Coetzee: Utanc - J. M.

In Summertime , his fictionalized memoir, a character says of Coetzee himself: “He was not a happy man. He was a man beset by shame.” Perhaps that is his gift to us: a literature that refuses to look away from the small, ugly, utterly human moment when we realize we are not who we wished to be.

In Elizabeth Costello , Coetzee creates a novelist so sensitive to shame that she cannot eat meat without imagining the animal’s suffering. Her utanc is intellectual: she is ashamed of humanity’s cruelty, but also ashamed of her own preaching. In a famous scene, she gives a lecture on animal rights and then, in private, admits she feels like a fraud. “I am not a philosopher,” she says. “I am a writer.” But even that identity is suspect. Coetzee’s deepest insight is that the most honest people are those most ashamed of their own honesty. Elizabeth Costello cannot escape the mirror. Utanc - J. M. Coetzee

Michael K, a gentle man with a cleft lip, suffers a different utanc : the shame of embodiment. In a nation at war, his body is a problem to be solved by bureaucrats, soldiers, and doctors. He is arrested for not having papers, force-fed, and treated as a subhuman anomaly. Yet Coetzee’s genius is to show that Michael K feels shame not for what he has done, but for what he is —a creature of simple needs in a world that demands ideology. His ultimate act is to retreat into a mountain, grow pumpkins, and refuse to speak. His utanc is so total that language itself becomes an instrument of humiliation. In Summertime , his fictionalized memoir, a character