CULTURE: South African Wins the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Ferial Haffajee

JOHANNESBURG, Oct 2 2003 (IPS) - The award of this year’s Nobel Prize for literature to the South African novelist and linguist John Maxwell Coetzee is the cherry on top for the country’s writers this year.

Novelists Damon Galgut, Andre Brink and Achmat Dangor have also been short-listed for international literary prizes.

Galgut’s novel, ‘The Good Doctor’, has been short-listed for the Booker prize, while Brink and Dangor are finalists in Commonwealth literary awards.

The prize is worth 1.3 million U.S. dollars, but its winners enter the annals of global literary greats. In this, it is an almost priceless prize.

Coetzee has won the Booker prize twice – in 1999 and 1983 – but failed to collect his prize on both occasions. The Nobel was awarded not for a single work, but for his long-standing contribution to literature.

An existential and stark writer, Coetzee’s work is at once universal and fiercely South African. He has delved apartheid and the post-apartheid era always through the eyes of complex and fascinating protagonists.

His universal themes have included the breakdown of characters to rebuild and a razor-sharp (sometimes painful) inspection and introspection of human dilemma. But he eschews any national or global identity except his own, perhaps explaining his rejection of the celebrity status enjoyed by writers like Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy.

"I am not a herald of community or anything else. I am someone who has intimations of freedom (as every chained prisoner has) and constructs representations of people slipping their chains and turning their faces to the light," Coetzee has said of himself.

Born in Cape Town, South Africa, Coetzee is teaching at the University of Chicago. He was a shoe-in for the Nobel Prize, said analysts though the Swedish Academy, which awarded the prize Thursday, does not make known its short-list.

The Nobel academy’s Horace Engdahl found the decision an easy one. ". we think he should belong to our literary heritage," he said.

South Africa’s literary critic and activist Mike van Graan says the win is "fantastic news. South Africans have made a clean sweep", he says, adding the win was particularly appropriate coming on the heels of ‘Proudly South African’ month in September.

‘Proudly South African’ is a campaign to celebrate the country’s heritage, promote tourism and to encourage consumers to buy locally. With book production and sales always at a low, the win by Coetzee is likely to give the local market a fillip.

Van Graan believes Coetzee’s literary longevity is owed to the fact that he is a writer still growing at 64 years old. Comparing one of his first and most famous books, ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’, which took readers into the dark heart of apartheid, and the book ‘Disgrace’ for which he won his second Booker, Van Graan discerns distinctly different style.

Critics have however also noted similarities and parallels between ‘Disgrace’ and the ‘Life and Times of Michael K’.

As a chronicler of "people slipping their chains and turning their faces to the light", Coetzee, through his writing, holds a bleak view of post-apartheid South Africa as captured in ‘Disgrace’, almost as bleak as his treatment of apartheid.

"It is Coetzee’s first book to deal explicitly with post-apartheid South Africa, and the picture it paints is a cheerless one that will comfort no one, no matter what race, nationality or viewpoint," said reviewer Andrew O’Hehir about the novel.

This is the second time the Nobel prize for literature has been awarded to a South African novelist – in 1991, Nadine Gordimer bagged what is arguably the world’s finest literary accolade. Coetzee is the third African to win the prize – and he has ended an eight-year domination by European writers.

With a fierce and global glare on South Africa during the apartheid era, its artists often won praise because the canvas on which they constructed was a ready-made script. "The times were black and white; there were obvious goodies and baddies. It was somewhat easy to make the world stage; now South Africa is just another country," says Van Graan.

This makes the multiple awards by local writers this year doubly deserved. But, Van Graan also adds, that "we live in interesting times" that are more complex and challenging for writers, perhaps presenting a canvas that is also more interesting to work with.

Alison Lowry, the chief executive officer of Penguin publishers in South Africa, agrees. "In the past it was South Africa’s politics more than its creativity that was noticed. Now it’s the writing and the writers being looked at first. So while South African themes are not that popular, South African writing is being taken more seriously," she adds.