J. M. Coetzee’s Weakness

This chapter’s investigation of the value of “soft opinions” from Diary of a Bad Year seeks to take political objections to critical modesty head on by thinking with J. M. Coetzee about the dispositions necessary to speak well in public. Both McEwan and Smith are interested in reading as an event that intimates one to an experience of failure, specifically the failure to know the world as another person does. From this intimation of failure, both draw lessons about the need for a modest disposition towards our own self-knowledge and our ability to make private experience public. Coetzee’s late novels—Elizabeth Costello and Diary of a Bad Year—take this failure to mean that there is no uncompromised position outside of politics or literature from which to speak about them. Coetzee’s well-known critique of rationalism is a reflection of his insistence that we are already compromised when we speak, that neither pure reason nor pure fiction provides any neutral site of judgment. Against the strong opinions of rationality, Coetzee embraces the weak but still critical claims of fiction, rhetoric, and imagination. Thus, for Coetzee modesty emerges as a condition of speaking in public because such speech is already politically, ethically, and spiritually implicated. In Diary, Coetzee uses multiple overlapping narrative lines to model what he calls “soft opinions” and “sympathetic imagination.” These formal techniques exemplify a disposition of critical modesty that he finds necessary for cultivating a better life from a position already entangled with the world.