Professor David Peimer
The Nobel Prize: History and Notable Winners of the Prize for Literature from the ‘Global South’
Professor David Peimer - The Nobel Prize: History and Notable Winners of the Prize for Literature from the ‘Global South’
- Okay, so I’m going to dive in today in terms of a couple of things. The first is the Nobel Prize itself, and a little bit about the life of Alfred Nobel that many may know of, but also may not know, and then look at two Nobel Prize winners from what’s become known as the global self in contemporary, I suppose, university jargon, or phrasing, and in particular, James Coetzee from South Africa. We’re dealing with South Africa, of course at the moment, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez from Columbia, South America, two brilliant writers, in my personal opinion, remarkable novelists, and especially Coetzee and Marquez wrote many other nonfiction essays as well. So we’re going to look at two books in particular, “Disgrace” from Coetzee, which I think is a piece of brilliance, and Marquez’s main book, “A Hundred Years of Solitude” as two examples of what I think is, pardon me, two of the highlights of literature over the last 100 years of these two, for me, fantastic writers. Okay, so a little bit about Alfred Nobel, and then on Saturday, sorry, I’m looking at the film “Zulu” about the 1879 battle of Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift with the Michael Caine movie, the 1964 movie. Okay, in terms of Nobel himself, I mean, it’s an interesting life for those who don’t know that much about him, and he, to set up this organisation which has become so mythical and regarded as the pinnacle of human achievement so much that is positive in the human race, so much that it gives hope and aspiration, speaks to dreams becoming real, not just dreams deferred in terms of Nobel and his contribution.
He was a Swedish chemist and inventor and businessman, and his main invention, as I’m sure many know, or creation, was the creation of dynamite, and of course, the Nobel Prize later in his life. Nobel coined the word dynamite from the ancient Greek dynamist, which means literally power in 1868 when he patented it in the UK and in America when he was travelling. Of course we all know today, dynamite, we take it for granted, blasting tunnels, canals, buildings, railways, roads, and the list goes on and on and on. Remarkable contribution for the benefit of mankind, and at the same time, of course, it’s for the usage in explosives of all kinds in a military, in a war context, and this is in the late 19th century that his invention happens, so it’s like so many things, that on the one hand, it contributes a remarkable development for human evolution and society. It’s such a progressive thing to do, and at the same time, it has this completely destructive side, creative and destructive, like we can say so much of human nature. Nobel, there are all sorts of mythical reasons or anecdotes as to why he then created the Nobel Prize to give not only money, but to give this prestigious award to the best of the human spirit, the best of human endeavours in a number of areas, and I’m not going to speculate here because there are too many. One can research it, and I did. I’ve done a lot of research on it. There are so many possible reasons why he did it, but none of them are definitive coming from Nobel himself or anyone directly knew him. What he did say in 1891 was that he wrote, “Perhaps my factories will put an end,” his factories of course making dynamite, “Perhaps my factories will put an end to all.
On the day that two armies can mutually annihilate each other in a second all civilised nations will surely recoil with horror and disband their troops.” 1891 he’s writing that about his creation, invention of dynamite. Of course, we know so much of the terrible truth that happened afterwards, and we know so much of the creative and innovative advancement of human civilization that it led to as well, and I’ve mentioned some of the examples. Nobel himself had 355 patents. He really saw himself not only as a businessman, but as an inventor and a creator, and I think that’s really important. He lived a pretty reclusive, very solitary life. He didn’t marry, didn’t have family, children, all the rest, and seemed devoted to his inventions, his patents, and business. The dynamite, in essence, is an explosive using nitroglycerin as we know, and I guess one of his main inventions was the ability to harness how to use it, so it wasn’t a totally unstable chemical compound, but that it could be controlled in controlled explosions in a way and detonated. The invention of the detonator was his as well, which is as important as an itself. He was fluent in six languages. He was also a major Swedish manufacturer of canons and armaments in a huge way in fact. His father had moved to St. Petersburg where he became successful as a businessman, manufacturing machine tools, explosives, and other things as well, and was partly involved in the development, not the final, but the development of the torpedo and other things.
The family factory produced armaments for the Crimean War, 1853 to 1856, and the business had more than 90 armaments factories, obviously from parts of St. Petersburg into other parts of Europe. What he did then, towards the end of his life when he creates the Nobel Prize is that he gives 94% of his total assets to the prize. I mean, that’s quite an extraordinary thing. We think about it today and we think of who today might do that, might be interested in such a thing, why, how, really, what’s going on? It’s quite an extraordinary decision to make in such a big way, that percentage amount, and then in 1901, it’s consolidated into the Nobel Prize for Physics, Chemistry, Physiology, Medicine, Literature and Peace. Okay, I want to give a few quick examples, a few stories to share of the early days of the Nobel Prize. On the right hand side is the gentleman Wilhelm Rontgen, and he got the first Nobel Prize for physics ever in 1901. He’s the guy who invented the x-ray, and this is the first picture here of the X-ray. On the right hand side is the very first X-ray that Rontgen ever actually made, and see at the bottom the dates and so on. That’s of his wife’s hand, and on the left hand side, looking at the picture is a friend of his, which as far as we know, is the second x-ray ever made, and you can see the clarity. He’d already developed the clarity from the first one to the second one, so an extraordinary advancement in not only medicine, but I would argue in human civilization, an incredible contribution that he made, so he wins the first Nobel Prize in 1901.
