Coetzee in California: adaptation, authorship and thefilming of Waiting for the Barbarians1 Hermann Wittenberg

EXT. OUTSIDE OF TOWN - DAYUsing a sharp stone, the Magistrate gouges the outline of a head in a side of the dig. Two pebbles for eyes, another for anose, a slash beneath the nose for a mouth, and the head is finished.

Tossing the stone aside, he moves back a dozen feet, raises his smock to reveal a holster and cartridge belt at the waist,and takes out the pistol. The arm unsteady, its movement awkward, he aims at the target and pulls the trigger: BANG! He’s wide off the mark. BANG! That’s closer. Holding the pistol with both hands, he aims again and BANG! The bullet hole is right between the eyes.

The Magistrate kisses the pistol and returns it to its holster. Pleased with his progress towards the goal he’s kept himself alive to attain, he bends down and briskly rubs Schmutzig’s head.2

The above scene comes from a screenplay version of Waiting for the Barbarians, written in 1988 by the Hollywood scriptwriter, Walter B. Newman. In Newman’s vividly imagined adaptation, the Magistrate, aided by his trusty dog, Schmutzig, is preparing to get even with Colonel Joll. The site of the archaeological dig, in the novel the place where the Magistrate encounters evidence of a history outside the time of the empire, here becomes refashioned as an impromptu shooting range in which the aging, gun-slinging protagonist can honehis rusty gun skills. As we already can see in this brief

1 The support of the National Research Foundation of South Africa and the Research Fund of the University of the Western Cape is gratefully acknowledged.2 Walter B. Newman, Waiting for the Barbarians, screenplay, unrealised, p. 107-108.

illustrative extract, Newman’s film would have re-imagined Coetzee’sstark fable in the mould of the Western action genre.

On the face of it, Newman would have found material in J.M. Coetzee’s book that could readily be transposed to a Western style film. The novel’s basic plot-line, in which a wronged good man suffers setbacks at the hands of a sadistic villain, lent itself to an adaptation in which the conflict is resolved in a violent climax,and justice and moral order are once again restored. Newman’s colourful film is characterised by the signature effects of Western

movies:3 action sequences involving guns, horses and desert landscapes, outdoors scenes of male bonding, off-beat humour including jokes about erectile dysfunction (cucumbers and walnuts feature as comic props), bar-room scenes involving whores and heavy drinking, and a final violent showdown in the village square. Instead of Indians, the film is populated by nomadic Barbarians who are characterised by a strong sense of honour and repulsive eating habits.

The Newman screenplay was commissioned by the German-American film producer Wieland Schulz-Keil, with whom Coetzee had earlier, in 1987, entered into an agreement to adapt Waiting for the Barbarians into amotion-picture. The film script should easily be dismissible as a flawed adaptation and spectacular misreading of the novel, not worthy of much serious attention, were it not for the fact that Coetzee had initially collaborated on the project, and that his interactions with film makers in this particular instance and more generally, give us important insights into his views of his own novel and the kind of film that he imagined to be made of it. Furthermore, the Newman screenplay, perhaps precisely because of itsglaring shortcomings, may have persuaded Coetzee to turn his hand toscriptwriting again, producing his own screenplay version of Waiting for the Barbarians in 1995.4

3 For a useful critical discussion, see Michael Coyne’s The Crowded Prairie. Also John Saunders’s handy overview, The Western Genre.4 J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, screenplay, unrealised. Available in the Coetzee Papers, Harry Ransom Centre, Austin, University of Texas. Together with Coetzee’s screenplay In the Heart of the Country (original ms at NELM), published as J.M. Coetzee, ed. H. Wittenberg, Two Screenplays, UCT Press, 2014.

This article will therefore examine the Newman adaptation and itshistorical context more carefully, showing that the Hollywoodepisode in which Coetzee briefly became caught up in was not just atrivial and inconsequential affair, but had a not insignificantbearing on the way his literary career unfolded. The larger storyhere is one about film and Coetzee’s relationship with film makersand the movie industry, and more specifically his ambitions to seehis novels, in particular Waiting for the Barbarians, on the big screen.At the same time then that Coetzee was breaking through on theinternational literary stage in the early 1980s with his thirdnovel, he was also becoming deeply involved in the cinematicadaptations of three of his books (In the Heart of the Country, Waiting for theBarbarians and Life & Times of Michael K),5 interested in seeing his booksadapted as a motion pictures, and reach an even wider audience.

In the popular imagination, the filming of a novel is generally seenas its ultimate validation and acknowledgement, a view that AnthonyBurgess satirised as follows: “Every bestselling novel has to beturned into a film, the assumption being that the book itself whetsan appetite for the true fulfilment – the verbal shadow turned intolight, the word made flesh” (1975, 15).6 Coetzee’s sophisticatedknowledge of film and its relationship to literature would have madehim particularly sceptical of such a situation in which the literarytext, once filmed, becomes a mere supplement to its authoritativeversion on the big screen.7 In writing screenplay versions of hisnovels, and allowing film makers to adapt his books, we see Coetzeeas being cognizant of the multiple pitfalls in the adaptationenterprise: films could, on the one hand, make his stories intopowerful screen narratives that would reach a much wider audience,but also, on the other hand, distort and misrepresent the meaning ofhis fictions in such a way that his creative work could be

5 The intersection between Coetzee’s novels and the screenplays is a potentially fascinating area of study. One of the early manuscript versionsof Life & Times of Michael K employs cinematic modes, showing the influence of the In the Heart of the Country screenplay. Both texts were written concurrently. See a forthcoming paper, “Cinematic Modes in Life & Times of Michael K” for more detailed discussion. 6 I’m indebted for the Burgess reference to Kamilla Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate. 7 For an overview of Coetzee’s thinking on film, see my “Introduction” in Two Screenplays (2014).

diminished. Robert Stam formulates the potentially antagonisticrelationship between novel and film as follows:

Filmic embodiment is seen as making literature obsolescent,retroactively revealing mere words as somehow weak andspectral and insubstantial. In Freudian terms, film is seen interms of Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’, whereby theadaptation as Oedipal son symbolically slays the source textas ‘father’. (2005, 4)

In the Newman affair, the Oedipal scenario fortunately did notmaterialise, but the California episode has much to teach aboutadaptation and its discontents. Adaptation theory, a fairly newbranch of cultural studies that has emerged in the nexus of filmtheory and literary criticism, has as its object the complexrelationship between the literary text and the film, in particularproblematizing the often posited ideal of fidelity to the sourcetext. As Stam again notes, instead of using an unproblematised ideaof fidelity, it is preferable to see adaptation

as a matter of the source novel’s hypotext being transformedby a complex series of operations: selection, amplification,concretization, actualization, critique, extrapolation,analogization, popularization and reculturization. (2005, 19)

The approach taken here in this paper situates itself between bookhistory and adaptation theory, inflecting the latter to take intoaccount the more recent sociological turn in adaptation studies thatis not only interested in the philosophical and theoreticalquestions which emerge in the accommodation of literary function tocinematic form, but foregrounds the material and historical contextof adaptations, interrogating what R. Barton Palmer calls the“complex negotiations (financial, authorial, commercial, legal,formal, generic, etc.) that bring adaptations into being and deeplyaffect their reception” (2007, 1).

