“Do you think I can’t read between the lines?”: Discourse of the unsaid in J. M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year

Abstract

This article examines J. M. Coetzee’s use of intuitive and interpretive exchanges within and across the tripartite structure of Diary of a Bad Year (2007). It argues that Coetzee rejects strict understandings of the novel genre in favour of a more fluid form, enabling him to explore heteroglot exchanges within the two monologues on each page of Diary of a Bad Year and complicate conventional understandings of Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism. Creating multiple layers that begin with unspoken words, pass through an “othered” interpreter, and arrive at the reader via the novel’s narration, meaning is reconfigured and reconsidered in a way that distances it from the author. The essay further argues that Coetzee’s use of dialogic discourse in Diary of a Bad Year privileges the perspective of the Filipina woman whose voice drives much of the novel’s commentary as she wins the interpretive game Coetzee creates.

J. M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year (2007), often labelled a “hybrid novel” for its innovative generic and formal mixing, ¹ is a groundbreaking amalgamation of the expository and the narrative, the academic and the fictional. Coetzee divides each page into three distinct sections: the Strong Opinions composed by “JC”, the writer’s diary of his interactions with Anya, and an additional narrative record from the perspective of JC’s Filipina typist. The novel juxtaposes these accounts on the page but not in time, creating a non-linear narrative composed of two linear ones. Dialogue frequently disrupts the first-person narratives of JC and Anya, at times confusing the two versions of the story and complicating perspective. Coetzee’s tripartite structure disrupts conventional novel-reading at the level of the page, raising questions about how we read and how authors manipulate that interaction between reader and text. Easily its most distinctive feature, the book’s structure remains the aspect most frequently addressed by scholars, who emphasize its defiance of novelistic conventions. ² For Coetzee, though, as expressed in a 1997 interview, “a novel is ultimately nothing but a prose fiction of a certain length. It has no formal requirements to satisfy” (Scott, 1997: 87). Coetzee claims that “the question of whether X or Y is ‘really’ a novel can’t be very interesting” (Scott, 1997: 87). Perhaps, then, rather than attempting to classify Diary of a Bad Year as a novel, a hybrid, or as something else, we should broach the “very interesting” question of what Coetzee does with that fluid novel form. What scholars have neglected, then, is not the interaction between the expository and the narrative that complicates our labelling of Diary of a Bad Year; it is the intricate, revelatory conversational exchange among characters within and across the individual narratives.

In Diary of a Bad Year, Coetzee constructs a stratified text that literalizes the multi-voicedness of Bakhtinian heteroglossia but that also invites play within those voices. Through its manipulation of novelistic elements like plot and point of view, Diary includes analyses of characters’ thoughts, actions, and speech by other characters, complicating interpretations on each page. ³ Noted by italics in the text, these intuitions represent imaginative forays into the mind of the other, revealing undercurrents of the individual narratives and the extent to which each character, most frequently Anya, exposes the unspoken thoughts of other characters. In this essay, I read Diary in light of pragmatic philosophy of language and Bakhtinian novelistic theory, arguing that Coetzee uses interpretation and conjecture within conversational exchange to emphasize the nuances inherent in the simplest of interpersonal communication. ⁴ As I will demonstrate, much of Coetzee’s late fiction concerns itself with the intricacies of dialogue by constructing relationships wherein characters infer, interpret, and even supply the dialogue of others, but Diary of a Bad Year extends this trope of conversational intuition. Diary’s structure, while dialogic in its deferral of authorial responsibility, also diffuses that narrative authority, broadening the range of perspectives by making Anya, a woman and a cultural “other”, the most powerful intuitive force in the novel. ⁵ In a book filled with “strong opinions”, Coetzee uses the lower, narrative portions of the page to show the latent significance and inherent ambiguity of what is said and, perhaps more importantly, what is not said.

