South Africa
According to Fred Pfeil, Coetzee, André Brink and Breyten Breytenbach were at "the forefront of the anti-apartheid movement within Afrikaner literature and letters".[71] On accepting the Jerusalem Prize in 1987, Coetzee spoke of the limitations of art in South African society, whose structures had resulted in "deformed and stunted relations between human beings" and "a deformed and stunted inner life". He added, "South African literature is a literature in bondage. It is a less than fully human literature. It is exactly the kind of literature you would expect people to write from prison", and called on the South African government to abandon its apartheid policy.[47] The scholar Isidore Diala wrote that Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, and Brink are "three of South Africa's most distinguished white writers, all with definite anti-apartheid commitment".[72]
It has been argued that Coetzee's 1999 novel Disgrace allegorises South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.[73] Asked about his views on the TRC, Coetzee said, "In a state with no official religion, the TRC was somewhat anomalous: a court of a certain kind based to a large degree on Christian teaching and on a strand of Christian teaching accepted in their hearts by only a tiny proportion of the citizenry. Only the future will tell what the TRC managed to achieve".[74]
After his Australian citizenship ceremony, Coetzee said: "I did not so much leave South Africa, a country with which I retain strong emotional ties, but come to Australia. I came because from the time of my first visit in 1991, I was attracted by the free and generous spirit of the people, by the beauty of the land itself and—when I first saw Adelaide—by the grace of the city that I now have the honour of calling my home."[24] When he moved to Australia, Coetzee cited the South African government's lax attitude to crime in that country as a reason, leading to a spat with Thabo Mbeki, who said, "South Africa is not only a place of rape", referencing Coetzee's Disgrace.[75] In 1999, the African National Congress's submission to a South African Human Rights Commission investigation into racism in the media said that Disgrace depicted racist stereotypes.[76] But when Coetzee won the Nobel Prize, Mbeki congratulated him "on behalf of the South African nation and indeed the continent of Africa".[77]
Politics
Coetzee has never specified any political orientation nor overtly criticised apartheid, though he has alluded to politics in his work, and especially the part that language plays in supporting the political and social structures of colonialism and nationalism. South African author Nadine Gordimer suggested that Coetzee had "a revulsion against all political and revolutionary solutions", and he has been both praised for his condemnation of racism in his writing and criticised for not explicitly denouncing apartheid.[27]
Writing about his past in the third person, Coetzee wrote in Doubling the Point:
Politically, the raznochinets can go either way. But during his student years he, this person, this subject, my subject, steers clear of the right. As a child in Worcester he has seen enough of the Afrikaner right, enough of its rant, to last him a lifetime. In fact, even before Worcester he has perhaps seen more of cruelty and violence than should have been allowed to a child. So as a student he moves on the fringes of the left without being part of the left. Sympathetic to the human concerns of the left, he is alienated, when the crunch comes, by its language—by all political language, in fact.[78]
Asked about the latter part of this quote in an interview, Coetzee answered: "There is no longer a left worth speaking of, and a language of the left. The language of politics, with its new economistic bent, is even more repellent than it was 15 years ago".[74]
In February 2016, Coetzee was one of 61 signatories to a letter to Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and immigration minister Peter Dutton condemning their government's policy of offshore detention of asylum seekers.[79]
Law
In 2005, Coetzee criticised contemporary anti-terrorism laws as resembling those of South Africa's apartheid regime: "I used to think that the people who created [South Africa's] laws that effectively suspended the rule of law were moral barbarians. Now I know they were just pioneers ahead of their time".[80] The main character in Coetzee's 2007 Diary of a Bad Year, which has been described as blending "memoir with fiction, academic criticism with novelistic narration" and refusing "to recognize the border that has traditionally separated political theory from fictional narrative",[81] shares similar concerns about the policies of John Howard and George W. Bush.[82]
Animals
In recent years, Coetzee has become a vocal critic of cruelty to animals and an advocate of animal rights.[83] In a speech given on his behalf by Hugo Weaving in Sydney on 22 February 2007, Coetzee railed against the modern animal husbandry industry.[84] The speech was for Voiceless, the animal protection institute, an Australian nonprofit animal protection organization of which Coetzee became a patron in 2004.[85] Coetzee's fiction has similarly engaged with animal cruelty and animal welfare, especially The Lives of Animals, Disgrace, Elizabeth Costello, and The Old Woman and the Cats. He is a vegetarian.[86]
In 2008, at the behest of John Banville, who alerted him to the matter, Coetzee wrote to The Irish Times of his opposition to Trinity College Dublin's use of vivisection on animals for scientific research. He wrote: "I support the sentiments expressed by John Banville. There is no good reason—in fact there has never been any good reason, scientific or pedagogical—to require students to cut up living animals. Trinity College brings shame on itself by continuing with the practice."[87] Nearly nine years later, when TCD's continued (and, indeed, increasing) practice of vivisection featured in the news, a listener to the RTÉ Radio 1 weekday afternoon show Liveline pointed out that Banville had previously raised the matter but been ignored. Banville then telephoned Liveline to call the practice "absolutely disgraceful" and recalled how his and Coetzee's efforts to intervene had been to no avail: "I was passing by the front gates of Trinity one day and there was a group of mostly young women protesting and I was interested. I went over and I spoke to them and they said that vivisection experiments were being carried out in the college. This was a great surprise to me and a great shock, so I wrote a letter of protest to The Irish Times. Some lady professor from Trinity wrote back essentially saying Mr. Banville should stick to his books and leave us scientists to our valuable work." Asked if he received any other support for his stance in the letter he sent to The Irish Times, Banville replied, "No. I became entirely dispirited and I thought, 'Just shut up, John. Stay out of it because I'm not going to do any good'. If I had done any good I would have kept it on. I mean, I got John Coetzee—you know, the famous novelist J. M. Coetzee—I got him to write a letter to The Irish Times. I asked a lot of people."[88]
Coetzee wanted to be a candidate in the 2014 European Parliament election for the Dutch Party for the Animals, but the Dutch election board rejected his candidacy, arguing that candidates had to prove legal residence in the European Union.[89]
Literatures of the South
In the early 1960s, while in London,[29] Coetzee studied Spanish,[27] and from 2015 to 2018, Coetzee was a director of a biannual seminar series on the Literatures of the South at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín in Argentina.[90][27] This involved writers and literary figures from Southern Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and South America.[91][92] The aim of the seminars, one observer remarked, was "to develop comparative perspectives on the literature" and journalism of the three areas, "to establish new intellectual networks, and to build a corpus of translated works from across the South through collaborative publishing ventures".[93] He developed an interest in Argentine literature, and curated a series for the publishing house El Hilo de Ariadna, which includes Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Samuel Beckett's Watt, and Patrick White's The Solid Mandala. His trilogy of novels The Childhood of Jesus, The Schooldays of Jesus, and The Death of Jesus reflect his preoccupation and evolution of ideas and views on language.[29]
At the same time, he was involved in a research project in Australia, Other Worlds: Forms of World Literature, for which he led a theme on "Everyday Pleasures" that is also focused on the literatures of the South.[94] Coetzee chose to publish The Schooldays of Jesus and The Death of Jesus in Australia, and The Pole in Argentina, before they were published in the U.K. or the U.S. In an interview with El Pais, he said, "the symbolism of publishing in the South before the North is important to me".[95][27]
Copyright/piracy
When asked in 2015 to address unofficial Iranian translations of foreign works — Iran does not recognize international copyright agreements — Coetzee stated his disapproval of the practice on moral grounds and wished to have it sent to journalistic organisations in that country.[96]