In exploring the history of engagements between text and film,author and scriptwriter, and agent and producer, the discussion willrely on archival material that has only recently become available,primarily in the form of business correspondence between Coetzee andvarious other parties. The material quoted and referred to here isdrawn in the main from two sources: firstly, the Coetzee Collection

in the Harry Ransom Centre in Austin at the University of Texaswhich acquired his manuscripts and other papers in 2012, and,secondly, the Kannemeyer Collection, now housed at National EnglishLiterary Museum (NELM), which was originally assembled by its authorto provide the source material for his biography of Coetzee.

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But before we look more closely at what happened in California in 1988 and explore its cultural consequences, it is necessary to step back in time and situate the affair within the trajectory of Coetzee’s emerging authorship. The publication of Waiting for the Barbarians in 1980, followed by a belated US edition in 1982, signified a decisive shift in the development of Coetzee’s maturing authorship, placing it on the well-known path of international recognition that would lead to two Booker prizes (1983 and 1999), and culminate in the Nobel award (2003). Coetzee was now an acclaimed new voice on the international literary scene, winning three literary prizes with the book and making the New York Times listof top ten novels of the year. The response of the respected Sunday Times reviewer, Bernard Levin, perhaps exemplified the effect of Coetzee’s book:

It is almost exactly a year to the day since I began reviewingnovels in this place … But I think that this week’s is in someways the most remarkable work I have reviewed here, and its author an artist of a weight and depth that put him in a category beyond ordinary comparisons.(1980,44)

Levin’s praise needs to be contextualised by the fact that that hehad previously reviewed well-known established writers such as V.S.Naipaul, Anthony Burgess, David Lodge and Russell Hoban. The novel’sclean, beautiful prose, its classical construction, and a story thatsuccessfully dissolved specific references to South Africanpolitical oppression within a more wide-reaching universal humannarrative, no doubt helped to win a wider, more main-stream globalaudience.

It is in this context of his rising literary reputation that we needto situate the subterranean influence of film and adaptation. Its

impact on Coetzee’s authorship was, as we shall see, deeply fraught,largely unrewarding, but yet paradoxically also ultimatelyproductive for his own creative practice. The complex story ofCoetzee’s relationship to cinema has only partially been told, andthe significance of film in Coetzee’s oeuvre has not beensufficiently recognised. Some of Coetzee’s interactions with filmmakers and producers have been described in J.C. Kannemeyer’s recentbiography J.M. Coetzee. A Life in Writing (2012), with attention in particularbeing given to the various attempts to adapt the previous novel, Inthe Heart of the Country. Although Kannemeyer in this context brieflyrefers to Coetzee’s screenplay (2012, 315), it has only recentlycome to light that Coetzee wrote not only his own full filmadaptation of In the Heart of the Country (a script that was discarded byMarion Hänsel in favour of her own version), but also for Waiting forthe Barbarians.

In Kannemeyer’s account (2012, 312-319), and in my own more detailedanalysis (2014), Coetzee worked together with first Clive Levinson(a Johannesburg producer) and then Francis Gerard (a Londondocumentary film maker), but both ventures came to naught. Theprospective film which Coetzee had in mind would have utilisedmontage and non-realist cinematography coupled with voice-overnarration and lengthy silent sequences, in other words, an art-housefilm that Francis Gerard was unable to secure financial backing for.Coetzee’s screenplay was written in 1980 and 1981, in the wake ofthe Waiting for the Barbarians success, but faced with no viable prospectto realise the film, Coetzee was open, by mid-1982, to a proposal bythe Belgian film maker Marion Hänsel. Coetzee had becomeunderstandably anxious about the prospects of ever having In the Heartof the Country made into a film, and agreed to go along with the Hänselproject even though she immediately rejected his own film script asunsuitable, and was pursuing a direction that was increasinglyincompatible with Coetzee’s vision. To Coetzee’s chagrin, Hänsel wasusing an inauthentic Spanish location and a non-South African leadactress, and overall displayed little interest in representing thelandscape and the distinctive social relations of the Karoofaithfully. The film was eventually released in 1985 under the titleDust to moderate critical acclaim, but it was also clear from

Coetzee’s subsequent reactions that the film did not entirely meethis expectations.8

What may have played a role in Coetzee’s reluctant acquiescence tothe Hänsel project, and also letting go of his own carefully craftedscreenplay, was the international success of Waiting for the Barbarians.Unlike the limited and mostly local sales of the previous twonovels, Waiting for the Barbarians had become a publishing success, bothcritically and commercially, and after winning the high-profileBooker prize for Life & Times of Michael K in 1983, Coetzee’s stock wouldhave risen even higher. In the same period then that Hänsel wasmaking her film, Coetzee was being inundated by enthusiasticproposals to film Waiting for the Barbarians, and there was thus the veryreal prospect of a major film adaptation that would eclipse theunsatisfactory outcome of the Dust project. Coetzee would haverealised that he had written an eminently filmable novel that couldnot only be an art-house film but had excellent prospects of broadercommercial success – in retrospect easily his most attractive andbankable book with an appeal to universal film audiences. Writing tohis agent Peter Lampack, Coetzee commented on “various people whowrite to me almost weekly”,9 offering film options and proposingdeals. The approaches by major film companies in Britain and the US,including Warner Brothers, and the very substantial sums of moneyinvolved, made Coetzee realise that this was a potentially life andcareer-changing opportunity. As he wrote to one hopeful filmproducer: “While I don’t want to be crassly commercial, the fact isthat I could be relieved of academic teaching if the deal is largeenough”.10 Coetzee must have sensed that Waiting for the Barbarians, unlikeIn the Heart of the Country, could potentially be a major internationalfilm that would propel his literary career to a different levelaltogether, giving him unprecedented freedom to pursue his creativeambitions. There was thus much at stake here.

