Her position as an unreliable narrator is demonstrated during the first five sentences of the novel. She describes her father coming home with a new bride, but the truth of her description is highly doubtful since she immediately claims not to have seen it. Today my father brought home his new bride. They came clip-clop across the flats in a dog-cart drawn by a horse with an ostrich-plume waving on its forehead, dusty after the long haul. Or perhaps they were drawn by two plumed donkeys, that is also possible. My father wore his black swallowtail coat and stovepipe hat, his bride a wide-brimmed sunhat and a white dress tight waist and throat. More detail I cannot give unless I begin to embroider, for I was not watching. (1) This opening statement may be read as a declaration of ambiguity. Magdas narrative is not concerned with consistency or reality. She frequently changes her version of what happens on the farm and important scenes are rendered highly questionable right after she describes them. One of these scenes concerns the evening she shoots her father. We are given a vivid account of how she shoots him, takes care of him while he is dying of his shotwound and subsequently washes and buries him when he is finally dead. In the last few parts of the book, however, she claims to spend her evenings sitting beside him and feeding him his broth and weak tea (149). The reader is left to decide whether she is talking about her fathers corpse, a figment of her imagination or whether he is still alive after all. After her father is buried, she asks the two servants (who previously had their own little shack on the land) to live with her in the farm. She is no longer able to pay them. This angers Hendrik and he rapes her. In this second important scene, Magda leaves the reader guessing as to what really happened by offering three slightly different versions of the rape incident. The reader is left to figure out which one is real or whether they have all sprung from her fantasy.

23 A similar unreliability can be seen in the medical officers narration in Life & Times of Michael K. Here, the narrator poses as a man truly occupied with the wellbeing of his patients. It becomes clear, however, that he becomes so obsessed with Michael (whom he calls Michaels, even after his patients correction) that neglects the other patients in his ward. Though he states his interest lies in Michaels recovery, he makes him into a kind of guru and tries to get life lessons from him. Michaels reluctance to speak or to recover physically are seen as signs of martyrdom. He twists Michaels words to fit into his own viewpoint and, though claiming to help him, willfully chooses to assist his patient in his own demands, instead of Michaels own wishes.

2.3.2 Ambiguity towards language.

Molloy and Moran both have dificulties interacting with people. Molloy, in particular, is baffled by the rules of conversation and is distracted by the multitude of sounds that are conjured up by words directed at him. Throughout his narrative he expresses doubt and a distrust towards language as a means to communicate. He sees language as a formula and has difficulty keeping all the different pieces in check at the same time. This is made apparent when he recalls a conversation with a stranger: Yes, the words I heard, and heard distinctly, having quite a sensitive ear, were heard a first time, then a second, and often even a third, as pure sounds, free of all meaning, and this is probably one of the reasons why conversation was unspeakably painful to me. And the words I uttered myself, and which must nearly have gone with an effort of the intelligence, were often to me as the buzzing of an insect. And this is perhaps one of the reasons I was so untalkative, I mean this trouble I had in understanding not only what others said to me, but also what I said to them. It is true that in the end, by dint of patience, we made ourselves understood, but understood with regard to what, I ask of you, and to what purpose? (53) The description Molloy gives of his problems understanding people and making himself understood, seems quite abstract. Every human being is brought up to immediately link the sounds they hear to a meaning belonging to that particular string of sounds. Molloys problem could only be recognisable if he were to live in a foreign country and forced to understand a language he has not been brought up with. However, this does not seem to be the case because he has the same problems with what he says himself. His problem is a fundamental one: words are sounds with fixed meanings attached to them and the only tools by which he may communicate with others. He has no choice but to use this system. While disappointed in

24 the system of words and sentences, he remains fascinated by sounds. This is demonstrated best when he explains his name for his mother: I called her Mag, when I had to call her something. And I called her Mag because for me, without my knowing why, the letter g abolished the syllable Ma, and as it were spat on it, better than any other letter would have done. And at the same time I satisfied a deep and doubtless unacknowledged need, the need to have a Ma, that is a mother, and to proclaim it audibly. For before you say mag, you say ma, inevitably. (15) In Coetzees two novels, both Magda and Michael struggle with the role language plays in their lives. They seem to want to step out of the language game, since it offers them no real help. There are different reasons for both characters distrust of language. Magda is good with language, but she struggles with the different power roles that are involved in using her mother tongue. To her, English is infected by the division between master and slave. After all, in her housefold, English is the Masters language, filled with commands: a language fit to give orders. She tries to erase this master-slave relationship that has been imposed on her by history and the language she speaks. To her dismay, she finds out that her goal is not that easily reached. She cannot communicate with the servants the way she wishes since they are historically below her and therefore use a different vernacular.22 When, for instance, she asks Hendrik to help her nurse her wounded father she is forced to use her fathers means of communication. Hendrik declines when she first asks him politely but he obliges when she takes on her fathers role and means of communication by pointing a gun at him commanding him to help her. She rarely communicates in real life. She and her father exchange only the most minimal of sentences and when he is gone, she tries to communicate with Hendrik and Klein-Anna but fails because their discourse is polluted by their collective past. Her narrative, however, is very eloquent and elaborate. Because Magda cannot communicate sufficiently to the others on the farm, language has become a reminder of her state of isolation. It becomes a nagging presence in her life. Towards the end of the book, she sums up her frustration when confronted by increasingly incoherent messages from the sky-gods: Are not all these dicta from above blind to the source of our disease, which is that we have no one to speak with, that our desires stream out of us chaotically, without aim, without response, like our words... (147)

22

The idea of history being a barrier between Magda and the servants was first suggested in: James Wohlpart, A (Sub)version of the Language of Power: Narrative and Narrative Technique in J. M. Coetzees In the Heart of the Country. (Critique Magazine) (summer 1994), 219-228.

25 Magdas use of language regresses. She goes from using her native tongue, English, to using a foreign tongue, Spanish. She uses her insufficient knowledge of Spanish to try and decipher the voices that first occur in her head and that she then identifies with the jetplanes hovering in the sky. She forms desperate outcries on the ground in order to attract the attention of these sky-gods. From Spanish she descends into an ideogram, namely the image of herself with her legs parted, drawn to attract the jetplanes that she sees flying above her. She reduced herself to wordless image: a lonely woman that is ready to receive. She repeatedly points out the uselessness of language. It could be said that, by defining herself constantly, she becomes more and more invisible. Much like Becketts characters in his trilogy, Magda fabricates herself again and again through language: ... from me only do these flowers draw the energy that enables them to commune with themselves, with each other, in their ecstacy of pure being, just as the stones and the bushes of the veld hum with life, with such happiness that hapiness is not the word, because I am here to set them vibrating with their own variety of material awareness that I am forever not they, and they not I, that I can never be the rapture of pure self that they are but am alas forever set off from them by the babble of words within me that fabricate and refabricate me as something else, something else. The farm, the desert, the whole world as far as the horizon is in an ecstacy of communion with itself, exalted by the vain urge of my consciousness to inhabit it. (53, my underlining) The quote above shares some similarities with Michaels notion of living a pure life amidst nature, unspoilt by language and the need to define oneself or put a name to the things that surround him. Like Magda, Michael has difficulty using language, though his reasons are different. He tries his very best to ban language from his life since he finds no use in communicating with other human beings. His harelip, and the speech impediment it might have caused, not only causes his awkwardness with strangers but it also symbolises his difficulty communicating. He desires a life alone, with the plants and fruits of the earth. However, a total banishment of language cannot be obtained since he, as all humans, is infected with its grammar and vocabulary. When he thinks to himself he cannot help but think these thoughts in his language. Michaels actual use of language, however, is kept to an absolute minimum. It seems he is tired of trying to explain himself: Always, when he tried to explain himself to himself, there remained a gap, a hole, a darkness before which his understanding baulked, in which it was useless to pour words. The words were eaten up, the gap remained. (110) As a result of this disillusionment with language, he will say something only when he is asked to and at times not even that. This becomes most evident in his relationship with the medical