On the left hand side is a remarkable scientist, Marie Curie, and first of all, she wins two Nobel prizes, so not only the first woman, but two Nobel prizes that she gets for, and many of us know what, I don’t want to go into detail about her life. That would be a separate thing, but a remarkably brilliant scientist and remarkable human being from what we can read about her life. It’s in the middle, which is, I purposely put him in a smaller picture, is a guy called Richard Kuhn, and Richard Kuhn was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry, but this is during the time of the Nazis and Hitler forces him to decline it because Hitler has all his own reasons why you don’t accept if you get a Nobel Prize or whatever. Don’t want to go into all the reasons. This guy, however, was from Vienna and was involved in the development of vitamins, especially Vitamin B and other things, hence wins the Nobel Prize, but he’s also a major collaborator with high ranking Nazis, and in 1936, he denounced three of his Jewish coworkers. So we get a sense of these individual lives intersecting with their historical contributions. Yes, remarkable vitamins. He really helps the development of it, but on the other hand, look what he does as well compared to Marie Curie and Rontgen and many others who made incredible contributions. The one person that I want to go into in a bit of detail here is, for me, one of the most remarkable scientists of the last century, Lise Meitner. I’m sure that many might know of her or about her, and I hope to heaven they make a movie about her like they do with Oppenheimer, totally different story, an amazing scientist who lived, you can see the dates that she lived.
She’s the co-discoverer of nuclear fission with a guy called Otto Hahn, and they’re working in Germany and in Berlin before the Nazis come to power. and then during that era, Otto Hahn gets an Nobel Prize in 1944 for chemistry. And she worked with this guy Otto Hahn, Fritz Strassmann at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, probably one of the, if not the most foremost scientific institute in Europe of the time, and she’s right in there. We have to just imagine going back, obviously she’s a woman and a scientist to get right to the centre, get right to the top, following the Marie Curie line, and an extraordinary development that she is part of with Hahn and Strassmann. And what she did specifically, amongst many other things, is that she worked out the physics of the splitting of the atom process, and that much later, of course, leads to the splitting of the atom, which is nuclear energy, and of course the bomb as well, but she’s involved in that and many, many other remarkable developments in the scientific arena, and she and Hahn give the name fission, which is the nuclear fission that we know of so well today. She never got the Nobel Prize. We don’t know the exact reason, but in the archives of the Nobel Committee in Sweden, it’s a vague set of statements, which only opened quite recently, actually, these archives, decades and decades later. We get a sense that there was something, because she’s Jewish and she has to flee the Nazis, something about, what’s her passport? What’s her nationality? It’s such a bureaucratic convolution, or is it antisemitic, or is it both? Without it being stated in the Nobel Archives that it’s antisemitic, it’s not actually stated that, but we don’t know for sure, of course, what conversations were amongst the Nobel Committee.
It certainly was seen as a total injustice towards her. There was a lot of complaints after the war, and she was nominated 19 times for the Nobel Prize in chemistry, and 30 times for the Nobel Prize in physics. Never got it. Certainly, she would’ve been one of the great great scientists to win this award, one of the great scientists anyway in human history, but also to win this award, and interestingly, she’s born in Leopoldstadt, that remarkable suburb of Vienna, where Freud came from, and so many other Jews had gone from Eastern Europe when the Austria Hungarian empire opened up, and they could go to Vienna and so on. Leopoldstadt, as I’m sure many know, the Tom Stoppard play, or just Leopoldstadt, the suburb of Vienna, where so many Jews, a remarkable bed of intellectual and scientific and literary and theoretical, so many ideas, so many changes of contributions to the 20th century development of human civilization came from and the Jews of that area. Okay, that’s the one lady that I wanted to mention, ‘cause her life has always fascinated me, together with Marie Curie of course. This picture, I’m sure many people know, some of the famous Nobel Prize winners. There’s of course Albert Einstein, there’s Fritz Haber, there’s Otto Hahn, there’s Lise Meitner.
She’s in the middle of the picture, in the front row sitting there, and Marie Curie, we see a picture of some of the most remarkable minds in my opinion, of the 20th century, and knowing who they were and what they did, and this is all coming out, primarily, from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, obviously before the Nazis. Okay, that’s just to give us a little bit of an introduction to the Nobel Prize itself and some of the fascinating developments of creation and destruction. I’m sure many of know about the Fritz Haber as well in his invention of ammonia for fertiliser, and also the same time chemical warfare and mustard gas, some of these complications, but remarkable contributions, so we come on to, first of all, I’m going to look at the great, great South African novelist, JM Coetzee, the Nobel Prize winner, and for me, really one of the great writers, obviously not the only one to come out of South Africa. I’ll never forget reading his first novels when I first read them as a student and then afterwards, and the impact was huge, just of the sheer brilliance of their writing, the grittiness, how he manages to crystallise in a sentence, an image, a feeling, a phrase that you feel every word is chiselled and every word is worked with such sensitivity and care. So Coetzee, he wins the Nobel Prize in 2003, and he is is one of the very few people to win the Booker Prize in England twice. He won the Jerusalem Prize for literature as well, and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize. As I’m sure many know, in 2002, he went to live in Adelaide. He’s of Africana descent, or shall we say better, maybe Dutch descent, 17th century Dutch immigrants to South Africa, but they speak English primarily at home. 1962, he goes to London to work as a computer programmer for IBM. In 1965, he went to study at the University of Texas at Austin and does a PhD, interestingly for me, in Computer-Aided Stylistic Analysis of Samuel Beckett’s prose. I love Samuel Beckett’s writing.