8 In a parenthetical aside in Doubling the Point, Coetzee remarks that Dust “retains virtually none of the sequence divisions and indeed none of the quite swift pacing of the novel. It loses a lot of vitality thereby, in my opinion”, p. 60. Coetzee’s more candidly expressed disapproval is also evident in correspondence, for example in a letter to James Polley, 17 July1985, Coetzee Papers, Harry Ransom Centre, Austin, at the University of Texas (henceforth HRC). 9 Letter by J.M. Coetzee to Peter Lampack, 25 April 1985, HRC.10 Letter by J.M. Coetzee to Charlie Nairn, 31 March 1986, HRC.

The record of correspondence shows that Coetzee was not rushing intoa film deal, but was proceeding cautiously in seeking to balancecommercial benefit with the objective to have the best possible filmmade which would do justice to his novel. Coetzee was initiallyagain approached by James Polley (who directed the Cape Town FilmFestival and UCT’s film education unit), and who had previouslyexpressed interest previously in filming In the Heart of the Country.11

Polley was keen to film the book, using Manie van Rensburg asdirector, but also bringing in international expertise andfinancing. A big budget production with commercial appeal wasenvisaged, and Coetzee was open to this proposal though no optionwas signed. Soon, he was also offered a film deal by theJohannesburg based producer Moonyeen Lee who wanted to promote ayoung director named Chester Dent. Dent had thoughts of shooting thefilm in Patagonia, casting Denholm Elliott in the role of theMagistrate, with John Hurt playing the part of Colonel Joll. Nothingcame of this bid, possibly due to Dent’s inexperience and thefinancial difficulties faced by Lee’s production company. Dent hadstressed the need for a substantial budget and high productionvalues, wanting to shoot the feature in the more costly 35mmPanavision format.12

In Coetzee’s dealings with filmmakers, one basic problem tended torecur in various permutations. Instead of just signing his book awayto the highest bidding film company and leaving the story to its ownfate, Coetzee was consistently at pains to ensure that the rightkind of film would be made. He explained his approach as follows tothe British television producer Eric Paice: “I must make it clearfrom the start that the main responsibility I feel is towards thebook. I don’t want to conclude a deal which results one day in afilm that leaves me feeling sick.”13 Coetzee’s remarks may possiblybe understood as an oblique reference to the growing dismay he wasfeeling with regard to the Hänsel project which was underway at thetime, and he would have wanted to ensure that there was not going tobe a repeat of this unsatisfactory state of affairs. But we alsoneed to consider that Coetzee was aware that any film adaptationwould irrevocably shift the reception and meaning of his novels. As

11 Letter by J.M. Coetzee to James Polley, 19 June 1979, Kannemeyer Papers (henceforth KP).12 Letter by Chester Dent to J.M.Coetzee, 31 January 1982, KP.13 Letter by J.M. Coetzee to E. Paice, 27 Feb 1984, HRC.

he told Hänsel, film was “a medium so powerful that its scenes willprobably take over the imagination of readers of the book.”14 Coetzeewas however not under any naïve illusion that films couldunproblematically transfer his book to the screen. Instead of asimplistic fidelity approach to adaptation,15 Coetzee recognized thatany cinematic adaptation would inevitably result in an autonomousand distinct creative project which could well be at variance withthe novel. As he put it to Paice, “At the same time (and you mustbelieve me when I say this) I am fully aware that a film has adynamic of its own which must be different from the dynamic ofwhatever book it is based on.”16

The conundrum which Coetzee then faced was derived from hiscommitment to protect the integrity of his books, explaining hisreluctance to sign away an option before being sure that the filmwould do justice to its core ideas. Such assurances would primarilycome in the form of an acceptable screenplay, signing up creditableactors and choosing appropriate locations. Conversely, filmmakerswere understandably unwilling to invest time into the writing of ascreenplay in the absence of a binding contract. And without asigned option, it was also impossible to secure financing, appoint asuitable director and hire the right actors that would have beenacceptable to the author. Coetzee explained the problem as followsto his New York agent Peter Lampack:

The problem, from my point of view, always seems to be thefollowing. (A) The filmmaker, for perfectly valid reasons,does not want to spend time and money on the project till hehas an option. (B) I, for perfectly valid reasons, do not wantto give the filmmaker carte blanche to do as he wishes withthe book. Therefore (A) the filmmaker does not want to commithimself to a particular treatment, and (B) I do not want to

14 Letter by J.M. Coetzee to Marion Hänsel, 26 September 1982. KP.15 In adaptation theory, fidelity is generally regarded as with suspicion asa simplistic and uncritical way of understanding the complex relationship between text and film. Robert Stam for example critiques “fidelity criticism’s discourse of loss” (2005, 20). Brian McFarlane’s Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation (1996) is an important early study. See also Kamilla Elliot’s complex and rich contribution to the field with her book Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (2003).16 Letter by J.M. Coetzee to E. Paice, 27 Feb 1984, HRC.

commit myself until he has committed himself. It is a perfectimpasse.17

It was this contractual bottle-neck, coupled with his cautiousness,that saw Coetzee unable to commit to several overtures from filmmakers in the mid-1980s, including deals proposed by Warner Brothersin the US and Eric Paice in the UK.