Coetzee encourages readers to question information and its sources. Each perspectival layer obscures the original voice and, like the children’s game of telephone, detaches the initial author from the meaning the text attains through transmission. Through what Bakhtin (1981) calls “interanimation of languages”, the author Coetzee “participates in the novel (he is omnipresent in it) with almost no direct language of his own” (47). The complexity of “languages that mutually and ideologically interanimate each other” disabuses the reader of any notions of “a single unitary language” of authorship (Bakhtin, 1981: 47). Coetzee uses the literal stratification of text to examine both the conventions of fiction and the assumptions of authorship; however, he does not merely construct a visualization of Bakhtinian dialogism. His textual play is subtler and, in my reading, underscores his comments on dialogism in an interview that precedes Diary by 10 years. Coetzee favours a less rigid division between the dialogical and the monological: “There’s a certain kind of monologue in which voices are evoked and contested and played with that is part of the dialogical” (Scott, 1997: 89). Coetzee avoids any formal definition of monologue, a move important for understanding his depiction of communication and intuition in Diary of a Bad Year. Resisting his own printed barriers between the three sections, Coetzee makes these seemingly monologic texts dialogic and thereby subtly portrays the intricacy of human communication. He “invites permeability” (Meljac, 2009: 96), consistently employing a trope of conversational intuition that highlights complex interpersonal relations that influence the construction of a dialogic fictional text. Robert Hahn (2012) and Carrol Clarkson (2009) understand Diary’s communication as fundamentally “responsive”: as the characters respond to one another, the narrative strands create a “refraction” of Coetzee’s authorial voice (Clarkson, 2009: 98–100). ⁶ For Barbara Dancygier, this “Access Principle” allows characters (and the reader) to track one another’s meanings across the lines of Coetzee’s narrative structure (Dancygier, 2010: 234–235). While Hahn argues that only the reader has access to the full meaning (2012: 192), Dancygier points out Diary’s revelation through its unique typographical structure (2010: 248). In what follows, I expand this argument by demonstrating the roles of intuition and interpretation of unspoken utterances throughout the novel. I point to several intuitive moments in the novel: instances where characters use past experience, situational details, and their own creativity to imagine the latent meanings in others’ verbal and non-verbal expressions. Working within and across the “different linguistic levels” of Diary of a Bad Year, Coetzee demonstrates how the unspoken word can be understood against a social background of “contradictory opinions, points of view and value judgments” (Bakhtin, 1981: 261, 281). Coetzee gives each voice its own narrative space in which to tease out the dialogism of each monologue. Each strand records the speaker’s perspective but also imagines the unspoken dialogue that occurs across the novel’s layers, revealing the complexity of language and rethinking Bakhtinian dialogism.

Coetzee establishes conversational intuition and commentary as dialogic undercurrents in Diary of a Bad Year, beginning with the first meeting of JC and Anya:

I live on the ground floor and have since 1995 and still I don’t know all my neighbours, I said. Yeah, she said, and no more, meaning, Yes, I hear what you say and I agree, it is tragic not to know who your neighbours are, but that is how it is in the big city and I have other things to attend to now, so could we let the present exchange of pleasantries die a natural death? (2007: 5)

The initial speaker, JC, takes Anya’s simple “Yeah” and infers much more, expressing confidently her intent without even knowing her. Realizing the failure of his attempted small talk, JC imagines the thoughts behind her monosyllabic response. In a later encounter, he again exercises such intuition by interpreting a non-verbal retort. Upon suggesting that Anya feels dishonoured by her rape-victim status, JC receives sheer unspoken virulence: “From her eyes beamed a ray of pure cold rage. Don’t you tell me how I feel! she hissed” (Coetzee, 2007: 115). Here, the words “she hissed” follow the italicized portion, raising the question of whether Anya’s exclamation is spoken by her lips or by her eyes. The question of actual speech thus remains ambiguous in this passage; however, I would argue that Coetzee’s use of punctuation identifies the sentence as unspoken meaning. In the passage quoted above, for example, actual speech like Anya’s brief “Yeah” appears in roman type, whereas italicized type consistently signals the unsaid in this text. If this hiss is indeed perceived visually rather than audibly, Coetzee adds sound and tone to an already powerful intuited meaning, infusing visual and discursive interpretation with the aural imagery of Anya’s angry hiss. Without a word to aid him, JC transforms a single expression into a complete thought and readily perceives the manner in which that thought would be delivered were it to pass into spoken dialogue. In this sense, JC’s internal voice is dialogic, representing the complex language that informs the novel’s more externalized conversations.