He wrote “Waiting for Godot”, remarkable playwright for me, post-Second World War, and one of my favourites of the last century, but he’s doing it on Computers Stylistic Analysis in the mid-60s on Beckett. Fascinating combination of ways of thinking and rigour and logic. 1972, Coetzee returned to South Africa to work at the University of Cape Town, and again, first writer to be awarded the Booker Prize twice for the “Life & Times of Michael K” in 1983, and then “Disgrace” in 1999. The Swedish Academy, when it gave him the the prize, had this one interesting phrase. They said that, “He portrays the surprising involvement of the outsider, the surprising involvement of the outsider.” It’s a fascinating phrase because one of my passions is the theme of the outsider, obviously being Jewish and South Africa, all just many, many things. The outsider who may be in the inside, but also on the outside, and that eternal dichotomy between outsider and insider, that fascinating porous boundary in a way that the outsider, the insider inhabits and moving from the margins to the inside and back again, but that’s where the mind and the personality are located, and I can see that in Coetzee very much. He’s an outsider and an insider, and I think the Nobel Committee, in a way put their finger on it with making that comment, because I think that’s what his novels do capture, the ability to almost have a third eye on South African history and world history at the time and literature itself as well. Coetzee interestingly, wrote, well he wrote many things, but in the nonfiction context, in a fantastic collection of his essays called “Doubling the Point” where he writes about his own past in the third person, and he writes also about South African literature.
He says, “South African literature is a literature in bondage.” It is the kind of literature you would expect people to write from prison.“ It’s a fascinating outsider insight to writing about South Africa in those times, during the dark times of apartheid, and then after apartheid when, of course, "Disgrace” is written. It’s fascinating that he sees it almost as if it’s written from a prison. So you’re outside looking in, or are you in the prison looking out or out looking in? It’s this constant in and out sense that I get with reading Coetzee, which I find fascinating because it’s so obviously located in South Africa, but he is able to step right back and look at the canvas of history, the canvas of human nature, of the past, of other cultures and countries and able to capture it in the literary art form with such rigorously worked language. You feel that not a word is wasted. The impact is so evocative. I go back to Hemingway who said that for him, when he defined writing, he said it was the ability to create the dramatic sequence of events which can produce the emotion in the reader, and I think that’s what Coetzee does as well. He creates dramatic sequence of events which produce the emotional response in the reader. He doesn’t write the emotion. He doesn’t give too much exposition of emotion or what we call backstory of character or too much endless fact and details, but he, as a way of producing emotional impact, sometimes like a punch in the guts in the writing. As you can see, I’m quite passionate about his work and Marques.
He grew up, and he said, as a child in Worcester growing up, he had seen enough of the cruelty and violence to last a lifetime and more, so this sense of the child looking at South Africa, at the youth observing in and out, the writer as observer, the writer as witness as a view guard, much more about bearing witness is the role of the writer and many others. For Coetzee, it’s more this sense of perhaps not just bearing witness, but the ability to write from inside or outside a prison almost as it were, a psychological one to see the cruelty and the violence, and of course he’s trying to capture the complexity of apartheid in the post apartheid periods. Okay, so these are some of his major novels, “Dusklands”, which is set in America, “In the Heart of the Country”, and amazing, obviously he’s playing on Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”, “Waiting for the Barbarians”, which is set in a fictional border during Empire times of a magistrate on a fictional border somewhere in Southern Africa and so-called barbarians on the other side, et cetera, all about superior, inferior, the othering of the other, and all about the sense of, what is the colonial psychology? What is the colonial performance in human beings, in terms of these superior, inferior and the othering of peoples? “Life & Times of Michael K”, “Foe” and so on. Love Daniel Defoe and the “Master of Petersburg”, Dostoevsky, and I think Dostoevsky, a huge influence in Coetzee. There’s some debate about whether Coetzee actually agrees with that or not, but that ability to not be scared, to go to the heart of human nature, the cruelty, the compassion, the salvation, the slaughter, the ruin, and the redemption.
He’s not scared to go to the heart of the paradox and contradictions of what we might call an essence of human nature, and that’s why I think “Disgrace” is an absolutely remarkable novel, as are the others, because inside, once you penetrate behind the curtain or the surface of apartheid and other systems, other institutionalised systems in other countries of discrimination, prejudice, other things, what does it do to human nature? How does it stunt growth? How does it maybe shape or deform or create aspects of human nature in that? I don’t think, he’s a writer who’s not scared to go the whole way, and I think that’s what we see in his novels, in particular “Disgrace” for me, “Waiting for Barbarians”, and “Michael K”. This is a picture from the film, and the cover of “Disgrace”. Of course, there are the dogs involved in it. It’s the farm, it’s the landscape out in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. He goes all the way to, what he’s doing to the pastoral novel of Alan Paton and Olive Schreiner and how he’s turning it inside out and located. Look at this image, this rusted metal, this emaciated dog here. This is a metaphor for South Africa of the psychology of South Africa that apartheid has done and post apartheid as well in terms of, for me, that’s where the image in a way comes from, obviously from the novel and in the film. And then of course the film was made with John Malkovich playing the main character, David Lurie, professor of English at University of Cape Town, and the black farm workers on the farm. They’re some of the dogs, and that’s meant to be Lucy, the daughter of the Malkovich character, the father and the daughter.
There’s a film made of it. It’s not a great film, but it’s a bit too laboured, and a bit too slow, so I didn’t want to show images from it, rather just show you, let’s imagine it rather. So what happens in this novel here, the David Lurie character, who’s the professor of English romanticism is writing an opera based on Byron’s letters, so it’s a romantic opera. His world is full of the canon of English literature. F.R. Leavis, the Oxbridge critic, called “The Great Tradition” Thomas Hardy, it’s so many, of all of them, and then Byron, of course one of them, the romantic poets. So he’s writing an opera, which he’ll never finish, but his mind is in Europe, his mind is in England and Europe at the centre, not only of empire, but of the world in Europe. And he goes through a trumped up case, which is that he had an affair with an ex student, a student, and all the complications. Anyway, he’s asked to apologise and to be politically correct, apologise it wasn’t read anything wrong, because there was consent, et cetera, et cetera. Don’t want to go into that, because that’s the less interesting part of the novel. What is more interesting is that, instead of apologising, and he could keep his job and have his pension as a retired professor at UCT, he says no and chooses not to, and therefore, of course is going to have to lose his job. So he’s kicked out of the university, and he goes off. He’s quite disillusioned. I wouldn’t say bitter in the novel, but I would say disillusioned with his own life as much as the changes in South Africa, 'cause of course, white man at the top of the tree is going to go close to the bottom after this is the end of apartheid.