Coetzee’s interactions with Paice are a good example of the extentof his protectiveness towards his books. Paice had sent Coetzee afour-page proposal for the projected film in February 1984 which waslargely devoted to financing, fund-raising and marketing, butmentioned the Atlas Mountains as a possible location and RichardBurton as the lead actor. In his response, Coetzee thought thatwhile Paice’s proposal was “reassuring on the subject of financingthe film, it has little to say about what kind of treatment youpropose for the book.” He clearly spelled out that “before we canseriously negotiate about the details it seems to me that I ought tohave a more specific indication of what treatment will be given tothe book.”18

Paice responded by sending Coetzee a draft screenplay the followingmonth which contained detailed scene-by-scene descriptions. WhileCoetzee was broadly assured of its faithfulness to the core ideas ofthe book, he also had several critical comments to make. Some ofthese were of a minor nature (for example the fact that in Paice’sversion town square incident, the hammer was to be used to break thecaptive Barbarians’ feet), but also more significant problems, suchas a confusion between Mai and the Barbarian girl which partlyconflated the two characters. However more critically, Paice did notseem to have a full handle on the novel’s central character:

The side of the Magistrate that tries to understand what isgoing on and place it historically does not get enough weight.Without this, the film can only be a shell. A way must befound for the Magistrate to emerge as a thinking man.19

Coetzee also was less than enthusiastic about the Paice’s choice oflead actor. His objection to the classically trained Burton are

17 Letter by J.M. Coetzee to Peter Lampack, 26 February 1984, HRC.18 Letter by J.M. Coetzee to E. Paice, 27 February 1984, HRC.19 Letter by J.M. Coetzee to E. Paice, 25 March 1984, HRC.

revealing in their insight that they provide into his view of theMagistrate:

The Magistrate is an intelligent man and a man of feeling.When people speak to him, he listens. My feelings (myprejudice?) is that actors who have been raised on Shakespearedon’t listen when other people speak, they simply composethemselves and wait for their turn to speak again. 20

Coetzee had clearly formed opinions on the strengths and weakness ofspecific actors, and their suitability in interpreting the criticalrole of the Magistrate. Similar to his disapproval of Burton’sacting abilities was also his criticism of the well-known US actorJack Nicholson. Nicholson had initially been proposed for the roleby the film producer Wieland Schulz-Keil. As described inKannemeyer’s biography, Coetzee had reservations about this casting:“Nicholson would have to divest himself from certain qualities ofwhat I can only call slyness and subversive humour, which have beenpart of his hallmark in other roles”. In order to play the role ofthe Magistrate successfully, an actor had to have the skill todisplay “on the one hand, intelligence and a capacity for self-doubt, and on the other, a genuine commitment to duty, without thefirst subverting the other” (2012, 314). As we can see already withCoetzee’s previous comments, he saw the Magistrate as a complexfigure, and therefore this was a part that required an actor todisplay unusual thoughtfulness and talent.

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It was to Wieland Schulz-Keil though that Coetzee eventuallycommitted himself after lengthy negotiations. In view of Schulz-Keil’s literary background and his extensive film industrycredentials, it seems particularly ironic that the person whoCoetzee felt he could trust to adapt his novel, was to lead him intothe Newman screenplay debacle. Schulz-Keil was a well-connectedAmerican-German film producer, who had studied and taught philosophyand literature in Germany and Paris, had run a publishing house inNew York, and worked as a theatre director in Europe and the USbefore moving into film. He had extensive literary and cultural

20 ibid.

interests and a cosmopolitan outlook, conducting his affairs byshuttling between Hollywood, Paris and New York. Schulz-Keil alsoappeared exceedingly well networked, not only knowing leading actorssuch as Jack Nicholson and Gene Hackman, but also working withpeople as diverse as John Berger, Robert Redford and BernardoBertolucci. Before his approach to Coetzee, he had just completedthe filming of a Malcolm Lowry novel, Under the Volcano, shooting thefilm with John Huston as director in Mexico, with Albert Finney andJacqueline Bisset in the lead roles.21

After the publication of the German translation of Waiting for theBarbarians by the Henssel Verlag in 1985, Schulz-Keil had writtennuanced and intelligent review of the book in the respected Germanpolitical magazine Der Spiegel, in which he rejected a simplisticreading of the novel as an allegory for the political situation inSouth Africa, stressing its universal relevance as a dramatizationof the corrosive effects of power. The novel posed a “universalproblem with uncompromising clarity”, namely the question of“thinking from the position of the other” (1985, 189). Schulz-Keilended his review with the following paradoxical observation: “Theambitiousness of such thinking and its consequences inciteexhilarating writing by Coetzee, which in turn provokes anelectrifying reading experience – a state of consciousness that isevidently not incompatible with thinking through an intractableimpasse with remarkable clarity and precision”(1985, 189).

Schulz-Keil’s responsiveness to Coetzee’s book and his background asa literary critic suggested a compatibility that should have auguredwell for a successful and sympathetic film adaptation. Coetzee andSchulz-Keil shared common cultural and philosophical referencepoints, and their ideas about film also appeared compatible, asbecame evident when Coetzee asked him to spell out his vision forthe film in more detail. In an extensive seven-page letter, Schulz-Keil sketched out his ideas for the adaptation. Instead of a directpage by page transposition of novel to screen, in which the filmwould merely follow the plan of the book in derivative andreplicative fashion, Schulz-Keil wanted to build the film aroundwhat he called “a central gesture.” Drawing on his background intheatre, as well as Nietzsche’s discussion of musical and poetic

21 The information is drawn from Schulz-Keil’s introductory letter to Coetzee, 16 February 1984, HRC.

effect, Schulz-Keil put forward the idea of a “central gesture” thatwould capture and illustrate the core essential qualities of acharacter, and in this way structure the film. He explained theimplications of this idea as follows:

Since the tension of the novel resides primarily within onecharacter, the Magistrate, rather than between two or morecharacters … we should try to define as clearly as possiblethe gesture of the character; a gesture which, incidentally,coincides largely with that of the novel. 22

Schulz-Keil saw the Magistrate’s essential gesture as a search forfreedom and meaning in the face of fate, implying that the filmwould need to find an appropriate visual equivalent to representthis effectively.

Schulz-Keil had also given thought to the question of voice-over,which had earlier bedevilled the attempts to film In the Heart of theCountry.23 Given the fact that much of the novel revolves around theconsciousness of the Magistrate, the use of voice-over to convey histhoughts would have been an obvious route. Schulz-Keil was thoughwary of relying on this technique:

Usually voice-over passages in films do not work at all; theytend to create a jarring distance between audience and thestory that is being told; they tend to enter into an onlysuperficial meaningful relation with the image – a bit likebad music; in short they tend to be editorialising.24

Voice-over could however be effective if it worked in a contrapuntalmanner. Citing Robert Bresson’s 1956 film Un condamné à mort s'est échappé(A Man Escaped) as a possible model, Schulz-Keil felt that such acontrapuntal utilization of voice-over might work well in some

22 W. Schulz-Keil, letter and film proposal sent to J.M. Coetzee, 17 March 1984, HRC. Permission to cite from this letter and other documents kindly granted by its author.23 In the In the Heart of the Country screenplay, Coetzee had earlier utilized voice-over extensively, leading to conflict with Clive Levinson. Marion Hänsel had also rejected voice-over as a cinematic technique, and used it sparingly in Dust. Coetzee castigated the conservative attitudes to voice-over in Doubling the Point (1992,60). See also Wittenberg, “Introduction” (2014) for a detailed discussion. 24 Schulz-Keil, letter and film proposal sent to J.M. Coetzee, 17 March 1984, HRC.

scenes in the film, for example the sequences depicting theMagistrate’s encounters with the Barbarian girl, where they wouldcreate a dissonance between what we see on the screen and what thevoice of the Magistrate shows him to be thinking.

