Apr 28, 2004 01:07 PM
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(Updated Apr 28, 2004 01:07 PM)
Is this a satire meant to puncture the monotony and constancy of the mundane, routine existence that infects every metropolis like a plague or a personal diary of a student whose constant self-critique has gradually paved way for stiff self-contempt, and finally reduced him to a psychotic victim of extreme pessimism. Youth’s paramount flavour is as dual as its main protagonist’s conflicts with the world around and inside him.
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Amongst the more recent works of the Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee, Youth, “on the surface level” narrates the life of a “seemingly” slim and looselimbed simpleton from Cape Town, South Africa in the 1950s who earns his bread and butter working industriously as tutorial-assistant, dummy-coach, library-assistant and even as a statistician for the Municipality simultaneously. Managing comfortably a no-frills-no-thrills life through these multiple vocations, this child-man, all of 19 years believes “each man is an island, you don’t need parents” which explains his ambivalence to relationships –blood and societal.
A constant faith that keeps him buoyant is that “love will cure him. The beloved, the destined one, will see at once through the dull exterior he presents to the fire that burns within him”, rejuvenate him, and transfigure him into a poet beyond compare. Till then, resting in his cocoon, he’s happy being “obscure and ridiculous for he believes that it is the lot of artist to suffer obscurity and ridicule until the day when he’s revealed in his true powers.” After two failed affairs in his native town, fearing an impending revolution, this potent poetry-lover, diligent mathematics-student arrives in London in search of true love and an inspirational ground to transform all his dormant visions and imaginations into fecund lines of poetry.
Absorbed initially by the job-search which eventually lands him in the IBM as a computer programmer where clearly he struggles to find a logic in the routine clerical mess he’s landed himself into, he experiences his first major conflict between his id (his primitive instinct to become a world-renowned poet) and his superego (which tells him that he dare not give up for failing would be too much like his father). Not able to balance these extremes, his ego shrinks and he finds refuge in self-justification and self-criticism. The constant rebuke from his conscience about his social origins keeps accentuating his isolation making his preconceived notions about people around him wilder and vaguer. Lonely and adrift, even his search for true love culminates into random, hurried, even downright embarrassing affairs.
With some more hurried and failed love affairs, its not long before he realises that “if there’s any mastering going on, it is London mastering him”. With this absolute belief ingrained, he shrugs off the job, indulges in a few more forgettable and absolutely futile stints at intimacy (including a brief homosexual one, just to see if in case!) and sways from poetry to prose to nothing. Puzzled and baffled, the harder he tries, the more he feels sucked into the English middle class until the combined effect of the wallop of neutral lives buzzing outside him and the constant conscience-pricking present inside him, he realises, have shrunk his life into yet another inconsequential existence. Is there a way to recuperate, or is it too late?
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Coetzee laces the life of his protagonist, John, with his passion of poetry and his backdrop of living in a British colony. Though the snippets informing the political background are penned with the needed color and candor, it’s only when you read the exhaustive observations of bygone authors and poets like Pound, Eliot, James, Beckett and Ford Madox Ford that you realise that Coetzee’s work is much above any amount of appreciation, any number of adjectives. The honest cluelessness of the poor chap in each of his encounters with the opposite sex and his colleagues and seniors (One should read his non sequiturs when his first girlfriend reads his diary or when he quits his third job to observe how pitiably humorous apathy can be!)
But perhaps, above all the flavours, Coetzee tragicomedy comes across a winner each time its protagonist runs into a self-questioning frenzy. Anything and everything that matters in the book happens in John’s mind and there’s so much caution and irony with which his psychology is dealt with that one can’t help empathizing (and smiling) with John as one witnesses him groping for answers everytime he’s faced with a new situation leaving him even more nonplussed, even more mystified.
His innocent faultfinding at the mechanised society when he questions “Is this indifference to the world a consequence of too much intercourse with machines that give the appearance of thinking? How were he to fare if one day he has to quit computers and rejoin a civilized society?... The more he has to do with computing, the more it seems to him like chess: a tight little world defined by made-up rules, one that sucks in boys of a certain susceptible temperament and then turns them half-crazy, as he is half-crazy, so that all the time they deludedly think they are playing the game, the game is in fact playing them.”
Watching the gaps between what he wanted to achieve and what he finally achieves widen, watching his conflicts climax in self-justifying affirmations, observing him falling back on self-sophistry each time he’s criticized or laughed at (he tells himself “I am hard enough on myself.. I do not need the help of others), seeing him degenerate slowly into an inactive, psychotic being trapped in his own questions and explanations and fallacies, finding him realising his blurred thought process for a moment when he observes that “his colleagues think clearer than him… he has to pretend he understands everything when actually he doesn’t.. what is wrong with him is that he is not prepared to fail…. if he were a warmer person, he would no doubt find it easier: life, love, poetry”… only to wrap himself finally up again in his dark blanket, where every breath taken is compared to his mentors—the dead authors—the obsession for whose work is so acute that its led him to believe that creativity is reproduced in only a set of situations, one just can’t help but question what causes John to deteriorate –is it too much self-analysis and soul-searching which actually injected complexity into a simple life, making him abhor his very existence or his setting unrealistic, unachievable targets for himself which triggers off a cycle of never ending self-criticism.
This hard-hitting, dark book which is so jampacked with raw emotion and brutal honesty and written with such cruelly precise prose that probably even a library full of fiction put together would find difficult to challenge, gives an awful lot of brain food to sink your teeth into.
A near perfect dissection of a human psyche, Coetzee’s penetrative, direct approach to writing lends this supremely identifiable book an air that’s truly a class apart!