26 officer in the second part of the novel. At one point he is interrogated by the officer and his Major about his activities in the Karoo. He is suspected of having provided rebels with food. Michael refuses to communicate. He only states he had a garden and what grew on it was for all the children of the earth (139). When he is told that time is running out because of the war, he simply replies I am not in the war (138), echoing his desire to be freed, not only from human language, but from society as well.

2.3.3 The difficult relationship between the protagonists and their families.

Both Molloy and Michael K have a strong, if somewhat strange relationship with their mother. In the case of Molloy, he finds himself on a quest to reach his mother's house. He has been there before but seems to have forgotten how to reach his destination. He does not know why he has to see her, let alone whether he has any real desire to see her. Yet, there is a great determination to his quest and, while he may sometimes get distracted during the rare occasions he meets another human being, he feels his mind can only find peace when he has found her. The fact that his narrative starts with a declaration that he is writing his story whilst sitting in his mothers room long after she has died suggests that, although too late, he has reached his destination but even this remains doubtful since the last page of his narrative finds him crippled and lying in a ditch facing his death. It is in this final condition that Molloy finds a reason for his need to visit his mother. He formulates this as follows: And of myself, all my life, I think I had been going to my mother, with the purpose of establishing our relations on a less precarious footing. And when I was with her, and I often succeeded, I left her without having done anything. And when I was no longer with her I was again on my way to her, hoping to do better the next time. And when I appeared to give up and to busy myself with something else, or with nothing at all any more, in reality I was hatching my plans and seeking the way to her house. (96) The determination of this remark can also be found, though in a slightly different context, when looking at Michael K. While it may be said that Molloy is wearing the burden of his mother in a metaphoric sense, the protagonist of Coetzees novel is forced to literally carry his mother on a quest to find the house where she was born and raised. They flee from Cape Town and, since his mother is ill and can barely walk, Michael constructs a cart in which he plans to wheel his mother out of town. This plan is not achieved because they lack a required document to leave the city (South-Africa seems to be in some sort of civil war) and his mother succumbs to her

27 illness and dies during the journey. Michael continues his journey alone, save for his mothers ashes, which he cannot dispose of until he finds the right place. Like Molloy, he embarks on a journey without a real purpose; Molloy has to keep moving for unkown reasons towards a destination he does not know how to find and Michael finds himself without a home and no person to guide his way or give him a reason to go and find the destination he and his mother set out to reach in the first place. Regardless of this, Michael keeps moving, driven by a vague determination to find a spot for himself where he can live outside of society and not be a part of history. Like Molloy, he fails to reach his goal but does not give up. Michaels bond with his mother is a strange one, since there seems to be no love or real communication between the two. His mother formed his antisocial character by separating him from other people since he was a baby. Her reason was a selfish one: she was ashamed of the way his harelip deformed his face. She shivered to think of what had been growing inside her all these months... Because their smiles and whispers hurt her, she kept it away from other children. Year after year Michael K sat on a blanket watching his mother polish other peoples floors, learning to be quiet. (2-3) When he grows up, she sends him to a boarding school where he is ignored by his fellow students and taught to stammer out irrelevant lessons. Because of this upbringing, Michael is a socially disturbed young man moving through life as though he was invisible. Though Molloy does not feel the need to be invisible and live on his own, he seems socially disturbed as well. Both Michael and Molloy struggle with the rules of interaction with strangers, by whom we must understand everyone but their mother. Incidentally, Molloys mother is deaf, dumb and blind. He describes his interaction with his mother as follows: I got into communication with her by knocking on her skull. One knock meant yes, two no, three I don't know, four money, five goodbye (15-16). He is not required to use language with his mother, he simply needs to issue five basic messages and that is all. Magdas relationship with her father is a troubled one as well. They share no connection whatsoever. While she blames him for her mothers death, she feels a constant need to catch his approval and a sign of love. Her father ignores her and only speaks to her in the form of commands. The thought of any other woman getting attention from him drives Magda to despair. She fantasizes about killing him and after she finds her father showing what she considers to be, to put it delicately, an inappropriate form of affection for the new servant girl, she finally shoots him. It seems all her life has been a quest to gain her fathers approval, while hating him at the same time. She describes him as a tyrant:

28 Now those booted feet come up the passage. I close the door and push against it. I have know that tread all my life, yet I stand with my mouth agape and pulse drumming. He is turning me into a child again!. The boots, the thud of the boots, the black brow, the black eyeholes, the black hole of the mouth from which roars the great NO, iron, cold, thunderous that blasts me and buries me and locks me up. (55) After she has shot him, she closes a part of her life but does not know how to move on. She finds there is no improvement in her relationship with the servants and she finds no solace in her new found freedom. Instead, she ends up lonely, disillusioned and as frustrated as ever.

2.4 The authors motives.

Although there is a difference between the reasons Beckett and Coetzee might have had when they wrote the works discussed in this chapter, it could be said that there is a political motive to be traced in the works I have selected by both authors. Becketts prose suggests an attempt to try and go to the end of narrative structure by expressing his doubt concerning all the literary traditions and tricks he gathered in his life in an attempt to lay bare the limitations of the use of language to put his message across. He has been quoted as saying that he began writing the trilogy after having had a revelation. Just before he wrote Molloy, he visited his mother, who had contracted Parkinson's Disease. This led to the following realisation: Her face was a mask, completely unrecognizable. Looking at her, I had a sudden realization that all the work I'd done before was on the wrong track. I guess you'd have to call it a revelation. Strong word, I know, but so it was. I simply understood that there was no sense adding to the store of information, gathering knowledge. The whole attempt at knowledge, it seemed to me, had come to nothing. It was all haywire. What I had to do was investigate not-knowing, not-perceiving, the whole world of incompleteness.23 Beckett tried to describe a void, a state of being without consciousness, without language. One might say he decided to take off the literary guise he thought he was supposed to wear as an author to see how far he could push the boundaries. His work since the trilogy, perhaps even since Murphy and Watt, can be read as a steady trek to the end of literature, the end of narrative and structure. He, of course, knows he will not succeed but, as so many of his protagonists, including Molloy, he has to keep trying. Perhaps Beckett expressed his determination best in the last line of Worstward Ho: Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try

23

Taken from Exorcising Beckett, a memoir by Lawrence Shainberg, as published in The Paris Review no. 104, Fall 1987.