As also seen in his Der Spiegel review, Schulz-Keil also felt stronglythat Coetzee’s novel was a parable rather than a thinly disguisedsocio-political commentary. Its unspecified setting should bemaintained, rather than localised and made recognizable:

The place of action and the characters should not behistorically, or geographically, more defined than they are inthe novel. The indigenous population should, therefore, notconsist of blacks or of American Indians; they shouldn’t beEast Indians and they shouldn’t be Arabs either.25

Similarly, the Magistrate should not have a distinctive Britishaccent, nor be modelled on a French colonial figure.

Overall, Schulz-Keil thought that the “film would require amassiveness and, so to speak, a grandeur that only few directorstoday can produce”,26 mentioning Peter Weir, Bernardo Bertolucci andPhillip Kaufman and even Akira Kurosawa as possible directors.Coetzee wrote back to Schulz-Keil, clearly pleased and reassuredthat his book was the subject of thoughtful attention and ambitiousplans: “I’ve read your letter with attention and find myself verymuch in sympathy with the approach you outline”.27 Coetzee wasespecially keen on Schulz-Keil’s approach to voice-over, whichcorresponded with his own views.28

Despite several attractive competing offers, Coetzee clearly must have felt confident in Schulz-Keil, especially because he had recognised the universal questions in the novel rather than tying itnarrowly to the South African political situation which was, in the mid-80s, becoming an object of increasing international interest. Possibly fearing film companies exploiting the marketing potential

25 ibid.26 ibid.27 Letter by J.M. Coetzee to W. Schulz-Keil, 14 May 1984, HRC.28 Coetzee was attracted to the estranging effects that could be achieved byseparating image and voice in film, effects that could be attained by utilising the technique of voice-over. For more details on Coetzee’s approach to voice-over, see the discussion in Doubling the Point (1992, 60).

of the South African angle (black Barbarians, Afrikaans-accented officials), Coetzee wanted explicit clauses written into any film contract that prohibited any suggestion of a South African connection with the film:

I am not playing one of those East European games in which a writer disguises a political statement about his own country in an allegorical form in such a way that all his readers knowwhat he really means but the authorities cannot pin an offenseon him. If I had wanted to write a book specifically about South Africa, I would have written it (which doesn’t mean to say that Waiting for the Barbarians is not about South Africa). I very definitively do not want the generality of the book stripped away in a movie version which claims to reveal what Iwas ‘really’ writing about by locating the story in South Africa. At the same time I recognize that I cannot prevent people from reading the book, or interpreting the film, as they desire.29

Coetzee clearly felt strongly about this matter, because he deemed it necessary to clarify his position more explicitly. Writing again to Peter Lampack, his New York agent who was negotiating with film makers on his behalf, he was adamant that the South African angle beavoided strictly:

I have never really explained to you why I have wanted the clause in the contract specifying that the story shall not be represented as taking place in South Africa. There are two reasons. The first is that, though the book does in fact in large part have its basis in the activities of the South African security police and their bosses, it is intended to portray a more general condition which places the security of the state above all other considerations. The second reason, frankly, is that I cannot afford to live in this country and be known as the author of a popular and widely distributed film which graphically depicts the activities of the south African police – not only because it is actually a crime here to ‘publish’ so-called mis-information about the police, but also because I’ve also had a .38 slug put through the

29 Letter byJ.M. Coetzee to Peter Lampack, 25 April 1985, HRC.

windshield of my car (years ago), and it’s an eerie feeling reporting the particulars to the people you know in your heartcommitted the act, and seeing them religiously writing it all down, and smiling up their sleeves. In other words – to be practical – while I live here, and while the present regime lasts, I have to distance myself from a ‘South African” Barbarians.30

Coetzee’s intriguing comments are one of the rare instances of authorial explication, but even here he maintains a balance between the two possible interpretive positions: the novel is about South Africa, but it also a more general exploration of the abuse of statepower. Ultimately Coetzee still asserted the rights of his readers to make up their own minds and interpret the book “as they desire”. While his objection to a South Africanised film version was framed in personal terms,31 he was also asserting the freedom of his fictions to have the possibility of open-ended meanings, meanings that a more narrowly conceived film should not seek to contain.

One of the ironies here is that at the very same time that Coetzee was strenuously seeking to avoid any suggestion of South Africa in the filming of Waiting for the Barbarians, he was critical of Hänsel for shooting Dust in Spain and consequently producing an inauthentic representation of South Africa. In his own screenplay that he wrote subsequently, Coetzee was at pains to avoid any hint of a contemporary South African connection, as can be seen in the detailed description of the orientalised and medievalised setting ofthe Magistrate’s frontier town:

The main trading street of the town. The street has an Easternflavour. The Magistrate passes a number of shops.A butchery (sheep carcasses, game-birds, clouds of flies). A nod from the Magistrate as he passes; the BUTCHER bows slightly as he returns the greeting. A coppersmith's shop. The SMITH, sitting cross-legged as he taps at a bowl with an engraving chisel, also returns his greeting.

30 Letter by J.M Coetzee to Peter Lampack, 1 September 1985, HRC.31 The incident in which a bullet was fired into Coetzee’s car in 1979 is discussed in more detail in Kannemeyer (2012,211).

A bakery (trays of breads and pastries). Here the Magistrate stops. Making a selection of pastries, he is served by an attractive young female ASSISTANT, whom he eyes with interest.

MAGISTRATETwo of those …One of those …32

Coetzee’s avoidance of a South African setting extends even to smalldetails: the reference in the novel to the “green and gold” flag (1982, 139) is changed in the screenplay to a flag of “black and gold in diagonal bands”,33 possibly to sidestep any suggestion of a reference to the emblematic colours of the South African national rugby team.

