ABSTRACT
J. M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year (2007) is structured as a multilinear narrative. The “dominant” narrative that occupies the top of each page is an assortment of “Strong Opinions,” essays attributed to Señor C., an aging South African writer living in Australia. Separated from the essays by rulers are two “subordinate” narratives that put forward the story of a romantic and fiduciary intrigue. The novel is thus a hybrid fiction that combines nonfiction political essays on such transnational conflicts as Guantánamo Bay, al-Qaeda terrorism, anarchism, pedophilia, censorship, and the slaughter of animals, with a “realist” fiction of thwarted romance. Coetzee deploys the literary persona of Señor C. in a narrative gambit that Mikhail Bakhtin calls “nondirect speaking,” that of an author who says “‘I am me’ in someone else’s language, and in my own language, ‘I am other.’” Tolstoy is held as an exemplar of “authority in fiction,” but like Tolstoy, Señor C. is unmasked as nothing more than an “ordinary man with fallible opinions.” Alienated by the violence of political discourse, and yet ethically compelled to speak to the injustices visited in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Coetzee describes a political philosophy of “pessimistic anarchistic quietism.”