29 again. Fail again. Fail better. (111). It could be argued that Coetzee, on the other hand, had a different, more overtly political motive. His work may be read, without exception, as largely allegorical. The figure of Michael K. can be seen as a symbol of the average coloured man before the colonizers (while he is never addressed as a black man there are some clues to assume he might at least be of colour - his registration card says CM (Coloured Male). Michael wants to live outside of history. He wants no part of society but it seems he has no choice. Growing up in the city, where the native population is kept in ghettos, Michael finds himself in an environment dictated by colonizers. This leads to the notion that he is also an outsider because of his skin colour, since his roots must lie in the vast stretches of land outside the big city. His move to the country, and the death of his mother along the way, brings forth a determination to exclude himself from society and history. He denounces the way things have turned out through the years and wishes to make a solitary new start. This is not accepted by society. He is put in camps to keep him from wandering about and is kept in a hospital bed because the state of his body does not fit the state that is required of him by others. Furthermore, he refuses to adjust to the role the white population has in mind for him: for instance to be a servant boy to the Visagie deserter. He also refuses to adjust to any role the black (his own) population might have in mind for him: to take part in the war. He does not make use of any of the tools or ideas the white people have brought to his country. When he is put to work by a white man, he learns he has a knack for fencing. He, however, denounces the use of fencing. This denouncement can be linked to Michaels wish not to leave any trace on the earth. There is no need to draw up fences and divide up the land. This would leave marks. This notion is demonstrated when he builds a hideaway to sleep in. He decides it should be made so that the rain will wash it away after he has gone. K does not wish to lay any claim on the land, neither for himself nor for future generations. He identifies with neither the white oppressor nor the black oppressed. He wishes to stay outside of categories. By doing this, a complete denial of his role in society, he in fact expresses a wish to live outside of history. In Michaels case, his most striking physical feature beside his skincolour, is his harelip. His deformation can be seen as symbolic for his state as an outsider or, in a more political sense, as the difficulty for the black man in South-African society to speak out. While living under the Apartheid regime, Michael K is not granted the use of a language to make himself heard since it has been polluted by the colonizer. Magda faces a similar problem. She is a woman in a mans world. In a colonised South Africa, white men are the rulers. She is the only white woman on the farm and is

30 condemned to a certain role within that environment. Like Michael, she identifies with neither the white nor the black population in her environment. Both Magda and Michael are looking for a way to live outside of society and outside of history. In a way, they deny their roles in society. There is, however, a striking difference between the two characters: Michael is an outsider by choice but Magda is not. Where Michael seems to make a conscious decision to cut himself off from society, Magda has no choice. She is simply born in isolation. She compares her fate to that of colonial women in general, neither belonging to the colony in which they are thrust (South-Africa) and its history, nor to the country of their origin and its history. She is lost between the two identities, not part of either of them. This makes her a woman living outside of history. In her thesis on Coetzee,24 Isabelle Brugmans argues that, by killing her father (once in her imagination and once, it seems, in real life) she tries to erase her history and origin. Her father can be seen as symbolic for her roots, which she must first kill in order to be able to start anew. Her attempt is unsuccesful because she is forced to take her fathers place on the farm. The dominating patriarchal figure leaves an absence that destroys the farm and, it seems her state of mind. While it is clear in the beginning of the book that Magda is not completely sound of mind, her state rapidly deteriorates after she has shot her father. All of a sudden, the balance in her environment is gone and she finds she has to step in her fathers shoes in order to stop chaos. She initially refuses to do so and tries once again to denounce the burden of her history by asking the two servants to come and live in her house. Although this does not work out in the end, she feels she has made a gesture towards equality. By attempting an affair with Hendrik she also denounces the taboo about interracial relationships. Michael K can be seen as Coetzees version of Becketts Molloy. They both trudge around the land alone, initially driven by a strong attachment to their mother and without a clear destination. There is, however, one important difference: While Molloy does nothing but talk, Michael K is struck dumb. In an allegorical sense, Coetzee has made his protagonist mute, in order to show the fact that he cannot speak for this oppressed part of the population any more than they themselves can. As with most of Coetzees coloured characters, Michael K, just like Friday in Foe, the native girl in Waiting for the Barbarians and Mr. Vercueill in Age of Iron, is bereft of language.

Isabelle Brugmans, Coetzees Anti-paradise: an Investigation into the Role of Isolation in Three Novels by J.M. Coetzee (Doctoraal Scriptie: Universiteit Utrecht, 1996).
24

31 In a similar vein, Magda can be compared to the protagonist in Becketts The Unnamable. They both speak to the reader directly, afraid to stop talking for fear of what might come when language stops and stillness sets in. Both protagonists are unreliable and confess this fact early on in their monologues. They also share an ambiguous view on language as a medium to express oneself. The main difference, again, is that Magdas problem with language has a political element because she finds it isolates her from her servants whereas the narrators problem in The Unnamable is more of a personal, philosophical nature; not being able to find the words while feeling a compulsion to produce a steady flow of them so as not to fall silent. While both authors lived in different times and had different regimes they had to obey, Becketts investigation into the situation of someone who has nothing to express, lacks the power to express and yet feels obliged to express can be compared to Coetzees personal situation as a white writer in South Africa who has nothing to express in the language he is brought up with, feels disqualified from writing because of his position and yet feels the moral obligation to express himself. In the introduction during the award ceremony of the Nobel Prize in 2003, the committee voiced Coetzees predicament as follows: Who does the writing, who seizes power by taking pen in hand? Can black experience be depicted by a white person? In Foe, Friday is an African, already dehumanised by Defoe. To give speech to Friday would be to colonise him and deny him what remains of his integrity. The girl in Waiting for the Barbarians speaks an unintelligible language and has been blinded by torture; Michael K has a harelip and Friday has had his tongue cut out. His life is recounted by Susan Barton: that is, through 'white writing', the title of one of Coetzee's books.25 Although Becketts motivation may have been more of a philosophical kind as opposed to Coetzees political stance, they share a belief in man wrestling with his situation and trying to use language in order to describe it. While these attempts may appear to be in vain, there is nothing they can do but try again and again.