*

Coetzee met Schulz-Keil and his partner Moritz Borman in Paris inApril 1985, an occasion where he also had the first opportunity toview the recently completed film Dust. As we have seen earlier,Coetzee was not enamoured of this adaptation, and would have wantedto avoid a similar disappointment with the new film. The contractualnegotiations accordingly took a long time, but eventually Coetzeesigned a one-year renewable option with Schulz-Keil against a non-refundable payment of $10 000. Should a viable screenplay and filmproject emerge in this period, the film rights would be purchasedfor $ ¼ million, together with 5% royalties accruing to the authoron producers’ box office profits. Coetzee was also assured extensivescript consultation rights and set privileges.34

In the following year Coetzee flew out to Los Angeles to help withthe script-writing. Schulz-Keil had engaged one of Hollywood’s topscriptwriters for the project, the highly experienced Walter B.Newman. Coetzee, Schulz-Keil, and Newman spend three days in workingtogether on the screenplay, at the Chateau Marmont, on 8221 SunsetBoulevard, Hollywood, which Schulz-Keil used as a business addressand where he also kept a suite.35 The Chateau Marmont, a 1920s styleAmerican Gothic building modelled on a French castle on the Loire,32 J.M. Coetzee, “Waiting for the Barbarians”, screenplay, unrealised, p. 7.33 J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, screenplay, unrealised, p. 6. 34 Letter by J.M. Coetzee to Murray Pollinger, 11 March 1987, HRC.

has long been a well-known Hollywood landmark, attracting a steadystream of the rich and famous. Greta Garbo, Marilyn Monroe and JohnWayne visited in the 1960s, Jim Morrison, high on drugs, once jumpedout of a fourth-floor window, and Helmut Newton lived there foryears, taking many of his photographs in his suite. Several filmswere shot there on location, and artists as diverse as Hunter S.Thompson, Annie Leibovitz, Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, TimBurton, and Sofia Coppola produced work from within the hotel'swalls (Brown 2010) – a list to which one could also tentatively addJ.M.Coetzee. Schultz-Keil and Newman were likely in their element,taking in the glamorous showbiz atmosphere of the hotel and thesteady stream of film moguls, starlets, politicians and artists. Itis more doubtful that Coetzee took to the heady ambiance, for heflew out after three days, cutting down his planned week-long stay.36

The Academy award nominated Newman (1916–1993) came with majorcredits to his name and was not only a respected and establishedscreenwriter, but would also have seemed a safe bet to Schulz-Keiland Borman who were sinking not insubstantial sums into the venture.Newman had a successful, commercially proven record, as was wellknown in the industry for scripts that featured good pacing, off-beat humour and vivid characterisation. William Froug placed him“undoubtedly on the short list of the greatest screenwriters of alltime” (2000, 130). Newman had been responsible for the screenplaysof several successful films which included Ace in the Hole (togetherwith Billy Wilder) in 1951; the 1965 Western send-up Cat Ballou (whichmade Jane Fonda into a well-known actress); Blood Brothers (1978)starring Richard Gere; and The Champ (1979), starring Jon Voight.The most well-known film that Newman penned was however releasedwithout his name on the credits, as a result of falling out with thedirector. This was the star-studded The Magnificent Seven (1960),directed by John Sturges, one of the signature Westerns of theperiod. The film stars Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson,James Coburn, Robert Vaughn, Brad Dexter and Horst Buchholz, whoplay a group of American gunmen hired to protect a small village inMexico from a group of marauding bandits. The film is a western-style remake based on Akira Kurosawa's 1954 Japanese film Seven

35 For years, Schulz-Keil kept Suite 39 at the Chateau Marmont, rooms he had “inherited” from the famous Czech-British film maker Karel Reisz (responsible for the 1981 adaptation of A French Lieutenant’s Woman). 36 Letter by J.M. Coetzee to Peter Lampack, 28 October 1988, HRC.

Samurai, a film which, co-incidently, Coetzee later commented onextensively in his opening essay of the novel Diary of a Bad Year (2007).

Coetzee reported mixed feelings from his visit to Hollywood. He had gotten to know Wieland Schulz- Keil better and felt more confidence in the direction he wished to give to the project, but wrote to Lampack confidentially that the choice of Newman as scriptwriter puzzled him.37 Newman had only the opening scenes sketched out, and there was little substantive material Coetzee could work with. When he received the full screenplay at the end of 1988, it was immediately clear that his misgivings had been fully justified. The notes that Coetzee pencilled in in the margin reveal a growing senseof disbelief and unease at the direction the script was taking.38 Looking at the Newman script, Coetzee may have felt that he had gotten off lightly with the Hänsel film which was, by comparison, a model of fidelity. Writing to Peter Lampack, Coetzee summed up his response as follows:

My unhappiness is not so much about his departures from the book (I hope I’m not so naive as to think that one can expect fidelity from movie makers) as about the quality of the screenplay itself. I think Newman has missed most of what is interesting in the book and produced a script which I don’t even see as having any particular commercial potential.39

Given the glaring shortcomings of the screenplay, it would have beenentirely appropriate for Coetzee to reject it out of hand. Possibly out of respect to Wieland Schulz-Keil and also in view of the time and money invested in the project to date, he took the time to writean extensive, carefully reasoned response, dealing with its strengths and weaknesses in a balanced manner. One of the positives for Coetzee was that the choice of a vaguely Russian setting certainly avoided any of the South African references he had earlierbeen concerned about. The steppe setting of the frontier town is a curious blend of camel trains and Orthodox church spires, populated by characters called Samarin, Appollon, Vrangel, Shostak and Kazan. Newman imagined the set to be inhabited by “stray dogs”,“drunks 37 ibid.38 The copy of the Newman screenplay with Coetzee’s annotations is now kept at NELM, part of a miscellaneous collection of adaptations that he deposited in 2001.39 Letter by J.M. Coetzee to Peter Lampack, 12 December 1988, HRC.

sleeping it off in doorways”, “Wife-beaters slapping their women around”, “possibly a barrel organ” and a “shopkeeper using an abacus”. The townspeople are imagined as “steady nibblers, especially of salted cucumbers and sunflower seeds (they spit out the hulls wherever they are)”. “Church bells sound the hours and quarter-hours” feature in a soundscape complemented by the clang of village smithies.40

Newman had also achieved a strong opening episode of the film featuring a Barbarian polo contest and sheep-eating feast, as we cansee in the scenes below:

FADEIN: TITLE, CREDITS & WILD MUSIC (discordant trumpets, drums, bull-roars and bone-flutes) OVER:

1. EXT. Nomad Camp – playing field – summer day

A leather polo ball bounces INTO THE SHOT, chased by an exuberant NOMAD on a galloping pony. As he lifts his mallet totake a whack, ANOTHER NOMAD slams into him at breakneck speed,tumbles him out of the saddle and raises his own mallet to wallop it back. Before he can, NOMADS from all sides are upon him, sideswiping one other, mallets flailing, all whopping andlaughing, some of them bleeding. The ball suddenly arcs into the air and OUT OF SHOT. The players race after it – and we’reaware now of spectators on the sideline, scores of cheering nomad men, women and children. They’re grouped on either side of the chief and his guests: the Magistrate and a young ENSIGN, commander of the town’s garrison.