So it’s that massive shift in culture and in his own mind. So he goes, he decides, okay, he’ll retire and go live with his daughter Lucy, who lives in the farm. He’s trying to set up and run a farm way out in the middle of almost nowhere, and has some dogs as well, and try to seriously engage with the aftermath of apartheid, and this really is the most interesting part of the novel and why the title. And part of the farm is the terrifying, terrifying image of his daughter, Lucy, is attacked by a group of black farm workers, and she’s raped, and he is beaten up and he’s shoved into the bathroom, the door, and he can just hear what’s going on to his own daughter. It’s terrifying writing and terrifyingly powerful, emotional, gut wrenching stuff in the way Coetzee writes it. And yet Coetzee keeps this third eye that I mentioned earlier, bit of detachment in the writing. So what happens after that? After that, Lucy refuses to press charges. They know who did it. He’s one of the farm workers and the assailant is her former, they refer to him as dog man. In other words, and Petrus who calls himself, “I am the dog man”, in other words, looks after the dogs on the farm, and the dogs take on this ambivalent metaphor in the novel where again, dogs are something wonderful, and have so many emotions and love and affection and can be such wonderful creatures to have, and at the same time, they can be quite terrifying and they can obviously bite and attack and do all sorts of things, so always, Coetzee is always aware of the paradox, always aware of the contradiction of the underbelly. What happens when you finally end nearly 50 years of apartheid?
What happens when you lift the lids on the repressed rage, on the repressed anger in South Africa of the times? What happens to white as much as black individual? Is there white guilt, black rage? Is it as simple as that, or as simplistic? And Coetzee is not scared to go the whole way. Is is Lurie, the Malkovich character, just playing out all different options of guilt because of obviously what apartheid has given him? Are the black farm worker characters just playing out the rage, or is there something more ambiguous because they work together, they are involved together? And what Coetzee does so brilliantly for me is that he takes history, his answer is to go to history, not in a didactic, predictable, polemical way, but to say that history is inscribed in the psychology. History is inscribed in the white man as much as the black man, white woman and black woman. History, which is unavoidable. These are ordinary people caught up in the maelstrom of history, and how do you write history and fiction and the psychology and these inner lives of these characters? And for me, what he does, and I’m going to come to Marquez as well, they bring history in, but not in a lecturing or excessively academic or scholarly way. It’s so deep inside the characters. It’s almost so deep in the DNA that they don’t have a choice, these characters almost, and I think that is what is so fascinating in the writing, and that goes back to me where he’s able to be inside and outsider.
He can step right in and see it and feel it and live it himself, obviously, and he can step right back and he can bring in some of the huge complexities of history without the characters just being mouthpieces of political arguments in a way. It goes much, much deeper, like Dostoevsky does. Dostoevsky looking at violence, punishment, crime, cruelty, all of those. Dostoevsky, the possessed madness he questions, “What is all this?” And Dostoevsky, also for me brings history in and myth into the characters. So getting all passionate again, Lucy decides to stay on the farm and not press charges, and her father, Lurie, can’t believe it and they argue about why, but also he can’t protect his daughter and he wanted to. He can’t protect her, not only in immediate father daughter way, but he can’t protect her from the inevitable ineluctable shift of history moving, can’t do it, can’t stop it. I think Coetzee is almost saying that everyone is victim to history. Everyone has some choice, but limited to play out their roles that history has given them. Not entirely, of course, but it is together with that is of course the Beckett idea. You’re on earth and there’s no cure for that, that the human nature is caught up in certain moments at certain times of cultures. So for me, “Disgrace” manages to hold the extreme alternative’s intention I mentioned before, salvation and ruin, redemption and revolution, the ongoing ones that South Africa threw up during apartheid, the TRC at the end, and so much of living there afterwards for all races and for all individuals that somehow everyone has to negotiate that way of living with that history so deep, however much it’s felt.
“Disgrace” is not scared to just go right to that depth, and it’s a disgrace about human nature. It’s a disgrace of what history can do with human nature or not, and what it offers in different ways. Let’s remember, he’s writing a minor opera on Byron. He’s reading Byron’s letters, but he is living in an extremely remote farm in Eastern Cape trying to help his daughter with his history of apartheid finished, but it’s the mid late 90s coming on, and yet he’s trying to write a minor opera about Byron and Byron’s romantic amorous affairs and his letters. We can see that the splits in the mind and in the psychology of the characters as it is already. Can history hold that or can it not? Lucy is also suffering. She’s been raped. I mean, one of the most evil things possible. What is her way of dealing with that? Why does she stay on the farm? Why not press charges and so on and so on. Is she just playing out a sense of guilt that her father accuses her and says, “What do you think you’re going to get salvation through that?” Can salvation be secured on an individual level, salvation from the judgement of history, from the judgement of societies? Is it possible? And I think Coetzee plays with these questions without answering them again, in a naive polemical way. He throws it out for us. Father says, Lucy is wrong to imagine that individual reparation will save her. In the novel he asks his daughter, whether by refusing to lay charges against the rapist, she imagines she’ll be treated differently in the future. Does she really think a progressive outlook will be, and I’m quoting from the novel quoting, “that her outlook will be a sign to paint on a door that will make the plague pass you by,” bringing in little subtle Biblical references, which goes back to Alan Paton and many others, but it’s a sense of, it’s coming through the character.