25

Nobel Prize Presentation Speech by Per Wastberg, December 10, 2003. To be found at: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2003/presentation-speech.html

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Chapter 3 Language
3.1 Introduction
This last chapter will focus on the use of language by both authors. I will do this by examining two striking similarities between Beckett and Coetzee, namely their bilingualism and their skeptical stance towards narrative and language as a tool to present that narrative as a truthful and complete account of ones thoughts and actions. The first part of this chapter will discuss the position of being an author who switches between two languages, namely Becketts switch from English to French and Coetzees use of both English and Afrikaans. Both Beckett and Coetzee have had two languages at their command when writing. While each might have had different reasons to use both or choose one of the two languages in order to write his work, their situation as both being writers between languages is an interesting one. Beckett felt he became frustrated and thought himself to be too familiar with the English language, which made him decide to seek his refuge in French. Coetzee, on the other hand, has felt at home in neither English nor Afrikaans for political reasons. He considered both languages to be infested with an undercurrent of oppression that is inherent in the historical part the two languages have played in his country. Secondly, both authors view of language in general will be discussed, focusing on their discomfort with words as a means to get across a personal message or emotion and the way this problem is dealt with in their work. I will, again, focus on Becketts trilogy and a number of Coetzees works, most notably In the Heart of the Country, Waiting for the Barbarians and some of his literary essays, Confession and Double Thought in particular. I will discuss the failure of truthful self-narration that can be found in both authors works and the urge yet to keep writing for fear of the void that awaits when the words cease to come.

33

3.2 Bilingualism
Both Beckett and Coetzee grew up in a country divided by two languages, of which one was English. Beckett grew up in Ireland, where language has been an issue for centuries, especially in the context of the nationalist struggle. Beckett was born in a Dublin Protestant home where English was the language of choice, since it belonged to the higher social status his family acquired.26 The ancient Celtic language, however, remained of prominent use in the nationalist groups that were supportive of the Irish language movement, which was still popular in the years in which he grew up. In Beckett's family, French was considered to be the first foreign language, since it was seen as a civilized European tongue. Beckett became more and more obsessed with French in his scholar years at Trinity College and he started visiting France. In 1937, after a short stay in Britain, Beckett opted for a permanent move to Paris. He would stay in France for the rest of his life, not even going home when the Nazis invaded the country three years later. His stay abroad has also triggered an interesting switch between the two languages he was most proficient in: English and French.27 By the time Beckett started his trilogy by writing Molloy in the late 1940s, he had decided to write his work in French, from start to finish. While he translated his work back into English for the British publication, the whole writing process from first draft to finished manuscript was done in French. One reason offered by Beckett as to why he chose this new work method: Perhaps because French was not my mother tongue, because I had no facility in it, no spontaneity. While for most writers this would seem a paradoxical intention, for Beckett it may have been refreshing and, in a sense, liberating to turn his back on the English language because he had gotten too familiar with it. He has also said that one of his problems with the language was that it had a lack of brakes and claiming that, while he was writing Watt, his last book before he switched to French, English was running away 28 with him. Coetzee, in his essay Beckett and the Temptations of Style gives another reason. He claims
26

All subsequent autobiographical details concerning Becketts life are taken from: James Knowlson, Damned to fame : The life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury Publishing 1996). 27 Additionally, Beckett was able to read and write German, Spanish and Italian. 28 Cf. Beckett in a letter of 23 June 1983, quoted by Alan Astro, Understanding Beckett. (Columbia, S. C.: University of Southern Carolina Press, 1990), 49.

34

that Beckett has been quoted as saying he found it easier to write without style when he wrote in French. This has prompted Coetzee to conclude that perhaps, Becketts familiarity with English might have made him feel restricted since he had inevitably developed a style of his own which he could not shake off. While most writers would consider it a blessing to have developed a personal style of writing, Beckett was opting for a more transparent style; less personal and emotive. Whether he achieved his goal of writing prose completely devoid of style is debatable. On the contrary, it could be argued that Becketts writing in the trilogy (his first work written in French) reads like a very stylized affair. Molloys monologue, for instance, is highly consistent in the way he forms his sentences and reasons his motivations and doubts. He has his own distinctive voice and his words have a carefully constructed rhythm to them. All characters in the three novels have a similar voice, which raises a doubt concerning the identity of the narrator. It leads the reader to think that Molloy and Malone might be the same person. Beckett also enjoyed playing with the differences in the two languages when it came to translating his French work back into English.29 There are some subtle jokes about his position as a bilingual writer, for instance in Molloy, where Lousses parrot swears in both languages. During the transation of Malone Meurt to Malone Dies Beckett inserted another, more subtle joke by changing names. The family who entertain Sapo are called the Louis family in the original French pubication but their name is changed to the Lamberts in the English version. As pointed out by Ann Beer, this is a reference to the novel Louis Lamberts by Balzac, which is about a young man who decends into madness, much like Becketts characters in the trilogy. References like these can only be spotted by readers that are able, and willing, to read both versions. This raises a doubt whether, in the case of a number of Becketts novels, one can speak of a single authoritative text. In the case of Malone Meurt and Malone Dies, both texts complement each other. A lot of critics have pointed to the possibilities of reading Molloy as a mirror-story, claiming that Molloy might be seen as a

29

For the discrepancies between the translations, I am much indebted to the article Beckett's Bilingualism by Ann Beer, published in The Cambridge Companion to Beckett. John Pilling, ed. (Cambridge University Press) 1994. (209-221)

35

mirrored version of Moran. Indeed, both men have similar experiences, taking up a journey without directions and ending up in the same state of disarray. In addition to the similaries between both characters journeys to an unknown destination, there is a bilingual theme to be found as well. Molloys name, and the region he lives in, Bally, indicate that he might be an Irishman. This contrasts with Moran, whose first name, like his sons, is Jacques, hinting at them being French. This is significant since it can be seen as a reflection of Becketts own dual nationality. Much like his mentor James Joyce, Beckett was an author in exile. This leads us to a final reason Beckett has confessed to writing in French, namely being afraid of using his native language because you couldnt help writing poetry in it.30 His decision to switch languages, however, did not offer work without poetry. It seems Beckett found himself in a situation he could not get out of. Up until his last productive year, he would go back and forth between the two languages. If anything, the duality of having two languages at your proposal excluded Beckett from the singular point of view most other authors are forced to have. He had two worlds of words to use as he saw fit. His short novel Company, written in the last part of his career, was composed initially in English but the text was revised into French during the writing process, which means that its origin lies in both languages as opposed to just one. A short novel he wrote some years later, Worstward Ho, on the other hand, saw him use the English language as if he had just rediscovered it and allowed himself to have a good time seeing how far he could stretch its boundaries. Filled with coined words and grammatically correct but unconventional affixations, it seems he made an attempt to strip away the syntax of the language and see where it would take him. Ironically, Worstward Ho was one of his final works and the first one he claimed, in a letter to his English publisher, he considered to be untranslatable.31 Like Beckett, Coetzee has also made switches between two languages in his work, namely English and Afrikaans. There are, however, different reasons and methods for his bilingual approach. Unlike Beckett, Coetzee just briefy turns to Afrikaans in some of his
30 31

Richard N. Coe, Beckett (Glasgow, Oliver & Boyd, 1964), 14. letter of 10 September 1985 from John Calder to Ann Beer; quoted in Beckett's Bilingualism by Ann Beer, published in The Cambridge Companion to Beckett. John Pilling, ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1994), 209-221.