Woman carry in a whole boiled sheep (dismembered and reassembled) on a huge platter and set it down for the chief. He, the magistrate, the Ensign, and the male heads of familiesare sitting on rugs in a semi-circle near the wall. The chief plucks out the sheep’s eyes and pops one into the Magistrate’smouth and the other into the Ensign’s – a great honor. It’s routine for the Magistrate (he has attended these feasts for almost 20 years) but the Ensign has to force himself to chew and swallow.

40 Newman screenplay, p. 2.

The exotic anthropology and scenery which Newman elaborates here in lavish detail are, as readers who know Coetzee’s book can see, extensive re-imaginings of the original story. The scene is not found in a similar form in the novel, though it is not necessarily entirely incongruent with the world which Coetzee had created. The film’s opening scene, which Coetzee would have become familiar with in California, certainly demonstrates Newman’s skill as screenwriter.

Newman’s adaptation gets it decidedly wrong though in the characterisation of the main figures, flattening their complexity and reducing their relationships to predictable clichéd interactionsreplete with garrulousness, clowning and off-beat humour. One particularly egregious example is cited below to illustrate the extent of Newman’s misreading of the Magistrate. It is a scene in which the Magistrate eyes an attractive woman in a pottery shop who is looking at pots, and deciding what to buy:

She has a low-cut blouse and a spectacular bosom. The Magistrate – half a head shorter – stands next to her, pretending to be interested in the pots. He glances up at her,to make sure that she’s absorbed, then gets up on his toes, and looks down her cleavage. Then he subsides, looks at the O.S. spectators, and grins a conspiratorial grin. 41

The Magistrate’s relationship to the barbarian girl is reduced to a merely sexual one, with Coetzee being particularly disturbed by her characterisation as mere object for the magistrate’s erotic gratification. We can see this is the following scene in which the Magistrate finally overcomes his impotence:

The magistrate crawls in, silhouetted against the tent wall nearest the O.S. fire. The girl lies asleep on a bearskin, covered by another. Only her head is visible. The Magistrate puts the hat and coat aside and takes off his boots. When he reaches for the blanket, the girl raises it for him. She’s lying there naked. The Magistrate runs his eyes over her, thenunbuttons his fly and slips under the blanket. She lets it

41 Newman screenplay, p. 111.

fall over him. Under it, her hand seeks and finds what it seeks.

GIRL(delighted surprise) Aiee-

The magistrate laughs happily. Then, with a heave, he’s on her.42

Coetzee’s marginalia here comment as follows: “I’m dubious about anylack of complexity in the girl. She is so simple, so animal in this presentation that it is hard to see her position in any way tragic.”43

Assessing the screenplay’s treatment of the Magistrate as a whole, and the manner in which his simultaneous sexual attraction and impotence is reduced to the comic spectacle of frustrated middle-aged libido, Coetzee outlined the core issues at stake in his reportto Schulz-Keil:

I find no sign in the screenplay that the screenwriter understands the central conflict that the Magistrate experiences in his erotic attraction to the girl, namely, thatbecause of her position the closer he moves to her the closer he moves to the Colonel. (Hence his impotence in a sense protects him from assuming the position of the Colonel.) Failing to understand this, he fails to understand the intimacy of the threat that the Colonel poses to him, as he fails to conceive of the impossible position of the girl herself.44

Coetzee went on to explain that the Magistrate’s “’impotence’ is in fact his body speaking to him in a language he does not yet understand”. All three principal characters, the Magistrate, Joll and the Barbarian girl, had to be re-conceptualised allowing them “to become more intelligent, more self-conscious, more mature, and hence more difficult to play and more rewarding for the actors”. Coetzee restrained himself from calling the entire screenplay to be

42 ibid, p.75.43 ibid.44 J.M. Coetzee correspondence to Schulz-Keil, 5 December 1988. HRC.

canned, but the many changes that he proposed in virtually all scenes amounted to much of the same outcome. In closing, Coetzee offered the following confidential recommendations:

While I don’t recommend that the Newman screenplay should be scrapped, I think it ought to be heavily rewritten, and not byNewman himself. I doubt that he can do better; nor, from what I know of him, do I believe that he is capable of absorbing radical criticism and profiting by it.45

To his credit Schulz-Keil immediately recognized the problem and conceded that Newman, despite his gifts, had been the wrong choice of screenwriter. He and Borman spend some time in trying to tinker with the script, but soon came to the conclusion that their film in this form was not salvageable. Reflecting on the turn of events morerecently, Schulz-Keil offered the following explanation:

Walter unfortunately could not get to grips with the adaptation of the allegorical novel, and not being able to work in the realist mode that he was accustomed to, took refuge in a form which offered a familiar allegorical structure, namely the Western. We had to agree with J.M. Coetzee’s judgement, and worked on Waiting for the Barbarians for a while spending money, until we eventually lost interest. As I’ve said before: that’s how it often goes with the development of film projects.46

The atmosphere of the Chateau Marmont, in which the famous Western screenplay Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had been written, had evidently resonated maliciously with Newman during his writing. In the closing scenes of the screenplay, like the one cited in the beginning where the Magistrate practices his shooting skills, Newmanincreasingly resorted to the generic conventions of the Western, culminating in a dramatic confrontation with Joll in the town square. Following the plot conventions of the action genre where thefinal combat is typically not a gun-fight, but more manly hand-to-hand combat, Joll gets his come-uppance when the Magistrate “swings

45 ibid46 Schulz-Keil to H. Wittenberg, email, 9 October 2013.

back his leg and gives the Colonel a shattering kick in the balls.”47

The scene serves to show Joll’s defeat in the form of a symbolic emasculation, and also demonstrates that the Magistrate has finally recovered his former macho identity that had previously been undermined by impotence. Newman’s screenplay in this way reduces thecomplexity of Coetzee’s character to a predictable drama of threatedmale virility.