JC sometimes interprets Anya’s words with her body language. For instance, he records the following response to his inquiry about Alan: “Alan, she said, my partner. And she gave me a look” (Coetzee, 2007: 15). The novel never describes Anya’s facial expression, but it does interpret the “look” through JC’s limited understanding of his new acquaintance:

The look did not say, Yes, I am to all intents and purposes a married woman, so if you pursue the course you have in mind it will be a matter of clandestine adultery, with all the risks and thrills pertaining thereto, nothing like that, on the contrary it said, You seem to think I am some sort of child, do I need to point out I am not a child at all? (Coetzee, 2007: 15)

This intuitive act reveals JC’s increasingly complex process of reception, interpretation, and application. From Anya’s body language he not only understands the intended meaning but also rejects the imagined response to his question. In both possibilities, though, the novel uses JC’s language to point out another critical recognition: he is not the only interpreter of the unsaid. When JC imagines what the look does not say, he acknowledges her invasion of his private thoughts: “if you pursue what you have in mind” (Coetzee, 2007: 15). JC similarly interprets the unspoken response he deems more probable: “You seem to think I am some sort of child” (Coetzee, 2007: 15). He acknowledges this woman’s ability to perceive a man’s latent intentions and emotions. Early in the novel, before Anya receives her own narrative space, JC frequently references women’s intuition. He addresses the “metaphysical ache” he feels as he watches her: “[I]n an intuitive way she knew about it, knew that in the old man in the plastic chair in the corner there was something personal going on” (Coetzee, 2007: 7). Jonathan Lear (2010) suggests that “this metaphysical ache […] reaches out to Anya, is instantly recognized by her and responded to in her own imaginative act, which is itself immediately recognized by JC” (74). Lear calls Anya’s intuition an “imaginative act”, one that requires not only perception but also invention. At this early point in the novel, before Anya begins her own narrative, our understanding of Anya’s ability is based only on JC’s conjecture. Lear notes that JC’s ready perception of Anya’s interpretive capability is closely associated with her gender: “What self-respecting woman would want to deny that she has an intuitive feel?” (Coetzee, 2007: 19). Paul Rayment, the protagonist of Slow Man (Coetzee, 2005), makes a similar assumption about his caregiver Marijana, whom he calls “an intuitive” for her ability to perceive his needs (Coetzee, 2005: 33). JC does, however, credit Anya with more extensive powers, considering the possibility that his very thoughts, not just his bodily sensations, are intuited and translated by this woman. Unlike Marijana, Anya’s intuition engenders language, first in the mind of JC and then in her own autonomous narrative. This episode also reveals JC’s self-reflective nature. He frequently shifts perspectives and assumes others’ thoughts to add layers of distance from which he can assess his own preconceptions about Anya. JC thus represents within the text the sort of authorial refraction that Clarkson and others assign to Coetzee himself. Bakhtin’s “dialogic tension” operates on the level of the character, as well as the novel itself, not just the author, and this move contributes to the dialogism of JC’s discourse even before another voice appears explicitly in the text.

After using his interpretations of Anya’s thoughts and body language to judge his own thoughts, JC eventually cuts out the middleman, or “middlewoman”, as it were. Asking Anya about her intentions about having children, he leaves no narrative space for her response and instead interprets his own assumption: “So you have no plans for children” (Coetzee, 2007: 50). Though this statement rewords Anya’s denial of marriage to Alan, Coetzee draws attention to it as JC’s imaginative interpretation of his own thoughts, an interpretation that appears as text on the page:

At the moment when I pronounce the first word, the word So, my curiosity could not be more innocent. But in between So and the second word you the devil waylays me, sends me an image of this Anya on a sweaty summer night, convulsed in the arms of ginger-haired, freckle-shouldered Alan, opening her womb in gladness to the gush of his male juices. By the time the monosyllable you has been fully enounced she can see, by a magical transference or perhaps simply from the image on my retina, what I am seeing. (2007: 53–54)