36

books. He often keeps the Afrikaans limited to merely one sentence or a single word in order to indicate a social characteristic of the person that is speaking or thinking. Unlike Becketts literary and philosophical motive to switch languages, Coetzees decision to use Afrikaans for certain characters or phrases instead of English may be considered to be a political one. Coetzee has been brought up in an English-speaking household. In interviews, he has commented on his situation as an English-speaking white person in South Africa. He claims that no Afrikaner would consider him an Afrikaner because he does not speak their language in daily life. According to him, an Afrikaner is someone whose primary language is Afrikaans. To expain himself in an ethnic-linguistic sense, he considers himself to be one of many people in this country who have become detached from their ethnic roots... and have joined a pool of no recognizable ethnos whose language of exchange is English. This comment indicates a feeling of detachment from a large group of people in his country, the Afrikaner in general. In an essay called The Novel Today, he claims: I do not even speak my own language. . . . I speak . . . a fragile metalanguage with very little body, one that is liable, at any moment, to find itself flattened and translated back and down into the discourse of politics, a sub-discourse of the discourse of history.32 This last comment also refers to Coetzees opinion that languages have a political aspect to them. Although some blacks may still argue that English is the language used by the colonizer, most black people today choose to use English as their first language. The reason for this is a political one: apart from the fact that it allows a more effective communication with the rest of the world, English is a language that provides the various ethnic groups in South Africa with a common identity. Though he speaks both languages fluently, Coetzee has willfully chosen English as his narrators voice. He, however, suggests English to be a language of colonizers as well. This point is particularly present in Magdas narrative in In the Heart of the Country where, even though they technically speak the same language, she struggles to have a dialogue with the two servants. There are two different versions of the novel: the 1977 British one and the 1978 South African version. In the South African (Afrikaans language) version the dialogue is in
32

J. M. Coetzee, The Novel Today, Upstream 6 (summer 1988), 2-5.

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South African, which gives an added dimension of unease between Magda and the servants on the farm. Consider the following quote33: But that is not the worst, dit is nie die ergste gewees nie. Energy is eternal delight, I could have been another person, ek kon heeltemal anders gewees het, I could have burned my way out of this prison, my tongue is forked with fire, verstaan jy, ek kan met `n tong van vuur praat. (para. 203) In In the Heart of the Country, as in other of Coetzee's novels, the question of history becomes related to language. In defining history, Coetzee noted in an interview with Dick Penner that history is an imposition of meaning on time and events, but that time and that meaning are actually linguistic; they are language.34 This comment suggests that history is embedded in language in general. In an interview with Jean Sevry, Coetzee claimed that in the process of writing, One is in confrontation (a) with the language in which one is writing and (b) with the fact of being a language producing animal.35 When asked about receiving the Nobel Prize for literature in 2003, his first answer contained a skeptical view on the matter, asking why there is no such award for music: music is, after all, more universal than literature, which is bound to a particular language.36 In the view of his bilingual situation, it is interesting that he claims to be in confrontation with the language he uses. This implies that it is important to him to be aware of that particular language and its connotations such as history, cultural differences and stylistic possibilities. This double-edged consciousness, what Stephen Watson calls the consciousness of a colonizer who does not want to be a colonizer,37 allows Coetzee, in In the Heart of the Country, to create a novel that operates on two levels. As pointed out in the previous chapter, Magda attempts to subvert the ideology of power while existing outside of history through killing her father and communing with the servants, Hendrik and Anna. Her
33

Derek Attridge. J.M.Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event. University of Chicago Press. Taken from: http://www.readysteadybook.com/Article.aspx?page=modernistform

(26-01-2004)
34

Dick Penner. Countries of the Mind: The Fiction of J. M. Coetzee. (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1989), 26. 35 Ed. Jean Sevry Interview de J. M. Coetzee. Socit des anglicistes de l'enseignement suprieur. Colloque de Brest, 911 May 1985 (Montpellier: Universit Paul Valry, 1985). 36 Interview by David Attwell, published in Dagens Nyheter 12-08-2003 37 Watson, Stephen. Colonialism and the Novels of JM Coetzee. Published in Critical Perspectives on J. M. Coetzee, edited by Graham Huggan and Stephen Watson. New York: St. Martins Press, 1996 (13-37)

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attempt fails, however, because this ideology is necessarily encoded in her language, and thus any attempt at speech, even one that ignores the father's use of language and originates from outside of history, still re-encodes this hierarchy. By creating a narrative character that is very aware of this theme, Coetzee uses the novel to try and deconstruct traditional uses of language and thus to undermine the ideology of power encoded into language.

3.3 The struggle with language and narrative

In his memoir Youth, Coetzee describes his first encounters with literature. He confesses that, when he was discovering the joys of reading, he found himself dissatisfied with most of South-African literature, which he deemed false and corrupt. When he started to look for literature outside of his home country, one of the writers he turned to was Beckett. He has later claimed in a number of interviews that he found the greatest delight in Becketts trilogy, which he reread several times.38 Part of Coetzees view of writing as being a failure in truth-telling might be traced back to his introduction to Beckett in his youth. In Becketts trilogy, he found a story that is not really a story but more a text that reads as the ramblings of a man (or being) who is overtly self-conscious of his attempts at giving the reader a truthful narrative and at the same time knowing he is failing. According to Coetzee, when a writer writes, no matter what his subject is, it is inevitable that he writes about himself. He has expressed this view in the following statement: all writing is autobiography.39 Even though this comment may seem a strong one, Coetzee is quick to add that all writing about the self does not necessarily deliver a truthful narrative. In Youth, Coetzee recapitulates a moment where, when he was a student, he returned home to find his lover had read some things about her in his diary, namely that he had found living with her tedious and unsatisfying. Discovering her lovers unspoken doubts about their relationship made her decide to pack her bags and leave.40 He recalls his thoughts on the fact that she had read this private document, and goes a step further by questioning whether it was a private document at all.
38 39

Joanna Scott. Voice and Trajectory: An Interview With J. M. Coetzee. (Salmagundi, 1997), 82-102. David Attwell (ed.), Doubling the Point: Essays & Interviews, 17. 40 J. M. Coetzee, Youth. (New York: Viking Penguin 2002), 9-10.

