Biographical Case Study: J. M. Coetzee

One author who engages very particularly with the nature of talk and writing in an age of computation – but a figure who might not immediately spring to mind – is J. M. Coetzee. He offers an interesting case study for his active participation in the fields of both literature and computing and for his proposal that literature offers a resistive function in an epoch dominated by computational logic. As an example, he also pushes us to consider the political import of this opposition in a global setting.

In many respects, Coetzee is the representative author of world literature. Born in South Africa in 1940, Coetzee began his writing career with the 1974 novella Dusklands, a critique of colonial ambition both at home and abroad (the Vietnam War). Over the next two decades he established himself as a leading voice in the South African literary scene, with novels such as In the Heart of the Country (1977), Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Life and Times of Michael K (1983), and Disgrace (1999). This last book secured his already significant reputation when it won him the second of two Booker prizes. These awards are only two among a long list of international accolades, including the Nobel in 2003. Today his novels, fictionalized autobiographies, essays, interviews, and translations are in print across the English-speaking world and are widely taught. He also maintained a career as a scholar of literature and linguistics, primarily at the University of Cape Town, but including stints in Europe, North America, and Australia (where he relocated in 2002).

Yet before Coetzee became known as a writer, he was a computer programmer. The broad details of this experience are today known to his readers, in large part thanks to the publication of Youth (2002), a fictional autobiography that discusses his time working in the British computer industry in the 1960s. However, Coetzee is famed for playing with the historical record in his work, thus I checked up on him. I spent some time at his archive, housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, examining paper and digital holdings and comparing these to industry records from the period.¹ What I found was fascinating.

In 1962 Coetzee, recently graduated from the University of Cape Town, obtained a post at IBM’s London office as a programmer. Across the next couple of years he worked there while completing an MA thesis on the works of Ford Madox Ford in his spare time, handwriting poetry and using his employer’s hardware to generate computer poems at night.²

In 1964 Coetzee moved to IBM’s British competitor ICT, collaborating with computer scientists at Cambridge University on Britain’s first supercomputer, the Atlas 2.³ There Coetzee focused on multiprogramming, working on the Atlas 2’s “supervisor,” the earliest computer operating system. He also worked on a version of the computer destined for Aldermaston, the Atomic Weapon’s Research Establishment, in the spring of 1965. Working at the forefront of the computer industry, Coetzee gained detailed knowledge of programming languages and logics, the uses to which computers were put, and computing culture more broadly.⁴

In the summer of 1965, however, Coetzee left Britain to pursue a PhD in literature at the University of Texas at Austin. He didn’t leave computing entirely behind: his dissertation applied computational stylistics to the permutational late works of Samuel Beckett. While he eventually concluded that such methods were flawed, he was an early champion of humanities computing. Coetzee’s interest in and ultimate resistance to such approaches to literary analysis turned on his understanding of the reading of literature. As I argue, he conceived of reading as a more complex experience than the linear process that such approaches implied. Some of his earliest academic publications discussed computational methods of writing and critical reading explicitly – his first claim to global fame was not a novel but a rather derisory appearance in Scientific American and the New York Times Review of Books in 1973, a response to an article he had published reading Beckett’s Lessness with a UNIVAC computer. He appears as the South African professor (he had returned to his native country in the early 1970s following a failed US visa application) who demonstrates the limits of computational criticism.⁵

This early experience in computing (at a time when the industry was expanding rapidly) seemingly influenced Coetzee’s thinking throughout his writing career. To understand the precise nature of this influence, however, I propose that we need to reflect on the specific literary, sociopolitical, and technological contexts in South Africa.

One of the figureheads of global Anglophone literature, Coetzee is also very much associated with the particular literary culture of his native country. Indeed, the “correct” interpretation of his, often contextually oblique, novels has been a central preoccupation of critics since the 1970s. Debates over whether a novel like Life and Times of Michael K offers a critique of the South African state or a more universal allegory testify to the differing political stakes in which local and global readings are invested. For of course, part of the international interest in Coetzee and other South African authors of the latter half of the twentieth century lies in their ability to articulate the specificities of writing and living under the Apartheid regime.

Apartheid, or “separateness” was a system of institutional racism, segregation, and discrimination, established in 1948 following the election victory of the pro-Afrikaner National Party. Operating in various manifestations between 1948 and 1991, Apartheid systematically denied black South Africans – the majority of the population – rights of citizenship and land ownership. Their movement, education, housing, employment opportunities, and marriage rights were heavily curtailed by the state. The so-called passbook system, a detested system of biometric control, required that black South Africans carry an internal passport with them when traveling within designated areas.