Coetzee avoids Anya’s intuition in favour of “magical transference” from one character to another or even a literal image on the retina of JC that reveals his mind’s eye. Is this a stronger exchange, or is Coetzee characterizing interpersonal communication as “magical transference” that allows one person to see another’s mind? JC does not question Anya’s ability to see his thoughts; instead, he seeks a metaphor for the experienced phenomenon. He distinguishes her intuition from his own by characterizing her mind’s eye as “magical” rather than logical. JC defers acknowledging the legitimacy of Anya’s abilities by dismissing them as visual or supernatural. Afterwards, the two return to their interpretive game: “Do you mean, she says coolly, are we using birth control? And she gives the tiniest little smile, as if to beckon me on” (Coetzee, 2007: 54). She answers in the affirmative and summons JC’s intuition: “Now dare to ask me, her eyes say — dare to ask me what kind of birth control. Of a kind, I say. Mm … I won’t ask of what kind” (Coetzee, 2007: 55). Here, as in her hiss of reproach, Anya’s eyes do the talking. Both sides see the other’s thoughts, intuit hidden meanings, perceive desired responses, and urge the other to continue the interpretive game. With its heavy emphasis on interpretation, this exchange demonstrates what Lear refers to as the “close intuitive contact” between JC and Anya (2010: 74). More importantly, though, the incident represents Coetzee’s most reciprocal example of linguistic and dialogic interpretation in Diary of a Bad Year.

While he initiates the game of interpreting the unspoken, JC soon drops out. Anya, however, assumes, maintains, and even extends the dialogic interpretation in her narrative thread. A woman and cultural “other”, her perspective contrasts with both JC and the author Coetzee whom he may represent, and her voice becomes a powerful democratizing force in the novel. ⁷ Like her elderly counterpart, Anya begins by filling in the blanks of a brief response: “But that was all: Yes, I have been married, as if I was to understand, Yes, I have been married and I didn’t like it and don’t want to talk about it” (Coetzee, 2007: 44). She interprets JC’s brevity as reluctance stemming from more than just disdain for idle pleasantries. As she becomes acquainted with JC, Anya intuits his thoughts without his speech. While disputing the definition of “typist”, Anya poses a loaded question: “A typist is a human being, a man or a woman as the case may be. […] In my case a woman. Or do you prefer not to think of me in that way?” (Coetzee, 2007: 68). Just as JC answers his own query about Anya’s plans for children, Anya preemptively responds to her own question about JC’s thoughts: “Of course he thought of me in that way” (Coetzee, 2007: 69). Drawing on her yet limited knowledge of her employer but more profoundly on her experience with men, Anya boldly assumes understanding of his thoughts. In a later exchange, this confidence leads her to confront JC:

I never said you had an empty head. No, that’s true, you never said so, you were too polite for that; but you thought so. You thought so from the first minute. What a pretty ass, you thought, one of the prettiest asses I have ever seen. But nothing upstairs. If only I was younger, you thought, how I would love to bang her. Confess. That is what you thought. (Coetzee, 2007: 93)

This confrontation relies on Anya’s ability to translate JC’s thoughts but also on her assumption that he, like other men, immediately objectifies her.

From her first appearance, Anya is arrogantly aware of her body’s effect on men and confidently interprets their thoughts. She imagines male perspectives and actively plays on them: “As I pass him, carrying the laundry basket, I make sure I waggle my behind, my delicious behind, sheathed in tight denim. If I were a man I would not be able to keep my eyes off me” (Coetzee, 2007: 25). Here, she in effect interprets the unspoken response of the universal male persona to her anatomy, producing in her own monologue the dialogue she infers from past social interaction. The novel gives voice to the objectified woman rather than to the objectifying man. Anya understands the male gaze’s implications and applies them to men around her. Once she begins working for JC, Anya relocates her interpretation of the male gaze to him, assigning her intuitions to an actual man. Anya can “feel his eyes lock onto” her, “avid upon” her as she makes her “silky moves”, and she knows exactly how to interpret his unspoken monologue (Coetzee, 2007: 28–30). She similarly approaches Alan’s friends, approximating the meanings of the words they do not speak:

When Alan brings me along to some office get-together, his friends don’t say, What a knockout you’ve got there! What tits! What legs! Lend her to me for the night! You can have mine! They don’t say it, but that is what is flashing between them. (Coetzee, 2007: 162)

As the novel’s only heroine, Anya constantly interprets the words and gazes of male characters by attributing the meanings she has learned to infer from their attentive eyes. She acknowledges that she narrates words that “[t]hey don’t say”, externalizing the assumed internal conversation on the pages of her narrative; moreover, she decodes that language for the reader. She thus creates not only a dialogic but also a heteroglot text in the Bakhtinian sense: her words represent the individual voices around her and the social forces that inform them.