39

There is a possibility he might have written it for her to find and read when he was gone because he could not say these hurtful things to her face. The doubts concerning the purpose and contents of his diary are linked to his doubts concerning truthful narration in the novels he was to write years later. Writing about himself in the third person and describing the years before he started his career as a novelist, Coetzee writes in Youth: The question of what should be permitted to go into his diary and what kept forever shrouded goes to the heart of all his writing. If he is to censor himself from expressing ignoble emotions ... how will those emotions ever be transfigured and turned into poetry? And if poetry is not to be the agency of his transfigurement from ignoble to noble, why bother with poetry at all? Besides, who is to say that the feelings he writes in his diary are his true feelings? Who is to say that at each moment the pen moves he is truly himself, at another he might simply be making things up. How can he know for sure? Why should he even want to know for sure? (9-10) Coetzees thoughts about the purpose of his diary are the same when it comes to his literary work. It is impossible to write an accurate account of ones thoughts, feelings or motives because one is bound to hold back certain details in favour of others. Even the fact that these feelings and thoughts have to be expressed in a text that is readable, albeit a literary text, reduces their truthful nature. In order to make a text endurable for the reader, the writer will turn away from his inner voice to use words that sound better and employ rhythm to utter his sentences, in other words: he will use his tools as a writer to produce something worthwhile, instead of something that echoes his mind in the most accurate sense. Another objection to the inability of a writer to write a truthful narrative is Coetzees claim that, in a writers so-called honest confession, there are inevitable flaws because of the authors motives to confess certain facts. These flaws are inevitable, because the author (or narrator) has to make several choices, namely: what it is he wants to confess, how to formulate his confession and whether to ask the reader for forgiveness, understanding, pity or to make the reader an accomplice by making him reach the same conclusion before admitting his own motive. Coetzee has singled out a non-fiction work, the essay Confession and Double Thoughts,41 to be a pivotal piece in his career. In this essay, he explores Dostoevskys Notes

41

David Attwell (ed.), Doubling the Point: Essays & Interviews, 251.

40

from the Underground and that writers attempt to recount his thoughts and feelings during captivity. He concludes with an observation that is as much a statement about the failure of truthful self-narration as it is a declaration of the ambiguity of his own work: The end of confession is to tell the truth to and for oneself... Because of the nature of consciousness, Dostoevsky indicates, the self cannot tell the truth of itself and come to rest without the possibility of self-deception. (291) The notion of writing as an act of self-deception has continued to be an important one in Coetzees work. One might argue that he has used some of Becketts themes to help formulate his own ethics of writing, including his reproach that most of white South African writing is done as a form of self-deception by writing narratives that are meant to console the writers (or protagonists) conscience. These texts, Coetzee seems to say, are filled with a false notion of empathy and identification with the native population of South Africa. A similar problem is encountered in Becketts trilogy. Though Coetzee's essay does not address Beckett, its concept can be traced more directly to his preoccupation with truthful self-narration in the Beckett trilogy. As Declan Kiberd has observed, Becketts trilogy can be read as a form of confessional writing: It is in the trilogy that Beckett evolves the most beautiful forms, as the linear plot of the western novel makes way for a structure which is the artistic equivalent of meditation and for a narrative which is the artistic equivalent of confession. Beckett reported that he conceived its first volume Molloy on the day he became aware of his past stupidity [...] in his refusal to accept the dark side as the "commanding side of my personality."42 In Beckett's trilogy, Coetzee might have encountered the notion of writing as self-writing. He might also have noticed Beckett's vision that this self-writing can never be read as fully authentic or truthful. When, at some point in his monologue, the narrator in The Unnamable reflects on his absolute alienation and solipsism, he laments: This voice that speaks, knowing that it lies, indifferent to what it says, too old perhaps and too abased ever to succeed in saying the words that would be its last, knowing itself useless and its uselessness in vain, not listening to itself but to the silence that it breaks and whence perhaps one day will come stealing the long clear sigh of advent
42

Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation. (Cambridge, Massachussets. Harvard UP, 1995), 459.

41 and farewell, is it one? I'll ask no more questions, there are no more questions, I know none any more. It issues from me, it fills me, it clamours against my walls, it is not mine, I can't stop it, I can't prevent it, from tearing me, racking me, assailing me. It is not mine, I have none, I have no voice and must speak, that is all I know, it's round that I must revolve, of that I must speak, with this voice that is not mine, but can only be mine, since there is no one but me, or if there are others, to whom it might belong, they have never come near me. (349) The image of a person talking in circles whilst getting no further in getting to the truth or the heart of what he or she wants to say is a recurring element in Coetzees work. Magda's, Mrs. Curren's and, to a lesser extent, Susan Barton's solipsistic narration can all be read as Coetzee's adaptation of the trilogy's narrative situation, where there is always just you, talking to you about you.43 Whether consciously or not, Coetzees ending in Waiting for the Barbarians is similar to the ending of Becketts Molloy, echoing the same sense of failure in having told a truthful narrative:

Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining. (Molloy, 199) In a way, Morans last sentences erase his entire story. By repeating the first sentences in a negative form, he almost seems to try and make his journey, which left him nowhere and caused him to lose everything, undone. The magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians ends his story with a similarly self-erasing comment: For a long while I stare at the plea I have written. It would be disappointing to know that the poplar slips I have spent so much time on contain a message as devious, as equivocal, as reprehensible as this. (154) Besides making a reference to the trilogy, Coetzee adds a political element as well. He takes the ambiguous view of writing and truth Beckett expressed in his work but sets it in a different framework, namely that of the South African conflict. This way, it becomes an ethical concern as well, turning the question whether it is raining into a question of whether the atrocities he has written about have really happened. The magistrate describes the tortures that took place in his prisons after another official had taken over his job, condemning their ruthless methods. By casting doubts concerning the truthful nature of his account he retreats from the commitment he has previously shown in his narrative. The magistrate in Waiting for

43

Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, 394.

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the Barbarians questions himself on how he is supposed to write down a true story, in the way a historian might write a record on what has happened in the torture rooms of his building. While he does not find it difficult to write an official letter to his superior explaining of his expedition to the barbarians, he cannot get himself to write a second document, the purpose or contents of which are not explained: What the second document is to be I do not yet know. A testament? A memoir? A confession? A history of thirty years on the frontier? All that day I sit in a trance at my desk staring at the empty white paper, waiting for words to come. A second day passes in the same way. On the third day I surrender, put the paper back in the drawer, and make preparations to leave. (62) The tortures that took place in his cells were committed to get the truth out of prisoners. The liberal magistrate condemns these methods and yet he finds it hard to get to know his own truth through words. He writes down a story that offers excuses and reasons to take away some of the blame he is entitled to. Coetzee takes Becketts view on the struggle between writing and truth but places it in the context of South Africa by letting the man who is struggling be white and in charge of a settlement where black44 or foreign people are considered barbarian and are treated as such. In this case, the truth the reader seeks is not just a philosophical question but also a political one, since it deals with historic and ethical issues. The magistrates inability to write a truthful account of his superiors behaviour can be interpreted as a stab at the inability of the priviliged white South African to face the truth and, most importantly: write it down. While the magistrate, as many white South Africans during the time his story takes place, is sympathetic to the cause of the black population under his wing, his narrative evades any real responsibility concerning their fate. Beckett uses a paradox in his trilogy that can be seen throughout numerous works by Coetzee, namely the inevitability of using self-narration coupled with the protagonist's struggle for truthful self-narration. In Beckett's The Unnamable this struggle is paired with a compulsion to keep talking. It appears that the person who is speaking, and is never given a name, cannot stop for fear of what might happen when he does. A fear of silence, which might or might not mean his end. He is a storyteller but, unlike Susan Barton in Coetzee's