This is not necessarily Coetzee saying this, really important, it’s the father character who belongs to that different generation, to his own daughter, of course. Liberal whites and goodwill earn immunity from historical anxiety, historical guilt. Is it even an important question to ask? I think it’s inside this and how to negotiate that between an ordinary life, and as I said this, this immense sea of historical forces. So much of the great South African literature captures these questions. There are no simple answers, and I think much of the story of “Disgrace” tries to grapple with these profound, profound questions. Obviously at the back of it is the African experience in South Africa of centuries of colonialism, but obviously that’s all behind it, but there’s also something of the common solitude and the hope of a redemptive state of grace. Let’s flip to the opposite. Take out the disc and just look at the word grace. Back to Hemingway, “Courage is the ability to handle pressure with grace.” So the sense of grace, and is that in our common solitude? Is there redemptive hope that can burn inside the individual, which is there, and it’s so human, obviously, to want hope. So there’s grace not only disgrace inside the word, and I don’t think I’m making too much of an academic speculation. Yeah, with that it’s there inside it. Just as one example of the ability of Coetzee to write, when Coetzee has this university, I suppose very common it’s like a trial, and he’s brought before university powers that be for what’s happened.
This is the early part of the book, and Coetzee makes this fascinating image. He writes, “They circle around him like hunters who have cornered a strange beast and do not know how to finish it off.” I’ll never forget the first time I read that phrase, and just thinking, “What a phrase.” It’s so deeply embedded in South Africa and the animals and the felt the land, which we all love so much, but, “They circle around him like hunters who have cornered a strange beast and do not know how to finish it off.” Very different to the cliche of vultures circling to strike. It’s endlessly evocative. When the father, Lurie, meets Petrus, Petrus, the black farm worker, introduces himself to the professor saying, “'I look after the dogs and I work in the garden. I am the gardener and the dog man. He reflects, 'The dog man,’ he repeats, savouring the phrase”. It’s such a beautifully tiny moment that Coetzee is not unaware of to throw in with the writing to show the sensitivity to each character’s perspective, and that’s the advantage of being the insider and the outsider to project into another person’s mind is essential tool for a writer. And the ability to project into the different character’s perspective without judging and letting each one speak and behave according to the character is the mark of a brilliant writer, which is for me, him, and Marquez and others. So it’s this ability to go right in savouring the phrase, there’s so many possible meanings in there. “I’m the dog man.”
You can imagine so many ironies in the way of saying that, ‘cause of course, once upon a time in South Africa, Petrus was the impoverished dog man, what he was, but now he’s going to become the farm owner, the leader. So at the end finally is Coetzee juxtaposing the cultures, the European culture of Byron and all the others are symbolised by that, and of course the ascendant black South African culture, which is going to take over post apartheid, a toil and a sweat on the land, and what’s it going to have to do with a minor opera about Byron’s letters and passionate affairs. Can they live together? Can they coexist in a peaceful way or not? Is it a creative collision of cultures? Fascinating option. And of course it can be, it’s a fusion, it’s a spitting of the atom, and then constantly creatively colliding with itself, so I think that there’s no answer. He just is throwing all this out inside the novel and it goes on and on. There’s so many beautiful descriptions, but I’m going to hold those there. Even that image when Lurie, the father, is locked in the bathroom and he’s watching the violence being perpetrated on his daughter through the bars that overlook the bathroom’s small window, it’s a hint of Robben Island. It’s again, the insider outsider, that prison eye perspective in and out, but of course nobody’s in a prison, or mentally are they? It’s enough to suggest it through metaphor. Okay, so the father of course is outraged and Lucy says finally at the end, she says about her choice, she says, “Objectively, I’m a woman alone. I have no brothers.
I have a father, but he’s powerless in the terms that matter here, so who can I turn to for protection? Practically speaking, there’s only Petrus left. Petrus may not be a big man, but he’s big enough for someone small like me. I need him.” There’s a pragmatic choice and realisation here at the end. The father is indignant and can’t understand and won’t and doesn’t want to, the clash. Lucy goes on, “I don’t think you get the point,” to her father. “Petrus is not offering me a church wedding followed by a honeymoon on the wild coast. He’s offering an alliance, a deal. I contribute the land in return for which I’m allowed to creep in under his wing. Yes, it is humiliating, but perhaps that is a good point to start from again.” So Coetzee, trying to be honest to the character’s perspective and point of view, crucial. So we get both here very powerfully. We get her perspective, we get the older generation, her father’s perspective, totally different, and Petrus, and the black farm worker perspective. So in all of this, I think we have a set of images, metaphors about history, myth and psychologies in post apartheid era. Okay, I want to go on a little bit with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, one of the fantastic writers. He is, of course from Columbia, South America, wins the Nobel Prize in 1982, primarily for the one great novel, “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, the other one, “Love in the Time of Cholera”, and many others that he wrote. “One Hundred Years of Solitude” he wrote in 1967.
