Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [217]
‘In America, where they take job-hunting seriously, people like him, people who don’t know how to read the agenda behind a question, can’t speak in rounded paragraphs, don’t put themselves over with conviction – in short, people deficient in people skills – attend training sessions where they learn to look the interrogator in the eye, smile, respond to questions fully and with every appearance of sincerity. Presentation of the self: that is what they call it in America, without irony.
‘What authors would he prefer to teach? What research is he currently engaged in? Would he feel competent to offer tutorials in Middle English? His answers sound more and more hollow. The truth is, he does not really want this job. He does not want it because in his heart he knows he is not cut out to be a teacher. Lacks the temperament. Lacks zeal.
‘He emerges from the interview in a state of black dejection. He wants to get away from this place at once, without delay. But no, first there are forms to be filled in, travel expenses to be collected.
“‘How did it go?”
‘The speaker is the candidate who was interviewed first, the pipe-smoker.’ That is you, if I am not mistaken.
Yes. But I have given up the pipe.
‘He shrugs. “Who knows?” he says. “Not well.”
“‘Shall we get a cup of tea?”
‘He is taken aback. Are the two of them not supposed to be rivals? Is it permitted for rivals to fraternize?
‘It is late afternoon, the campus is deserted. They make for the Student Union in quest of their cup of tea. The Union is closed. MJ’ – that is what he calls you – ‘takes out his pipe. “Ah well,” he says. “Do you smoke?”
‘How surprising: he is beginning to like this MJ, with his easy, straightforward manner! His gloom is fading fast. He likes MJ and, unless it is all just an exercise in self-presentation, MJ seems inclined to like him too. And this mutual liking has grown up in a flash!
‘Yet should he be surprised? Why have the two of them (or the three of them, if the shadowy third is included) been selected to be interviewed for a lectureship in English literature, if not because they are the same kind of person, with the same formation behind them (formation: not the customary English word, he must remember that); and because both, finally and most obviously, are South Africans, white South Africans?’
That is where the fragment ends. It is undated, but I am pretty sure he wrote it in 1999 or 2000. So … a couple of questions relating to it. First question: You were the successful candidate, the one who was awarded the lectureship, while Coetzee was passed over. Why do you think he was passed over? And did you detect any resentment on his part?
None at all. I was from inside the system – the colonial university system as it was in those days – while he was from outside, insofar as he had gone off to America for his graduate education. Given the nature of all systems, namely to reproduce themselves, I was always going to have the edge over him. He understood that, in theory and in practice. He certainly didn’t put the blame on me.
Very well. Another question: He suggests that in you he has found a new friend, and goes on to list traits that you and he have in common. But when he gets to your white South Africanness he stops and writes no more. Have you any idea why he should have stopped just there?
Why he should have raised the topic of white South African identity and then dropped it? There are two explanations I can offer. One is that it might have seemed