The novel is made possible by divisions. Coetzee divided the book into two sections called “Strong Opinions” and “Second Diary” in order to differentiate issues extrinsic and intrinsic to the self, only to reveal that they’re actually both driven by external events on the one hand, and limitations of intellectual and affective visions on the other. Additionally Coetzee divided each page into essays supposedly written by Señor C, an aging Australian writer born in South Africa, who wrote a novel called Waiting for the Barbarians, not unlike Coetzee himself; his narration of encounters with and thoughts of Anya, a Filipina who never lived in the Philippines whom he invited to work as his typist; and Anya’s observations of Señor C’s writings, and of his actions and reactions towards her.
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An excerpt from Señor C’s essay, “On terrorism,”: “… a secret is an item of information and as such falls under the wing of information science, one of whose branches is mining, the extraction of scintillae of information (secrets) from tons of data. The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible.” He liked to call his brand of political thought “pessimistic anarchistic quietism, or anarchist quietistic pessimism, or pessimistic quietistic anarchism,” even if he doubted his own qualification as a thinker.
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Anya recognizes herself, and knows that she’s most probably viewed, as “racy, exciting, exotic” yet “just the little Filipina”–but with a tinge of irony, which is the only probable tone Coetzee could have given her, if he would like to survive in our age of political correctness. She even teased, that is return the gaze to, the old man when he asked her where she was born: “Why do you want to know? Am I not blonde-eyed and blue-haired enough for your tastes?” Señor C was speechless, but in another occasion, upon seeing Anya’s clothes “enough to outfit a middle-sized cathouse,” he asked if she had “a shoe collection too.” Filipinas are remembered for how little they are, and how extravagant. But Anya remembered her mother as someone very loyal to her Australian father, and mused: “That is how we are, we Filipinas. Good wives, good mistresses, good friends too. Everything good.”
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Movies, aside from literary works, are among Señor C’s immediate intertexts in his essays, like Kurasawa’s Seven Samurai and Kubrick’s film adaption of Lolita. His was a commissioned series of essays because he admitted to no longer have the endurance needed for writing novels. He told Anya that, “To write a novel you have to be like Atlas, holding up a whole world on your shoulders and supporting it there for months and years while its affairs work themselves out.”
Anya was eager to tell the old man, however, that his essays, especially the one about the terrorists, were a bit “idealistic” and “unrealistic,” and then shared her own uncle’s encounters with the Islamists in Mindanao, who don’t mind dying if it could bring nearer “the day of the battle to end all battles, when the infidels are defeated and Islam takes over the world.” She was so opinionated, a “little Filipina typist who thinks she knows everything,” that Señor C wondered if Anya was the real mother of the thoughts he was putting down on paper. But, really, where does authorship begin and end?
Filed under: 1001 Lists & Beyond Tagged: Beyond the 1001 Books, J.M. Coetzee