“Love in the Time of Cholera” in 1985. What’s fascinating about him, it’s very different, but there’s a similar idea of solitude, and it’s not aloneness really. It’s a solitude, how to deal with myth and history that we inherit in a solitary way, which not necessarily lonely, but solitary. It’s a very individual sense of reflection in the book, and I think there’s a link with Coetzee in that way. Marquez, of course, is well known for magic realism, and where in Marquez’s own words to, “How do you see the extraordinary in the ordinary?” Take ordinary events, but how do you find something extraordinary in it? Some of his works are set in the fictional village of Macondo, which is inspired by his birthplace, Aracataca, and the theme of solitude, of course, is the deepest one. He’s the most translated Spanish author. He sold over 50 million copies of “One Hundred Years of Solitude, been translated into 147 languages at the last count. What’s fascinating is that it, he’s very imbued with his parents and the way he received stories from his grandfather who had constantly, he was this quite famous figure, who fought for liberal and democratic values in Columbia, and he calls him the colonel, and he was an excellent storyteller, and then there’s his grandmother, and his grandmother filled him with stories of ghosts, premonitions, omens, hauntings. Marquez wrote, "She was the source of the magical, the supernatural view of reality, a magical view of reality.” There’s a beauty, there’s a wander, and there’s also a sense of make something much more than it just is. Reality isn’t just looking at a pretty rose, or as Marquez once said to a friend, “Reality’s not just the price of eggs,” there’s something hidden behind it, and that’s what he meant by magic realism.
The magical is something hidden behind. Picasso once said, “When I paint a tree, I don’t just see the tree. I’m painting colour, shape, and angle.” See something behind, something more that is there. So his grandmother’s telling all these stories fantastic, and he says as a kid, “However, fantastic and improbable they were, she always delivered him as though they were irrefutable truth in a deadpan style.” And that so much influences his style of writing in “One Hundred Years of Solitude”. He was very inspired by Kafka, “The Metamorphosis”, fantastic novel, and I’m sure many of us we love Kafka and that’s a also a kind of magic realism. It’s such a magical invention of Kafka. Gregor Samsa woke up one day and found he was a huge insect and he was obsessed with being worried that he’d be late for work. And then William Faulkner’s narrative techniques, historical themes, rural locations, et cetera. All of this is fairly common. Interestingly, in 1991, Marquez wrote a book called “Changing the History of Africa”, which was a study of mainly the Cuban soldiers during the Angolan Civil War and what became known as the South African Border War. So interesting that crossovers and his interests were way beyond obviously South American Columbia. His grandfather was the one that I mentioned. His grandmother was the one to tell the stories. “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, just to go onto it a little bit. On the left is obviously in Spanish “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, on the right “Love in the Time of Cholera”.
“One Hundred Years of Solitude” has got this magic realism style of writing where the supernatural can be presented as mundane, and the mundane as supernatural or extraordinary. You can suddenly play with the image and you can almost take it anywhere. And for Marquez, it’s that ability to look behind, not just the price of eggs or the tree or whatever, the river, but something you can imagine behind it, and that’s how you understand solitude and the supernatural, and it’s not so far from Coetzee, the insider and the outsider, 'cause the insider would just see the facts and the literal things all the time, but the outsider can look and see something beyond the river or how you see the tree, or how we see the father/ son relationship, whatever. Again, he talks quite a lot about myth and history overlapping, and our history becomes myth and myth takes from history and they overlap. And I think it’s quite close to Coetzee in that way as well. Constant intertwining of the ordinary, the extraordinary, how the historical fact becomes a mythical event in the imagination of some of the characters or the writer. And he’s always looking for this creative impulse. Yes, it may be full of sorrow, but it’s also full of beauty in the way that anything can. That’s why I wanted to mention some of those Nobel Prize winners, because there’s a beauty in what they’re doing and contributing, but they can be a sorrow as well. He wants to bring, of course, the imagination into it, and when he started writing “One Hundred Days of Solitude, he was of course a totally unknown writer, and he gave up his job and he said to his wife and family, "Look, can we just,”.
They were going away and he drove straight back. They went to their small home, sold the car. The family would’ve money to live on, and he just wrote every day for 18 months, and his wife and family stood by him and he just kept writing, and out of that came the great novel, “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, not only all the money and the fame, but a remarkable piece of writing. And they often needed to get credit of buying food from the butcher, the baker et cetera, so it is such a serious commitment to the art of writing. “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, fundamentally about it chronicles seven generations of this Colombian family, of the Buendia family from the fictional founding of the village in South America, their trials and tribulations, their births, deaths, history, the rural, the urban, all of this. It’s all interwoven with the main idea of solitude and history becoming mythologies and myth, and that’s part of how magical realism can work, because you can see the myth behind the historical fact or event. “Love in the Time of Cholera” very briefly, which he wrote in 1985, after “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is a fascinating idea that he found and it’s based on something he read in the newspaper, and he read it was about the love of very elderly people, and the newspaper story, which apparently was based on fact, was about the death of two Americans who were about 80 years old. They would meet every year, once a year in Acapulco, and one day they were out on a boat, and they were murdered by the boatman who bashed them, beat them with the oars.
And Marquez wrote through their death, the story of their secret romance became known because, sorry, they were both married to other people, but they had this commitment once a year they would meet in Acapulco and celebrate their romantic love and their beauty, and this went on for years and years and years, and they were 80 years old and they were still meeting in Acapulco when the story came out. Marquez wrote, “Through their death, the story of their secret romance became known and I was fascinated. They were also each married to other people and kept the secret for decades.” So this one single event, which he then turns into “Love in the Time of Cholera”, and he’s fascinated by love of these two elderly people who’s just turned 80 and the beauty and the wonder in the time of cholera, so whatever is happening historically can be cholera, it can be whatever event, they have found the beauty of love between the two of them. They’re going to break up their families. They find it in the go-to for them magical wonder world, I imagine, of Acapulco. You can already see the magic realism and the fantastical inside the realism of that story. Is he just making it exotic and exciting and interesting or is he taking some, I think he’s taking something and going really, really quite profoundly into, again, human nature. There’s much more enchanting than there is maybe in Coetzee, but it’s equally, it’s obsessed with the same themes, and obviously solitude runs all the way through, solitude in everyone.