In the only scene where the novel’s three main characters interact, the novel extends Anya’s perception of the male gaze and translation of men’s thoughts. When JC remarks on Anya’s helpfulness, Anya delivers her interpretation of Alan’s interpretation of the comment:

So Señor C, who is seventy-two and is losing fine muscle control and presumably pees in his pants, says, What a comfort and support your Anya was!, and Alan reads at once what it means in boys’ code: Thank you for letting your girlfriend visit me and stroke her hips before me and waft her scent under my nostrils. I dream about her, I lust after her in my senile way, what a man you must be, what a stallion, to have a woman like that! Yes, replies Alan, she is pretty good at what she does; and Señor C picks up the innuendo at once, as he is meant to. (Coetzee, 2007: 163)

Anya does not convey JC’s remark through her own understanding; she goes a step further and applies Alan’s perception (as she perceives it), extracting hidden meaning through what she calls “boys’ code”. This act of intuition actually references its interpretive means, a code of gestures and utterances among male actors and speakers. Coetzee allows the novel’s female, othered voice to interpret and comment on the male voices in Diary of a Bad Year, but he also permits this “middlewoman” character to examine his own authorial perspective. Coetzee’s alignment with JC notwithstanding, Anya represents an innovative and even uncomfortable foray into the unspoken, or in this case unwritten, thoughts of the male author. By raising such issues through Anya’s narrative voice, the novel further complicates its own dialogic communication. Diary’s narrative, in keeping with Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia, locates language “on the borderline between oneself and the other” (Bakhtin, 1981: 293). If, as Bakthtin asserts, “[t]he word in language is half someone else’s”, Coetzee’s granting of that partial ownership to a character entirely other to himself and his protagonist proves a significant social application of dialogic theory (1981: 293). For Bakhtin, a speaker owns language when he “populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention” (1981: 293). Before this moment, words “exist in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions” (1981: 294). What happens, then, when language is appropriated by the intuitive listener and placed in the service of her intentions before it is even spoken? For Anya to “take the word, and make it [her] own” demonstrates remarkable agency and places Bakhtin’s understanding of dialogue in the realm of the unspoken, applying it to implication as well as expression (Bakhtin, 1981: 294). Anya’s narrative thus represents much more than feminine intuition: her voice becomes a major interpretive force that imaginatively reshapes the words, spoken and unspoken, of Coetzee’s novel. The intuitive game of Diary forces the reader to confront intentionality on multiple levels and in multiple voices, both as literally stratified in the text and as expressed within each of those printed layers.

Coetzee extends this game beyond the interaction between JC and his Filipina typist to the relationship between Anya and Alan. For instance, in an early conversations about JC, Anya interprets Alan’s questions within their dialogue: “What about the old man, he says — he hasn’t tried anything with you, has he? Has he given me a poke, do you mean? I say. No, he hasn’t given me a poke. Hasn’t tried” (Coetzee, 2007: 39). Anya immediately exchanges the vague “tried anything” for “given me a poke”, which, though still nondescript, approximates Alan’s meaning more accurately than his utterance does. Benjamin Hedin (2007) views the Anya–Alan subplot as an addition that merely “flatten[s] the vitality of Coetzee’s engagement with his own life” (216–217), but these two characters’ participation in Coetzee’s game enables a fuller portrayal of dialogic communication that relies on Anya’s awareness and intuition of unspoken male discourse about women. For instance, she interprets Alan’s “sharp looks” to mean “I am the boss and don’t you forget that”, understanding his facial expression as an assertion of male dominance (Coetzee, 2007: 108). In this relationship, though, just as with Anya and JC, Anya is not the only mind-reader: “It is as if Alan reads what [Anya is] thinking” (Coetzee, 2007: 146). Their exchanges also take a game-like form in Anya’s narrative:

Still, […] I feel sorry for the old man (by which Alan understands me to mean, As a woman I claim my natural right to be soft-hearted). That is OK, says Alan, as long as you don’t let your feelings run away with you. That is OK, meaning, I understand, I know you can’t help it, I wouldn’t want you to be otherwise, it is part of your feminine charm. (Coetzee, 2007: 87)