There is no mention of the barbarians being black. Coetzee suggests that there are racial characteristics that sets them apart but does not go into specifics, much like his vagueness about Michael Ks race. The purpose of this vagueness could be to lift his novels above the South African framework and make them into allegories that can be applied globally.
44

43 Foe, does not know any stories worth telling. Though he appears to be honest about his motives he keeps wanting to say something truthful but never succeeds. It is quite tempting to read the voice in The Unnamable as Beckett's own voice, lamenting about the futility he finds in his task as a writer paired with his compulsion to keep writing:

All this business of a labour to accomplish, before I can end, of words to say, a truth to recover, in order to say it, before I can end, of an imposed task, once known, long neglected, finally forgotten, to perform, before I can be done with speaking, with listening, I invented it all, in the hope it would console me, help me to go on, allow me to think of myself as somewhere on a road, moving, between a beginning and an end, gaining ground, losing ground, getting lost, but somehow in the long run making headway. All lies. I have nothing to do, that is to say nothing in particular. I have to speak, whatever that means. Having nothing to say, no words but the words of others, I have to speak. (357) Beckett, in particular, shows a painful awareness of his position as author (or creator) of his work and the trade that comes with this position but instead of trying to overcome this or, better yet, dispose of his responsibilities (which is impossible, since the pages would have to remain blank and unpublished) he lets his narrators struggle with the same problem, thus being able to tell a story about the difficulties or uselessness of telling a story when one finds oneself troubled by the traps this action imposes on the storyteller. While, in most novels, the general plot seems to deal with the actions of the characters in their physical world, in truth all it does is describe action in the writers facsimile of the real world. It can be said that Beckett does not find it important how accurate this facsimile is but instead tries to express the mental world where it was created. He favours depicting the mental reality in which the novel originated instead of presenting a ready-made world that seems real by focusing on landscape, or other pictorial elements. Since mental reality is inevitably a shifting and ambiguous world, Beckett uses metaphorical language as opposed to denotative language. This same use of language can be found in Magdas narrative, where the same event is presented in different, contrasting, ways and there is no real sense of an authentic truth behind her motives and actions. The mental reality, the place where thought and language is kept, primarily functions on the basis of patterns that were taught and shown by the environment of a person. These mental patterns are of interest to Beckett when it comes to language, as is suggested by a statement by Molloy about the origin of his story and his means to tell it: "You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten..." (32). It is no coincidence that these mental patterns can be linked

44 to the linguistic patterns we have formed since childhood and are unable to shake off. This ties in with both Becketts and Coetzees theme of there being no escape from language. Early on in Molloy, Beckett lets its narrator reveal a truth about himself that will become a recurring theme with every narrator in the trilogy: Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat of composition. (27) In Coetzee's work, a similar sentiment can be found in the protagonists' efforts to tell their story. Elisabeth Curren, in Age of Iron, complains in her letter to her daughter:

I have written about everything, I am written out, bled dry, and still I go on. This letter has become a maze, and I a dog in the maze, scurrying up and down the branches and tunnels, scratching and whining at the same old places, tiring, tired. (126) In this case, Elisabeth Curren cannot stop writing because she does know where she is heading and she is afraid of the void that will present itself when her pen stops moving. This goes for Becketts protagonists as well. They are talking in a loop and are compelled to go on for fear of what happens when the words stop. This gives the idea of language a sinister element, especially in the case of The Unnamable who is forever occupied with the whereabouts of his pencil and notebook. Words are the only things they can hold onto because they must hold on to it, for behind lies the great unknown. Like Beckett, Coetzee can be said to harbour a skeptic view of language when it comes to truth and meaning. The consistent manner in which truth and motive are put in doubt in both authors works suggests the idea that, during any written or oral account truth inevitably makes way for untruth. Just the simple fact that it is the self writing about the self makes any full truth impossible, since an authentic representation of the self would have to be an image too blurry to fully grasp: a nothingness. According to both authors, language is an inadequate approximation which can never express our full emotions and thoughts. This might account for the slow descent into the exploration of nothingness that can be traced throughout Becketts trilogy and the slow disintegration of Magdas solipsistic narrative in In the Heart of the Country. To try and get a clear view of nothingness, which I use here as another word for truthfulness, would acquire a blank page. From Molloy and Malone to Magda; all use their narrative to create a semi-reality in order not to have to face what comes after one has finished spewing words and sentences. Words give them the consolation of not being finished. When writing the trilogy, Beckett confessed his preoccupation with the void

45 that is left by language as a medium to express a truth about oneself: What I had to do was investigate not-knowing, not-perceiving, the whole world of incompleteness.45 This is one of the main struggles or, one might suggest, ironies of these two authors works: realising that writing will never be able to express an authentic all-encompassing truth and yet seeing no other method to get any closer than by writing about it.

45

Lawrence Shainberg, Exorcising Beckett The Paris Review No. 104 (Fall 1987).

46

Conclusion
In my thesis I have tried to point at a number of similarities and differences between J. M. Coetzee and Samuel Beckett, focusing on their use of language and narrative technique. Both authors share an ambiguous stance towards language. It being their only tool of expression within their medium, they have no choice but to use language to tell their story. At the same time, however, both Coetzee and Beckett seem convinced that language alone never enables them to say exactly what they want to say. There is always a gap. This paradox becomes one of the main points of focus in Becketts prose work. With Coetzee it becomes an important factor as well, albeit in a different, more politically motivated, manner. While Becketts Molloy is convinced that: ..truly it little matters what I say, this or that or any other thing46, and thus gives a rather cynical view of the narrators purpose, Coetzees Michael K and his unwillingness to explain himself leaves the narrator with "a story with a hole in it47. In the first chapter, Coetzee on Beckett, Coetzees own comments about Beckett have been reviewed and examined. His formal essays mostly deal with the technical side of Becketts writing: using a computer to analyse the recurring of phrases in Lessness, pointing out discrepancies between manuscript and final draft of Watt, the anarchic use of point of view in Murphy. He has, however, made a few comments about the use of language and style in Becketts prose work as well. In Homage and The Temptations of Style in Samuel Beckett, Coetzee has given some more personal thoughts on his appreciation of Becketts work. It is significant that he explicitly states a fondness for the period in which Beckett wrote his trilogy, since certain aspects in his own work bear some resemblance to these works. In Youth, he recounts the moment he fell in love with Becketts work, by discovering his prose work. The resemblances between Becketts prose work and Coetzees novels are pointed out and analysed in the second chapter, Comparison. In this chapter, some links have been made between Becketts Molloy and Coetzees In the Heart of the Country and Life & Times of Michael K. Most of these links concern thematical similarities, such as a distrust of language and an ambiguity of truth. Also, certain stylistical links, such as the use of a mirrorstory or an unreliable narrator have been analysed. I could not find any clear link
46 47

Samuel Beckett. Molloy, 32. J. M. Coetzee. Life & Times of Michael K, 110.