And what he wrote about solitude in the Latin American experience, Marquez wrote, “The interpretation of our reality is through patterns which are not our own. It serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, and therefore ever more solitary.” I find that fascinating understanding of what solitude is, how we try to interpret reality through patterns, but they’re not our own. There are patterns that are happening, history and mythology, and our own psychology and our own lives are caught up in the shifting sands of the characters that he describes, and I think that is so close to Coetzee. We can know a certain amount, but not everything. Why Lucy chooses what she does, why her father does, why Petrus, all the characters that are caught up in the novels. We can’t ultimately know. These are unconscious choices, decisions, desires. Are they filled from history and mythology? Are they much more psychologically conscious, rational choices? Are they a mixture? This is what a great writer tries to grapple with, and of course there’s the themes of the surrealism of it, the fictional village, the urban, the rural, the violence, and not scared to go into cruelty and violence in the same way as Coetzee is not scared at all. Both writers refuse to see literature as a platform for a political point of view or political party. They’re trying to go deeper. Marquez wrote, “The duty of the writer is to write well and penetrate reality.” And I don’t think Coetzee would be too far from that as well. He’s the most popular and regarded as the best writer in Spanish since Cervantes, which is a pretty huge, huge achievement and he’s interested in chronicling a nation’s life and culture and history, but in this very, very individual story way.
Yes, he uses magic realism, totally different history to South Africa, but I think obsessed with the same kinds of key questions that Coetzee is in a completely different way. In the Nobel Prize, his speech, when he gave the acceptance speech in winning the Nobel Prize in 1982, the title of his speech was The Solitude of South America, the Solitude of Latin America in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined. I think there’s something endlessly powerful in these two writers who I love and the completely different approaches and yet inside it is a very modern obsession with these themes that I’ve mentioned. Okay, so let’s hold it there and let’s go into questions.
Q&A and Comments:
Okay, Stuart, hi. I think good dates are wrong. Nobel was born in 1853, not 80. Did I say 1883? Gosh, I’m sorry if I wrote that in the beginning, that mistake in my typing. Stuart, you’re absolutely right, not 1883. Thanks. Thanks for that, Stuart.
Q: Joan, do you have family in Israel?
A: Yes, my sister lives in Jerusalem, and her daughter and granddaughters live in Jerusalem, not too far from her, and lots and lots of cousins all over Israel directly, and obviously we’re speaking every day and all the time. Absolutely unspeakable horror what’s going on.
Michael, be advised right now, Hezbollah and Lebanon have started attacking. Oh my, oh, as we thought, terrible, terrible. Absolutely unspeakable. Thanks for that, Michael.
Q: Is this maybe biblical prophecy?
A: Hmm. That’s another whole conversation which we could go into.
Morris, Gross error on his life. The title says 1883. Apologies in my typing. Okay, absolutely. Thank you.
Mitzi, I have trouble with the Nobel Prize. One winner for a Peace Prize was an anti-Semitic man of mass murderer, Yasser Arafat. Yeah, the other was Jose Saramago, a Nobel Laureate. Yes. There’s a quote and I’m not going to read it because it’s just so horrific and evil. Pure evil. I agree, but I think that we have to take these things on which is why I want to give the example of Richard Kuhn, who was a pretty high ranking Nazi and mixing with pretty high ranking Nazi officials, and it’s only because Hitler refuses him permission to go there but he wins, so these are things that are happening which are real in society and we have to absolutely judge them and condemn them, but we have to see it as part of what’s happening in the world and has been since Nobel started over 100 years ago with the prize.
Jill, one of Nobel’s dynamite factories was established in Fontaine 1894. I didn’t know that, interesting, for the mines, and it grew to become the largest dynamite factory in the world. That’s fascinating. Jill, thank you. That’s really, really interesting.
Marilyn, there’s an obituary in today’s “English Times” about a man called Chuck Feeney, gave away millions, but very discreetly. I haven’t heard of him either. I’m going to go and Google and have a look. Thanks, Marilyn.
Bruce, the Nobel Prize in economics was just awarded to a Jewish woman. Yes. Claudia Golden. Yeah, I read it the other day. She studied inequality with men and women in the workplace. Absolutely, she was a classmate of mine at Bronx High School and Cornell. Fascinating, Bruce. Thanks for sharing.
Q: Rodney, is Coetzee, as an outsider, address helpless?
A: I’m not sure what you mean there.
Q: Paula, will you be discussing “Master Harold and the Boys” by Fugard?
A: Thanks, your kind comments. We going to do some other things at the moment, but Fugard, of course, remains top of the top of the mountain in terms of playwrights and obviously South African writer, some fantastic plays, “The Island”, “Master Harold”, the others.
Lorna, can’t understand the dwelling of the guy, Coetzee in such a galaxy of other world figures who were prize winners. I think because we are dealing with South Africa at the moment and Coetzee, Nobel Prize, a very different type of writing. Obviously there’s Nadine Gordimer, there’s Bloke Modisane, there’s Lewis Nkosi, there’s Ezekiel Mphahlele, there’s . There’s so many writers, black and white from South Africa and I know a lot of them. We have to choose somewhere.
Q: Coetzee is fascinating because he is that outsider, insider individual, and I think Marquez is to a degree as well. I guess I’m very influenced by and that kind of way of thinking as a writer. Jewel, history in the novel, could you comment?
A: That would be fascinating parallel between Coetzee and Amos Oz. That’s fascinating. It’s a lovely idea, Jewel. Let me hold it in my mind.