Anya, well aware of Alan’s interpretive proficiency, reads her own utterance through his filter; however, the interpretation ultimately relies on her perception of that filter, an understanding informed by her knowledge of gender norms and of Alan’s adherence to them. She translates his ambiguous “That is OK” into a revelation of Alan’s philosophy of femininity as informed by Anya’s prior knowledge of his views of gender. Thus, this exchange between Anya and Alan is even more loaded than her encounters with JC because it draws on the years of experiential knowledge each participant has about the other. Anya combines stereotypical assumptions about the male mindset with personal relationship history in order to perceive Alan’s communications astutely and create a realistic, though perhaps biased, dialogue within her narrative.

Coetzee further complicates these exchanges through their larger narrative context. Anya uses intuition and prior knowledge to infiltrate the minds of JC and Alan and interpret their thoughts, but these communications ultimately occur among characters in Coetzee’s fictional narrative. The novel, which is after all written by a male author, adds another layer through which Anya’s interpretations must be perceived. The spoken or unspoken dialogic instances of Diary of a Bad Year must ultimately be read through as many as four separate but layered filters. For example, in the party scene where Anya perceives Alan’s interpretation of JC’s comment, the following layers exist: (1) the utterance itself, spoken by JC; (2) Alan’s unspoken interpretation of the comment; (3) Anya’s translation of Alan’s thought process; and (4) the novel’s depiction of Anya’s understanding as written in the third level of Diary of a Bad Year. Thus, the overall structure of Diary layers already layered utterances, literally stratifying them in print so that readers may encounter thoughts, conversations, and interpretations from two different perspectives, both created by Coetzee to narrate the composition and transcription of the essays that precede them.

As critics note, Diary of a Bad Year’s narrative manipulation is characteristic of, if more extreme than, Coetzee’s commentary on fiction, especially in his later works. Maria J. López (2011), Peter D. McDonald (2010), and Johan Geertsema (2011), liken Diary to Coetzee’s late novels because it interrogates novelistic conventions. Moreover, McDonald considers Diary of a Bad Year an “inventive extension of Coetzee’s oeuvre” (2010: 493), and Benjamin H. Ogden (2010) calls it “Coetzee’s most extended meditation on the genre of the novel” (466–467). As “Coetzee’s most elaborate working out” of the “discomfort[s]” of novel-writing, Diary encourages further exploration of authorship (McDonald, 2010: 494). Such readings gain force in conversation with Bakhtin’s ideas of novelistic speech: “When heteroglossia enters the novel it becomes subject to an artistic reworking” (1981: 300). In Diary, Coetzee artistically reworks authorship, monologue, and the novel more generally through unconventional dialogues of unspoken utterances. Coetzee’s earlier texts lay the groundwork for this novelistic revision by inconclusively examining communication so as to indicate the complexity of discourse among characters and, ultimately, the humans they approximate. Through the following examples, I argue that Coetzee establishes and reworks intuitive, dialogic monologue as a motif in his body of fiction before developing it most fully in Diary of a Bad Year.

Before turning to Coetzee’s late fiction, I wish to establish an early instance of this intuitive trope. Coetzee’s Foe (1987; first published in 1986) raises the issue of the unspoken by giving a voice to the tongueless slave, Friday, an issue thoroughly treated by critics; ⁸ however, the even earlier text of Waiting for the Barbarians (2010; first published in 1980) proves more useful here because it includes a relationship demographically and representatively similar to the association between JC and Anya. An ageing country magistrate attached to a brutal regime employs a young barbarian woman who has been captured, relocated, and tortured by his associates. As “[s]he sits obdurately” before him, the magistrate admits that he is “beating about the bush” of his true intent with a formal offer of employment: “I can offer you work. I need someone to keep these rooms tidy, to see to my laundry. The woman who does it at present is not satisfactory” (Coetzee, 2010: 30–31). Though she is visually impaired, the barbarian woman sees clearly the sexual subtext of the magistrate’s offer, a perception he recognizes: “She understands what I am offering. She sits very stiff, her hands in her lap” (Coetzee, 2010: 30–31). Similarly, Anya perceives the subtext of JC’s indication that he is “in need of a secretary” (Coetzee, 2007: 15). Like the magistrate, JC creates a position for a young, ill-qualified woman, admitting that “the Anya in question has never done a stitch of editing in her life” (Coetzee, 2007: 19). For the most part, though, the similarities between these two relationships cease shortly after their beginnings. Whereas JC and Anya readily translate one another’s thoughts in an interpretive game, the magistrate and his “mistress” reach a major roadblock in communication because of their incongruities of rhetorical style. For example, after the magistrate fails to shoot a buck during his hunting trip, the barbarian woman pointedly questions his explanation of what happened:

“If you want to do something, you do it”, she says very firmly. She is making an effort to be clear; but perhaps she intends, “If you had wanted to do it you would have done it”. In the makeshift language we share there are no nuances. She has a fondness for facts, I note, for pragmatic dicta; she dislikes fancy, questions, speculations; we are an ill-matched couple. (Coetzee, 2010: 45–46)

These differences make the pair an undeveloped, ineffectual precursor to the JC–Anya exchange in Diary of a Bad Year. Because he cannot read the barbarian woman’s mind, the magistrate resorts to interpreting the scars on her body: “It has been growing more and more clear to me that until the marks on this girl’s body are deciphered and understood I cannot let go of her” (Coetzee, 2010: 35–36). Whereas JC deciphers Anya’s vague speech and more direct facial expressions to create a multi-voiced dialogue, the magistrate’s monologue struggles to incorporate dialogism.

Conversely, Disgrace’s David Lurie proves skillful in deciphering his own complex thought processes but struggles to bring his counterpart to that interpretive level. One exchange between Lurie and his student Melanie anticipates Diary’s use of italics to indicate interpreted content. After Lurie confronts Melanie about missing her exam:

She stares back at him in puzzlement, even shock. You have cut me off from everyone, she seems to say. You have made me bear your secret. I am no longer just a student. How can you speak to me like this? Her voice, when it comes, is so subdued that he can barely hear: “I can’t take the test, I haven’t done the reading”. What he wants to say cannot be said, not decently. All he can do is signal, and hope that she understands. “Just take the test, Melanie, like everyone else. It does not matter if you are not prepared, the point is to get it behind you”. (Coetzee, 2000: 34–35)

Just as Anya and JC infer whole sentences from brief facial expressions, Lurie reads ostracism and betrayal in Melanie’s bewildered look and finds her audible communication less expressive, less meaningful than that which she leaves unspoken. He “can barely hear” her voice, but her body language divulges whole sentences. Entangled in an inappropriate liaison, Lurie realizes that his own words must be similarly vague and must rely on Melanie’s interpretation of subtext. With the word “hope”, he reveals that this plan may fail if Melanie lacks intuitive capabilities. In this instance, a difference of interpretive ability rather than interpretive style impedes the exchange, suggesting that both are necessary for effective unspoken discourse. ⁹

Coetzee reinforces this prescription with two successful couples of speakers/interpreters. In Elizabeth Costello (2003), Coetzee briefly connects scholar Susan Moebius and John, the novel’s narrator and Elizabeth Costello’s son, as a pair who typify the seamless communication foregrounded in Diary of a Bad Year. As Susan comments that female writers’ “touch is lighter”, John notices that “[s]he is smiling again. See how light my touch can be, her lips seem to say. Soft lips” (Coetzee, 2003: 23). By attributing the utterance to her lips rather than her voice, John emphasizes the physical aspect of implied dialogue. Susan uses her lips to imply meaning rather than speak it. Her body language prefigures Anya’s, seducing men without uttering a word. A woman similarly aware of her effects on men and perceptive of their reactions appears in the Summertime portion of Scenes from Provincial Life (2012). In the section that bears her name, Julia recounts a conversation with the deceased writer, John Coetzee. When John asks what might “give direction to [his] life”, Julia’s generalized reply sparks a nuanced exchange:

“Find yourself a good woman and marry her.”

He looked at me strangely. “Are you making me a proposal?” he said.

I laughed. “No,” I said, “I am already married, thank you. Find a woman better suited to you, someone who will take you out of yourself.”