47 between the motives of both writers attiditude towards language. While Beckett seemed determined to try and find new ways of expressing himself and voicing the difficulties of this self-imposed task, Coetzees underlying drive is more political; exposing and therefore, in a way, amplifying the government-imposed lack of words available to the native people in his South Africa. The last chapter, Language, has been devoted exclusively to the use of language by Beckett and Coetzee. The fact that both authors have a bilingual element to their work gives them the opportunity to approach English from a certain distance, even though it is their first language. Beckett decided to discard English and write his work in French in order to free himself from his mother tongue. Coetzee has always written in English but incorporates Afrikaans to put certain characters in a different social context. Furthermore, their struggle with language and narrative is discussed in the second part of the chapter. One of the things that must have appealed to Coetzee, since it is present in his own work, is Becketts unrelenting distrust of the power of language as a tool of expression. Beckett seems to think that words can never paint a full picture and, even worse, may even distort it because it is coloured by the one who writes and utters them. The use of reliable narrators that cannot be trusted is one of the ways to illustrate this point. What is striking in both Coetzee and Becketts work is that the narrator in question is always aware of the fact that his or her account is by definition untrustworthy. This leads to another big question: if the story you are trying to tell is not to be trusted, is it worth telling? This question remains unanswered but the struggle with this notion is what makes both authors work interesting. Perhaps the uselessness or, rather shortcomings of words in general is one of the most important things to write about since it forces the writer to fight its subject with its own weapons. One can be instantly touched or appalled by a piece of music or a painting. A text, however, takes its time to unveal its worth or strength. Both Beckett and Coetzee have chosen to use their own craft language to try and express doubt and apprehension of the same medium. This is a both modernist and a brave approach toward themselves and their public. All in all, one might claim that the most important thing J. M. Coetzee has picked up and customized to his own environment by reading Samuel Becketts works of fiction is a view of language that is perhaps as sobering as it is depressing: powerful though potentially deceitful, stained by history, social relations and devious personal motives of readers and writers alike.

48

Works Consulted.
In alphabetical and chronological order:

Astro, Alan. Understanding Beckett. Columbia, S. C.: University of Southern Carolina Press. 1990.

Attwell, David. Ed. Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press. 1992.

Beckett, Samuel. Murphy. New York: Grove Press. 1957.

Beckett, Samuel. Watt. New York: Grove Press. 1959.

Beckett, Samuel. Molloy. Malone Dies. The Unnamable. New York: Everyman's Library. 1997.

Beckett, Samuel. The Complete Short Prose, 1929 - 1989. New York: Grove Press. 1995.

Beckett, Samuel. Nohow On. New York: Grove Press. 1996.

Begam, Richard. Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. 1996. Brugmans, Isabelle. Coetzees Anti-paradise: an Investigation into the Role of Isolation in Three Novels by J.M. Coetzee. Utrecht: Universiteit Utrecht. 1996.

Coe, Richard N. Beckett. Glasgow: Oliver & Boyd. 1964.

Coetzee, J. M. In the Heart of the Country. London: Vintage. 2004.

Coetzee, J. M. Waiting for the Barbarians. London: Vintage. 2004.

49

Coetzee, J. M. Life & Times of Michael K. London: Vintage. 1998.

Coetzee, J. M. Foe. London: Penguin Books. 1987.

Coetzee, J. M. Age of Iron. London: Martin Secker & Warburg. 1990.

Coetzee, J. M. Disgrace. London: Vintage. 2000.

Coetzee, J. M. Youth. New York: Viking Penguin. 2002. Coetzee, J. M. Samuel Becketts Lessness: An Exercise in Decomposition. In: Computers and the Humanities 7.4. 1973: 195-198.

Coetzee, J. M. The Novel Today. Upstream 6. Summer 1988: 2-5.

Coetzee, J. M. Homage. Threepenny Review. Spring 1993.

Coetzee, J. M. He and his Man. Nobel Lecture. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2003/coetzee-lecture-e.html, 2003.

Coetzee, J. M. As a Woman Grows Older. The New York Review of Books 51. no 1. (January 15, 2004). http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16872

Coetzee, J. M. Slow Man. London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 2005. Dragunoiu, Dana. Existential Doubt and Political Responsibility in J.M. Coetzee's Foe. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. (March, 2001).

50

Gauthier, Marni. Intersection of the Postmodern and the Postcolonial in J.M. Coetzee's Foe. English Language Notes. (June 1997): 52-69.

Huggan, Graham and Watson, Stephen. Ed. Critical Perspectives on J.M. Coetzee. London: Macmillan Press Ltd. 1996. Kalb, Jonathan. Beckett the Difficult, Beckett the Brash, Beckett the Prolific. In: The New York Times. April 13 2006: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/13/books/13kalb.html.

Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame : The life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. 1996.

May, Brian. "J. M. Coetzee and the Question of the Body." MFS Modern Fiction Studies. Volume 47, Number 2. (Summer 2001): 391-420.

Penner, Dick. Countries of the Mind: The Fiction of J. M. Coetzee. Westport: Greenwood Press. 1989. Beer, Ann. Beckett's Bilingualism. In: The Cambridge Companion to Beckett. Ed. John Pilling. Cambridge Massachussets??: Cambridge University Press. 1994: 209-222. Scott, Joanna. Voice and Trajectory: An Interview With J. M. Coetzee. In: Salmagundi. 114-115. (Spring-Summer 1997): 82-102. Sevry, Jean. Interview de J. M. Coetzee. In: Socit des anglicistes de l'enseignement suprieur. Colloque de Brest, 911 May 1985. Montpellier: Universit Paul Valry. 1985. Shainberg, Lawrence. Exorcising Beckett. In: The Paris Review No. 104. (Fall 1987), http://www.samuel-beckett.net/ShainExor1.html (last accessed 15-08-2006).

51 Watson, Stephen. Colonialism and the Novels of JM Coetzee. In: Critical Perspectives on J. M. Coetzee, Ed. Graham Huggan and Stephen Watson. New York: St. Martins Press. 1996: 13-37. Wohlpart, James. A (sub)version of the Language of Power: Narrative and Narrative Technique in J. M. Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country. In: Critique. 35(4). (Summer, 1994): 219-28.

Documentary:

Van De Schoonheid en de Troost, episode nr. 17: "Onschuld?", Hilversum: VPRO Omroep, (april 23, 2000). http://www.vpro.nl/programma/schoonheidentroost/afleveringen/2365352/ (last accessed: 04-08-'06)