Internal resistance was high and state tactics became increasingly violent. The most notable events include the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, where police killed sixty-nine people at a protest; the aftermath saw the government declare a state of emergency, arresting thousands of people, cracking down on media, and banning opposition parties, the ANC and the PAC. In 1976, two years after Dusklands was published, secondary school students protesting the imposition of Afrikaans as the language of instruction were mowed down by police in the Soweto uprising. A year later Stephen Biko, leader of the black consciousness movement, was beaten to death in police custody. Across the late 1970s and 1980s internal protests by students and labor unions grew.

Not coincidentally, international condemnation, including sanctions, also put pressure on the regime. In the early years of the Cold War, South Africa had been seen as an important ally against communism in Africa by America and the West, and there was de facto support for the state. This support was put under increasing strain thanks to such high-profile police violence and effectively disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1990 negotiations were begun to dismantle the Apartheid system, with the first free elections conducted in 1994.

Across the time in which Coetzee was growing up, establishing his writing career, and teaching students at the University of Cape Town, Apartheid, with its rigid profiling of people, was an unavoidable fact of life.

Crucially for our analysis here, this same period also saw a big shift in the status of computing in South Africa. Between the 1960s and 1980s, the decades in which Coetzee was establishing himself as a writer, the Apartheid regime became increasingly reliant upon and associated with computing – as I have argued in my article “Hero and Bad Motherland: J. M. Coetzee’s Computational Critique.” As one anti-Apartheid pamphlet put it, “The growth of the computer age in South Africa has been closely linked to the consolidation and expansion of the white power structure.”⁶ IBM (which controlled over half the market) and ICT mainframe computers were used to implement the passbook system and other racist architectures. A fantasy of “total” technological control became crucial to the state’s ideology and a way for them to signal their Western, modernizing orientation.⁷ At the same time, the goal of computerization helped to conceal the oppressive nature of this system as an apparent quest for efficiency and automation. It also made the industry vulnerable to international anti-Apartheid campaigns: workers at ICL (ICT’s later incarnation) in Britain would strike over the company’s South African ties, and under pressure in America IBM, for example, eventually divested from their South African company.⁸ Computing was at this point one of the global symbols in the battle over Apartheid.

This wider political background likely reinforced Coetzee’s own thinking about the sociopolitical implications of computing and the position of literature in such a society. It is my contention that in Coetzee’s creative and critical writings across his career we can trace the development of a platform of “aesthetic automatism.” My phrase plays on the Russian formalists’ concept of “automatization,” or the process by which, through repeated use, language and form become familiar, while describing a perceived demand for aesthetic autonomy in a postwar age of automation. Coetzee’s aesthetic automatism as I comprehend it, was conceived as literature’s autonomy from the dominance of “binary” or “computational thinking.”¹⁰

Distinct from the machines that Coetzee programmed, computational thinking is what David Golumbia has called “the view that a great deal, perhaps all, of human and social experience can be explained via computational processes.”¹¹ Conceived as universal machines, computers became “metaphors for metaphor,” embodying a logic of substitution under which important cultural distinctions could be dissolved. In the postwar era rapid advances in computing technologies were accompanied by similar advances in the application of communication theory across the cultural and social domain: whether Noam Chomsky’s theory of transformational grammar in linguistics, or Hilary Putnam’s classical computational theory of mind in philosophy. Often stripping away its own metaphorical origins, such “computational thinking” offered a technological update to a longer tradition of the rationalist theory of mind. In so doing, computational thinking helped to promote a set of beliefs that, as Golumbia makes clear, benefits existing structures of institutional and colonial power: “computationalism meshes all too easily with the project of instrumental reason.”¹²

This set of beliefs, rather than computers themselves, would be the target of Coetzee’s literary project across his career. In a 2016 essay Coetzee declared that it is “up to the poets” to keep us from “binary thinking, and the corresponding spread of a form of mental constraint that conceives of itself quite innocently as freedom.”¹³ Coetzee’s critique of the computational thinking – thinking that characterized the Apartheid state and the closed world of the Cold War – here positions literary thinking as its rival, autonomous, mode.

While Coetzee’s computing experience and literary acclaim make him something of a unique case study, examining his career does help to draw attention to issues around the perceived function and value of literature – and associated questions of form and mediation – in an era dominated by computational conceptions of language.

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