I am already married, therefore marriage to you would constitute bigamy: that was the unspoken part. (Coetzee, 2012: 333)

This conversation proves remarkably similar to Anya’s loaded admission of attachment to Alan, yet Julia’s last statement represents Coetzee’s most direct acknowledgment of the subtextual discourse behind many of the exchanges in his novels. Julia interprets her own speech and even realizes that her utterance has an “unspoken part” that also merits inclusion in the dialogue. Coetzee makes characters aware of their own speech and uses typographical variation to encourage the same in readers, foregrounding intuition in everyday conversation.

Throughout his late fiction, Coetzee includes instances of nuanced dialogue that rely largely on unspoken words. Waiting for the Barbarians, Disgrace, Elizabeth Costello, and Scenes from Provincial Life all contain intimations of the discursive intuition that pervades Diary of a Bad Year. Whereas Coetzee’s previous novels include brief and sometimes inhibited subtextual communication, Diary represents his fullest experimentation with human dialogue, body language, and understanding. Unlike the ill-matched couples of Waiting for the Barbarians or Disgrace, JC and Anya operate as expressive and perceptive equals like Elizabeth Costello’s Susan Moebius and John Costello or the Julia–John pair from Summertime. While one might expect this from Coetzee’s pairs of clear intellectual equals, Anya’s proficiency in JC’s game of interpretation defies expectations based on her othered and highly sexualized character. ¹⁰ Anya proves more than “a specialist in the erotic” or a “perspective from below” (Abbott, 2011: 194; Maziarczyk, 2010: 56), entering JC’s discursive sphere and raising the stakes of their communication. ¹¹ While critics readily grant Anya’s influence on JC’s “strong opinions” and especially on his later “soft opinions”, few acknowledge her facility in the unspoken element of human dialogue. JC similarly underestimates Anya, and she responds sarcastically, “Do you think I can’t read between the lines?” (Coetzee, 2007: 91). Anya’s narration is not merely an exhibition of interpretive abilities; it is also the written record of that exhibition. As that record, Diary of a Bad Year narratively and visually foregrounds intuition. The text thus demonstrates that, while Anya consistently reads between the lines, she is also able to read across the lines of Coetzee’s novel and therefore across the boundaries constructed by the othering forces of JC, Alan, and patriarchal society. Anya becomes “the novel’s key character” as she subtly enters and wins JC’s game of translation in the lower two-thirds of Diary of a Bad Year (Hahn, 2012: 191).

By giving Anya a voice, specifically a written voice, Coetzee legitimizes her perspective on the novel’s events. Her dialogic narrative “throw[s] light on” the other language of the novel, giving Anya the ultimate interpretive power apart from that of the reader (Bakhtin, 1981: 12). Thus, Diary’s form demonstrates the importance of unspoken communication, specifically that of conventional “others”, in interpersonal exchanges, but the reader possesses the ultimate ability to interpret Coetzee’s words within this structure. Much of Coetzee’s earlier fiction concerns itself with alterity, with the difficulties of understanding the self in light of the other, and with the intricacies of human communication among diverse speakers. As early as Waiting for the Barbarians, Coetzee tugs at the strings connecting speech to unspoken thought, and his late fiction, of which Diary is a piece, increasingly foregrounds this tension. Unlike Coetzee’s other novels, though, Diary of a Bad Year grants readers consistent access to the intimate, diary-like records of both main characters. Diary depicts the nuanced, complicated nature of human dialogue through characters’ active analysis of one another’s words, gestures, and thoughts in their individual monologues. Without the three-part structure, the “diary” remains the tired opinions of an old man. Yet, by externalizing the internal, by figuring latent communication as audible speech and, further, as written dialogue, Diary of a Bad Year expands the province of the novel to include the implicit and even the unspoken as essential components of its narrative structure. In keeping with this expansion, Coetzee considers other perspectives inherent in heteroglot language and offers the principal descriptive and interpretive role to a character completely other to him. He also presents the novel-reading process in a new way by filtering it through several readings before it even reaches his audience. Diary of a Bad Year, then, raises an issue far more important than whether it earns the label of “novel”. It multiplies dialogic tension, blurring the formal lines between monologue and dialogue to represent the underrepresented speakers and understated speech of everyday conversation. Coetzee explodes the dialogic even as he literalizes it, conveying on paper that which cannot even be conveyed through spoken words: the discourse of the unsaid.