By Robert Becker
Tribune higher education reporter
Published October 3, 2003
John Maxwell Coetzee, a University of Chicago professor and South African-born novelist, won the 2003 Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday, a crowning achievement for a writer lauded for his precise prose and facile imaginings.
The committee said of the author, who has taught at the U. of C. since 1996: "It is in exploring weakness and defeat that Coetzee captures the divine spark in man."
Coetzee (pronounced kut SEE ah), who has a reputation as an intensely private person, has crafted a body of work that is grounded in the moral bankruptcy of apartheid South Africa, yet serves as a timeless fable of the human condition.
Coetzee, 63, declined requests for an interview, but the university, where he is a distinguished service professor in the Committee on Social Thought, released a statement saying the author was surprised.
"I am particularly happy that the announcement has come during this autumn quarter, which is the time of year that I spend at University of Chicago," Coetzee said in the statement.
Coetzee lives in Australia but travels to Chicago to teach in the autumn quarter. This year, he is teaching two classes, one on Plato and the other on Walt Whitman.
The announcement brought to 75 the number of Nobel Prizes awarded to faculty, alumni or researchers at the University of Chicago. It is the third time the celebrated prize has gone to a faculty member for literature. Saul Bellow won in 1976, and Bertrand Russell in 1950.
Praised by colleagues
While Coetzee avoided the hoopla associated with the Nobel announcement, his colleagues praised his unassuming personality, his precise mind and his rigorous prose.
"I think he may be the most honest human being alive--with all the passion and dispassion that is required," said Jonathan Lear, who is co-teaching a class with Coetzee this quarter. "And I think that is there in his writing."
Wayne Booth, one of the U. of C.'s most famous literary critics, summed up Coetzee's achievement this way: "He is one of my literary heroes."
In his own country Coetzee remains revered, but enigmatic.
"He's become so pared-down, so minimalist, that there's a sense of lifelessness about him and his work," said Charlotte Bauer, assistant features editor at This Day, a new daily newspaper that will begin publication in Johannesburg, South Africa, Tuesday. "He has become so spiritual that he's almost fleshless."
Reclusive figure
The prize, awarded in the past to literary giants such as William Faulkner, fellow South African Nadine Gordimer and Samuel Beckett, goes to one of literature's most retiring figures.
Though not as reclusive as novelist J.D. Salinger, Coetzee nevertheless is a man who shuns outside intrusion.
Coetzee is known for abruptly canceling media appearances and winning prizes and not showing up at the awards ceremony, which he did twice--once in 1983 and again in 1999--when he won the Booker Prize, Britain's highest honor for fiction.
Author Rian Malan described Coetzee as "a man of almost monkish self-discipline and dedication. He does not drink, smoke or eat meat ... and spends at least an hour at his writing desk each morning."
Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1940. His father worked as a sheep farmer and held a job with the government. According to a biography compiled by Emory University, Coetzee's father lost his post with the government for dissenting with the then-apartheid government. The family subsequently moved to the town of Worcester.
Coetzee attended the University of Cape Town, receiving degrees in English and mathematics and later receiving a master's degree in English.
Coetzee traveled to the U.S. to continue his studies, enrolling at the University of Texas at Austin.
Thomas Cable, a professor of English at the University of Texas, was a graduate student with Coetzee during his Austin days.
Cable remembers social gatherings with Coetzee and over a glass of wine discussing Noam Chomsky's "latest book on syntax and talking about how linguistics could be applied to the study of literature."
"Even when you got to know him, he was a quiet person," Cable said. "He listens carefully, and he's careful about his own words."
Unromantic memories
Some years later Coetzee wrote a singularly unromantic recollection of his graduate student days in Austin, where in 1969 he completed his dissertation on Samuel Beckett and played crickett on a baseball field with other foreign students.
"I moved in a simple stratum of the university community, a stratum of graduate students living thrifty lives in rented apartments with baby toys scattered over the floors, laboring like tortoises to complete courses or prepare for orals or write dissertations," Coetzee wrote in a 1984 essay in the New York Times Book Review.
Coetzee landed a teaching job at the State University of New York at Buffalo, joining the faculty as a scholar, impressing colleagues with his modest manner and careful attention to language.
"I remember him as a shadowy presence--put it that way," said Irving Massey, a retired professor of English and comparative literature at SUNY Buffalo.
Howard Wolf, who is still on the faculty at SUNY, attributed Coetzee's taciturn ways to his obsession with language.
Respect for language
"I think some of it has to do with his respect for language and not wanting any language in print that is not his careful formulation," Wolf said.
Coetzee began work on his first novel while at Buffalo, and the publication in 1974 of "Dusklands"--described by the Nobel committee as the juxtaposition of "two forms of misanthropy"--heralded the beginning of his literary career.
Books seemed to flow out Coetzee, who in the 1970s returned to South Africa to teach. "From the Heart of the Country" appeared in 1977, followed by "Waiting for the Barbarians," which established Coetzee as a serious literary and social writer.
"The feel of writing fiction is one of freedom, of irresponsibility, or better, of responsibility toward something that has not yet emerged," Coetzee once said.
Lear called "Barbarians" the defining book about apartheid in South Africa, yet "it takes place in no place and no time and transcends any particular historical moment."
`Voice against apartheid'
Booth said "Barbarians" is "not just intellectually challenging, but morally and ethically challenging. He was a strong voice against apartheid."
Coetzee won his first Booker Prize in 1983 for "The Life and Times of Michael K," adding to his growing reputation as an important literary voice.
Coetzee continued teaching as his literary fame grew.
Shaun Irlam, chairman of the Department of Comparative Literature at SUNY Buffalo, studied with Coetzee while a graduate student at the University of Cape Town.
Irlam said Coetzee shaped his thinking about literature through the way the celebrated author looked at language.
"No word is wasted," Irlam said. "His advice was to learn to edit your work and pare it down, and that is an important lesson."
Booth said Coetzee's books are not page-turners in the traditional sense of murder mysteries.
"But they are pager turners in another sense because of what I'm learning and thinking about," Booth said.
