The work of white South African writer John Maxwell Coetzee often concerns itself with the relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed. When Coetzee won the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature, president of the committee Per Wastberg observed in his speech, “Coetzee sees through the obscene poses and false pomp of history, lending voice to the silenced and the despised.” By representing the exploited, Coetzee reveals the unspoken story, the silence of the victim. In this way, he directs our attention to the often tyrannous nature of storytelling itself: that we do not hear the suppressed voice, merely the loudest one.
Coetzee has been labelled as a reclusive and private man by many of his friends. Indeed, he did not travel to London to receive the Booker prize for his novel The Life and Times of Michael K in 1983, nor when he became the first writer to win the award twice in 1999, this time for Disgrace. Coetzee is regarded as a highly elusive author, only granting access to a select minority of interviewers. This is of particular interest, given his concern with the unspoken story.
It is probably due to his own situation that Coetzee is interested in the representation of the unspoken story, and it is difficult not to draw comparisons between his circumstances and his storytelling. Born in Cape Town in 1940 and brought up under the apartheid regime, Coetzee is an author who is strongly influenced by his personal background. Despite being a white writer in the racially segregated South Africa, he grew to write with strong anti-imperialist beliefs, feeling a sense of alienation from his fellow Afrikaners. Much of Coetzee’s writing indirectly reflects events unfolding within South African society. When we consider the rapid, sometimes traumatic, changes that transformed the country, this is particularly troubling.
In “Into the Dark Chamber: The Writer and the South African State”, from his collection of essays Doubling the Point (Harvard, 1992), Coetzee discusses torture:

The dark, forbidden chamber is the origin of novelistic fantasy per se; in creating an obscenity, in enveloping it in mystery, the state unwittingly creates the preconditions for the novel to set about its work of representation.

This indicates his interest in drawing attention to the censored story, to the extremes that are never discussed. The situation in South Africa furthered, or perhaps created, his interest in the unspoken story because “the law sees to it as far as it can that not only such people but also the prisons in which they are held become invisible.”
Many of Coetzee’s writings centre on a solitary character. His aim is to highlight problems and enable the reader to generate answers. The Life and Times of Michael K (1983) is set in Cape Town, a city troubled by racial wars. It focuses on Michael K, a gardener who attempts to bring his dying mother to the farm of her youth. Although she dies during the journey, Michael K continues on to the farm with her ashes. The novel does not focus on racial separations but is more concerned with humanity as a whole.
In Disgrace (1999), crime, rape and racial divides are themes of the novel and problems in modern day South Africa. Disgrace illuminates two key concerns of Coetzee’s work: the motivations behind colonisation and its legacies in a post-colonial time. For Coetzee, the post-colonial era does not indicate the disintegration of empire, but instead a new and more sinister phase of colonisation.
Coetzee’s interest in the voice of the victim is perhaps best seen in his work Foe (1986), a re-telling of Daniel Defoe’s classic Robinson Crusoe from within the city of London. Re-imagining such a novel of British imperialism, it adopts a familiar strategy of post-colonial fiction (such as Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea), as it writes back to the culture of the coloniser. Foe is ultimately a tale about story telling. Susan Barton, a castaway on the island, tells her story to an author, Daniel Foe, after she has returned to England and her island companion Crusoe has died. In this way, Coetzee places the story in the hands of the minor character (Barton) and shifts the focus onto the previously unspoken voice. However, the reader soon learns about the suppression of voice as Daniel Foe rewrites the story into the classic tale, removing Susan Barton’s part in the story, effectively suppressing her voice and replacing it with his own authority.
Yet for all its variety of tone, Foe is conspicuously a novel about silence. The silence of Friday is all-important, as Coetzee refuses to represent his voice. Through the silent centre of this text, Coetzee exposes the extent to which language is a key tool of colonisation. The brutal suppression of story is revealed when we learn that Friday cannot speak because slave traders have cut out his tongue. Coetzee lingers over the thought of “the root of his tongue closed behind those heavy lips like a toad in eternal winter” and is obsessed with this suppression because “his mutilation was secret, closed behind his lips.” In this way, we too become fixated on Friday’s untold story.
