College Record 2014

J M Coetzee Reads At Wolfson
On 12 June 2014 the 2003 Nobel Laureate for Literature and two-times Booker
winner, J M Coetzee, paid a welcome return visit to the College to give a reading
from his work. Since the millennium, Oxford has been fortunate in having a visit
from him every five years or so. In 2002 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by
the University, and in June 2009 he gave memorable readings in the Sheldonian
Theatre and at Wolfson alongside the writers Zoe Wicomb, Helen Simpson and
Elleke Boehmer. If ticket sales and queues seeking signatures this time round were
anything to go by, the number of his readers and admirers here in Oxford only
continues to grow, both within the University and more widely across the city.
The College hosted the reading with assistance from the English Faculty’s
Postcolonial Writing and Theory seminar. The organisers, Professor Elleke
Boehmer and the President, Professor Dame Hermione Lee, were ably assisted by
Wolfson’s hospitality team, headed by Louise Gordon, as well as by Rachael Sanders
and the English Faculty office, and the English DPhil students Eleni Philippou and
Erica Lombard.
Welcoming J M Coetzee, Elleke Boehmer expressed her gratitude and delight on
behalf of the whole audience, at his having coming all the way from Australia that
very day, ‘a taxing trip across half the world’, as his novel Elizabeth Costello describes
it, in order to read at Wolfson. She also drew attention to the fine concentration
on the complexities of human embodiment that in different ways marks each one
of Coetzee’s novels, from the early Dusklands (1974) and In the Heart of the Country
(1977), through Age of Iron (1990) to The Childhood of Jesus (2013). These remarks
resonated intriguingly in the passages which the author then shared with his
audience.
In spite of the prevailing heat, Coetzee delivered his readings with customary cool
self-containment, beginning with a warm thankyou to Wolfson for inviting him.
His first reading was from a piquant and even light-hearted section of his most
recently published novel, The Childhood of Jesus (2013), on ‘the poo-ness of poo’, a
characteristic investigation of the closeness of life to death and decomposition. He
concluded with two letters from his new work in progress, the epistolary exchange
about psychoanalysis he has been conducting with the Leicester analyst Arabella
Kurtz. This was Coetzee’s first public airing of this new work, due to be published
next year. The letters were fascinating for the light they shed on his understanding
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