Memories of Underdevelopment
There are some epic moments
in this slim volume--memories of bitterness and shame magnified by the
fly-thick heat of the western Cape. Boyhood: Scenes From Provincial Life
by J.M. Coetzee, the Booker Prize-winning white South African novelist and
author of Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) and Life & Times of
Michael K (1983), tells of barren spaces. The first of these is a small
town named Worcester, where Coetzee spent part of his childhood and where
nothing grows. The second is the city of Cape Town, where his family returned
after a stint in the hinterland and where dead babies rot in brown paper
packets.
Part 1 of
an autobiographical trilogy, Boyhood is the story of a boy forced to
endure and imagine his way out of that barrenness. It is a writer's memoir,
minutely detailed and finely polished. Framed by a dystopic post-World War II
South Africa--where the economy has moved from rural to urban, Afrikaner
nationalists have risen to power, and apartheid is testing its wings--the story
airs these larger happenings through the muggy lives of its young protagonist
(the book spans years 10 through 13) and his family: his father, a
nonpracticing attorney whom he despises; his mother, who is too close to him
and to whom he is too close; and a younger brother, who he suspects may, at
heart, be normal.
This last, you understand, is not a good thing. Normalcy,
to which John the memoirist's father is doomed and against which his mother is
his own last bastion, must be avoided at all costs. On young John's rejection
of "normal," that twee, tired word, turns the action of this book. He can
isolate his every sensation, indulge his every impulse, in the untested space
on either side of the n and the l . He identifies himself as a
Roman Catholic--not because he is one (his family is nondenominationally
Christian) but "because of Rome, because of Horatius and his two comrades,
swords in their hands, crested helmets on their heads, indomitable courage in
their glance, defending the bridge ... against the Etruscan hordes." The
bathetic discovery that Roman Catholicism has little to do with Horatius has no
effect on his philosophy of life (asked to choose between the Russians and the
Americans, he chooses the Russians as he chose Rome, because of the letter
r , "particularly the capital R , the strongest of all letters");
but there's a larger reality that will not be ignored: the fact that he,
thinking only of Leonidas at Thermopylae, has by his choice of faiths isolated
himself in a Protestant-majority school. From that day forward, his social
options are severely limited--to the other outcasts, Greenberg and Goldstein,
who are, like him, in a despised religious minority.
Isolation
and introspection, those staples of the Bildungsroman , scrape at young
Coetzee's sensibilities, refining them raw. Exposure--of ignorance, of soft
pink feet in a classroom of callused soles--is anathema. Lessons must be
mastered and feet remain shod. Ugliness and sloth thin the nostrils and raise
the gorge. Appearances must be maintained and the desperately unhappy worlds of
home and school kept separate, and they almost are. Above all is the yearning
for greatness, for acts of wondrous heroism. But shy, brainy, and unpopular,
Coetzee must make do with hyperbolic fantasy instead:
The
water from the water-bottle is magically cool, but he pours no more than a
mouthful at a time. He is proud of how little he drinks. It will stand him in
good stead, he hopes, if he is ever lost in the veld. He wants to be a creature
of the desert, this desert, like a lizard.
Boyhood's grand fumblings put me in mind of
V.S. Naipaul's semiautobiographical novel A House for Mr. Biswas , whose
protagonist is similarly prone to self-romanticization. Like Coetzee, Naipaul
has been accused of avoiding politics when he writes. That's a mystifying
charge: Biswas' paranoias, the magistrate's coming apart in Coetzee's
Waiting for the Barbarians , the antihero's inability to connect with the
world around him in his Life & Times of Michael K , are all directly
traceable to the traumas of political change and the individual's need to find
stability within it.
Likewise,
there is no mistaking the political underpinnings of Boyhood . There are
cozy images of empire: John's obsession with cricket ("not a game ... the truth
of life"), his description of beloved train rides ("sleeping snug and tight
under the crisp white sheets and navy-blue blankets that the bedding attendant
brings"). There are scenes from provincial life that derive from absolute
hierarchies, which, in turn, are built on Manichaean oppositions: The
Afrikaners, with whom he must share a last name, are crude, their language
filthy beyond belief. The Coloureds, fathered by whites upon Hottentots, are
poor and therefore good, naturally qualified by their lack of book-learning to
fix a broken gadget or a leaky faucet. The Natives, rightful owners of the
land, are immutable, their pithy pidginisms ("Man builds great boats of iron,
but the sea is stronger") deserving of the utmost reverence ("You must remember
what he said. He was a wise old man," intones Mrs. Coetzee--this, observes
John, is the only time he has heard his mother use the word "wise"). Atop this
heap are the English, the fascinating, remote English, "people who have not
fallen into a rage because they live behind walls and guard their hearts well."
The stereotyping is powerful, the more so because it appears deceptively
unquestioned.
There is explicit racism, too. What, for example, does one
do with a cup sullied by Coloured lips? Does one wash it, or does one discard
it? (One bleaches it.) It is among these careful calibrations that John must
come into his own. Painfully aware of the limitations of class, occasionally
able to peer outside the prison house of race, he strains to exceed his
inheritance. He despairs of his father the failed lawyer, the gunner who can't
hit a bird that doesn't bother with flight, the pajama-clad alcoholic who
squelches his cigarettes in his own excrement. The son copes, as any kid would,
by leaving out the details that most offend him. When he tells his friends
about his father's service in the South African army during World War II, for
instance, he drops the "lance" before "corporal." But the father remains
common. He cannot aspire.
The mother, however, is
another matter. She has tragic potential. She lives in fear of breast cancer;
adores Ingrid Bergman; learns to ride a bike, then, ridiculed by her family,
abandons it. Underneath it all is her rock-solid, oppressive devotion to her
son. Her tolerance feeds his tantrums, her servitude his warped sense of self.
She, like him, is denied wholeness by her downwardly mobile lot and remains
fluttery and distracted almost to the last, when she has the moment of clarity
her son has dreaded. Unlike the mother, however, the son can and did flee into
his books and beyond--to the pastoral beauty of his grandfather's farm, for
one, and toward his future. Not that Coetzee invites you to celebrate with him.
In Boyhood , as in his other work, astringence remains his first
principle. Frosty of tone, flinty of edge, he doesn't tell you what to feel or
how to escape. You're on your own.