This suppression remains until the end of the novel when the author takes the reader down into the depths of the ocean to see an alternative fate for Friday. We understand that story can be subverted to conclude in any possible way, with the narrator’s intervention and authority, but that Friday’s story can only be imagined because we do not have his voice. The seabed is like ‘the mud of Flanders, in which generations of grenadiers now lie dead, trampled in the postures of sleep.’ The author finds Friday’s body also at the bottom of the sea, fated by a shipwreck to remain there forever with a slave chain still around his throat.
At the end of the story, ‘his mouth opens. From inside him comes a slow stream, without breath, without interruption. It flows up through his body and out upon me; it passes through the cabin, through the wreck; washing the cliffs and shores of the island, it runs northward and southward to the ends of the earth. Soft and cold, dark and unending, it beats against my eyelids, against the skin of my face.’ This is Friday’s unspoken voice of both his and his kind’s fate. Friday remains mute; his tongue cut, never allowed the liberty to tell his tale.
Likewise, in Waiting for the Barbarians (1982), Coetzee is interested in the story of the victim, a woman, who, through torture, is rendered blind. She is crippled and covered in scars like a map of her story for the magistrate to read. This novel is an exploration of the relationship between barbarity and civilisation. Set in an unspecified land, at an undefined point in time, the novel examines the relationship between coloniser and colonised. The magistrate, who is in charge of a frontier settlement, finds himself caught between the empire who employs him and the barbarians for whom he feels increasing sympathy. The barbarians lie at the core of the very empire that believes them to be other.
Coetzee focuses on the unspoken story of the mutilated woman. The magistrate becomes obsessed with tracing her scars, the wounds at the edges of her eyes, and dwells repeatedly upon the torture he did not see, the torture room he did not enter. The barbarian girl consumes the magistrate, and yet we rarely hear her voice. In fact, we only get the girl’s viewpoint when another woman tells the magistrate “we talked to each other about what was on our minds. Sometimes she would cry and cry and cry. You made her very unhappy. Did you know that?”
The magistrate is obsessed with knowing the story of the persecution that this woman has suffered. He states ‘with this woman it is as if there is no interior, only a surface across which I hunt back and forth seeking entry. Is this how her torturers felt hunting their secret, whatever they thought it was?’ It is with this we recognise that in the magistrate’s need to know the woman’s story he is allied with the torturers, as like the torturers he also felt this need to penetrate the surface of the woman. The lack of constancy in position of coloniser and colonised is further emphasised when the magistrate becomes the tortured, when his tormentors hang him from a tree. During his screams of pain and fear as he nears death, the torturers exclaim, “that is barbarian language you hear”, indicating that what was interpreted as barbarian language was actually the cries of suffering: the victim’s story, rather than the words of the oppressor.
Coetzee’s latest novel, Slow Man, was published last September. The book tells the story of retired photographer Paul Rayment, who loses his leg in a bicycle accident. During his convalescence, Rayment pushes away his friends and is forced to reflect on a life he feels was wasted. This loneliness lifts with the arrival of Marijana, his Croatian nurse, with whom Paul becomes smitten, although he is unsure of how to express his feelings. It is at this stage in the novel that Coetzee employs a new literary device: the distinguished writer Elizabeth Costello, the eponymous heroine of Coetzee’s 2003 novel, visits Paul and informs him that he is to be a character in her novel. Costello demands that he become more of a main character in the narrative and threatens to take over the direction of his life. In doing this, Costello attempts to suppress Paul’s true story–she is sabotaging her own author’s usual approach to writing, a suppressed story in itself.
At the heart of all of Coetzee’s novels, then, lies the concept of the unspoken story, drawing attention to the people who are unable to voice their stories. It is this discovery of silent strands of narrative that makes Coetzee’s works so fascinating.