Thank you. Monty, Crick and Watson, yeah, won Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine discovery of the DNA.
Rosalind Franklin, a Jew, was completely ignored, the work she did. Absolutely spot on, Monty, in the way that Lise Meitner was.
Q: Sandy, does history negate free will?
A: That is a superb question, and that is something that I have certainly obsessed with and I’m sure you have Sandy. I don’t think it does. I think going back to the ancient Greeks, it’s always an eternal dynamic. It can be a creative tension, it can be a destructive tension between history and free will, between destiny and choice, fate and free choice. It’s the ancient Greek philosophy in a phrase in Aristotle, Euripides, all of the great writers and what we receive from all of them, and I don’t think it’s changed that much in the western world certainly and other parts. I think it’s the two, and that’s part of being also human.
Ruth, David Lurie is a Jewish name, please comment. Yes, I can only think that Coetzee, 'cause there’s no hint anytime, and people who are very good friends of mine, and who knew Coetzee when he lived in Cape Town, certainly that he ever was in antisemitic in any way. He isn’t, he isn’t anything, so why choose a Jewish name? I think it’s the sense of the outsider, and I think Coetzee identifies with the outsider. That’s why he goes back to that image of the writer in South Africa. It’s almost as if they’re writing from inside or outside a prison looking in or looking out. I mean it’s quite an extraordinary image if you think about it, for a writer to describe writing from a particular culture. It’s not the usual, I’m going to bear a witness to history. It’s quite different, and he wants to bring human nature. I think it’s that identification with the outsider in Jewish history and Jewish experience.
Marilyn, sadly, Rosalind Franklin died before the Nobel Prize was awarded, so it was easier to ignore a contribution. Thanks for that, Marilyn.
Q: It’s important. Josie, do you discern changes in Coetzee’s gestalt in his writing after he immigrated?
A: Partly. Fascinating question, Josie. I think I do, but not a huge one. I think that he just has moved and has kept up with his writing with different passions and obsessions. Muhammad Ali once said, “If I have the same obsessions at the age of 40 as I had at the age of 20, I’ve got a serious problem.” Think that Muhammad Ali captures something there. So Coetzee’s gestalt is going to change like all of us as we grow older, as life changes, we have children, family, cultures. We move, we do change, and therefore the writing would, or the the obsessions can change as well.
Corinne, thank you about “Disgrace”. Chiselled, yeah, I do feel that with his spare pointed writing. That’s partly how it’s so evocative. It’s so minimalist, it’s so spare, which is ironic because we live in a world of excessive communication. Words, words, noise. There’s Daniel Kahneman’s book “Noise”. I mean it’s end endless cluttered noise, so many words. So the irony of great writing in contemporary times can be to go very minimalist, to have a greater emotional impact on the reader. He embeds history in the character and the landscape, yep. Unlike Isabella and Andy, I would agree there as well.
Marianne, Lorna Sandler, agree, thank you. Almost as if he’s prepared a lecture and has to give it, yes.
Paula, thank you very much. Yeah, they’re fine. They’re okay in Jerusalem, yeah. Thank you.
Rita, I see a rudeness around today. Ah, not sure what you refer to. Helen, reporting rudeness. If one doesn’t like the lecture or the topic into an exit. Ah, okay. I’m not sure what that is, okay.
Rita, David, my brother, a well-known photographer and the opportunity to do a photo shoot with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It’s a wonderful, oh, that’s fantastic. I’d love to read that interview and see the photo. Thank you, Rita, to share that.
Caroline and Kay Louise, my brother was so excited by “One Hundred Years of Solitude”. He read it to me translating as he read from Spanish to English. He did the same sometimes with . That’s an extraordinary story. It’s amazing, Louise. He was reading it and translating at the same time. Brilliant. Thank you for sharing, research. Thank you, appreciate.
Q: And Ruth, are you going to cover any Black South African writers?
A: We’ll have to see what we have time for to fit into. I know them very well. Well, I’m quite friendly with some of them and Nat Nakasa as well, short story, “The Suit”. So many fantastic writers. In the very title, “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, “Love in the Time of Cholera”, it’s so obvious that he’s bringing history and myth into character and literature in a magic realist, fantastical way.
Catherine, thank you, very kind. Roger, from Toronto, thank you Roger.
Sarah, I expect you mentioned. Nadine Gordimer. Unfortunately it was alert, yeah. So I missed, Nadine was married to my father’s first cousin, Rena Casara. Oh, fascinating. “When I was based at Pretoria, I was able to see her much more often. She had an amazing self-discipline.” Yeah, and a fantastic writer. Fantastic, superb writer as well. Just we are limited how much we can obviously take on. So yeah, we have to make these choices. Thank you, Sandra, very kind comment, thank you.
Yeah, the passion, Stuart, thanks very much, and I hope your family and everybody’s families are safe in these terrible, terrible times.
Barry, Jews are and then sometimes they turned. Yeah, absolutely, sometimes Jewish people help this one, help that one. It turns, it doesn’t turn. Shakespeare’s word from “King Lear” if I remember, the wheel of fire, the wheels of history.
Gina, I’m from Worcester. David Lurie would’ve been the prize winner decades before Coetzee. That’s a fantastic comment, Gina.
Great, thank you. Lorna, with virtue as a translator, Marquez has just died. Oh, okay, interesting. Ruth, thank you for your kind comment.
Okay, so thank you very much everybody, and hope everybody is well and all prayers again and thoughts for the present and the future. Thanks so much, Jess, for your help and to Wendy and everybody in these terrible, terrible times, but we have to keep going and fighting. Thank you so much and do take care for the rest of the week.