If we follow the six-part typology of possible film adaptation models, as proposed by Kamilla Elliott, the Newman version would squarely constitute a “Ventriloquist Concept of Adaptation” where the film pays not even “lip service to the authorial project” but empties out the novel’s signs and replaces them with “new filmic spirits”. The book’s empty form is filled with entirely new meanings, and the proposed film, “like a ventriloquist, props up thedead novel” and “throws its own voice into the silent corpse” (2003,143).

The fact that the screenplay was now the cause of trouble is particularly ironic in view of Schulz-Keil’s earlier comments. Writing to Coetzee on the vital role of a good screenplay in the filming process, Schulz-Keil had earlier expressed his opinion as follows:

Nothing, in my judgement, leads as easily to mindless picturesthan screenplays that give in too easily, screenplays that do not present any resistance to the director and the actors during the shooting. Ideally, I feel, a screenplay ought to besacrosanct during production, as the text of the play is during stage rehearsals. You do not just rewrite all the time;you work with and against the text, the text is a provocation and a challenge.48

Added to the difficulties in getting the film off the ground, even with a radically revised screenplay that could have played the foundational role that he had envisaged, was that Schulz-Keil had earmarked Roman Polanski as the director.49 After being accused of 47 Newman screenplay, p.122.48 Schulz-Keil, letter and film proposal sent to J.M. Coetzee, 17 March 1984, HRC.49 Schulz-Keil, personal communication with H. Wittenberg, 14 October 2013.

sexual misconduct with a minor in 1977 and subsequently fleeing the United States for France, Polanski had, ten years later, seemingly rehabilitated himself in the public eye, and would appear to have been an excellent choice. But the earlier rape case expectantly became a matter of public interest again in 1988, when Samantha Geimer, Polanski’s victim, launched a high-profile lawsuit for damages against the director. In view of the plot of Waiting for the Barbarians, which involves a sexually ambiguous relationship between amiddle-aged man and a young girl, going with Polanski as director ofthe film in these new circumstances was to court public controversy.Polanski’s involvement was likely to detract from the film’s commercial success and also distract viewers from the intrinsic merits of Coetzee’s story.

*

The negative outcome of the Hollywood experiment would not only havebeen disappointing to Coetzee, but may also have reinforced his scepticism of the movie industry. If someone with Wieland Schulz-Keil’s standing and insight could not come up with an intelligent script, what hope was there for a film that would do justice to his novel? In the aftermath to the Newman debacle, Coetzee may thus haverealised that it would be better to write his own film script for Waiting for the Barbarians, even though his earlier attempt to make a filmwith Gerard had been a dead end. This was a project Coetzee eventually undertook with Michael Fitzgerald,50 an American independent film producer who had made a number of intelligent and well-crafted films. With Fitzgerald’s help, Coetzee wrote an eminently filmable screenplay in 1995, but at a late stage his hopesof realising a film adaptation were dashed. Despite having set up afilming location in Morocco, financial obstacles prevented actual shooting to take place. Fitzgerald persisted with the film for several years longer and Coetzee agreed to extend the option. In 2005, Fitzgerald explored Kazakhstan as a possible location and source of funding, trying to tap into the country’s vast oil and gasfortunes. The film project did not get off the ground, but the localKazakhstanskaya Pravda newspaper still reported, as recently as 2010, that a film, titled “In Expectation of Barbarians” was going to be

50 For a more detailed account of the Coetzee – Fitzgerald collaboration, see Wittenberg, 2014.

made.51 It is increasingly unlikely though that more than 30 years after its publication, Waiting for the Barbarians will ever see a successful big-screen adaptation.

*

In retrospect, Coetzee’s foray into cinema may not have yielded satisfactory results, neither in the form of an aesthetically rewarding avant-garde film that would have translated the stylistic and formal inventiveness of the prose of In the Heart of the Country to the screen, nor in the shape of a successful big-budget motion picture for Waiting for the Barbarians that could possibly have released him from teaching. Coetzee invested considerable time and energy in collaborating with filmmakers and writing his own screenplays, venturing into a field that stretched his creativity in new directions. But in the end his ideas and cinematic ambitions could not be realised in an industry that was aesthetically conservative and ultimately driven by commercial considerations. Teresa and Lindiwe Dovey have argued that Coetzee does not relinquish control over his books lightly, and furthermore that the complexity of ideasmakes cinematic adaptations highly difficult:

film as a medium has as its disposal very few ways of representing the discourse of philosophy, and that films attempting to do this would not likely get funding. It is thisthat makes adaptation of Coetzee’s novels so difficult… (2010,77)

The Doveys’ comments are made without an awareness that Coetzee had attempted to address the conundrum of adaptation by writing his own film versions of the novels, producing screenplays that retained a large measure of adaptive fidelity to the prose versions. Both projects though remained unrealised because funding for the projected films failed to materialise, an outcome that reinforces the Doveys’ argument about the difficulty of filming Coetzee’s fictions. A closer look at the multiple attempts by Coetzee to make films from his novels however has shown a much greater complexity and variance in his strategy, with various factors and developments

51 Kazakhstanskaya Pravda [English online version] “Festival over – a new work starting”, 2 November 2010. Available on http://kp.kazpravda.kz/k/1152250835/2010-11-02. Accessed 3 June 2013.

influencing the course of events, one of which being the Newman script.

In closing, I would like to offer the speculation that it was paradoxically fortunate that the Waiting for the Barbarians film went awryin California (and again later, in a different incarnation, in Morocco). If the Schulz-Keil project had come off successfully in the form of a high-grossing box-office motion picture, Coetzee may well have resigned from his academic post at UCT, and become a free-lance writer, based perhaps somewhere in the Karoo, in France or Spain, or elsewhere. In this scenario, Coetzee would not have continued to balance an academic career with creative writing, and we need to consider that his famous campus novel, Disgrace, may not have been written. The film project of Waiting for the Barbarians must therefore be considered not just an ancillary matter to Coetzee’s authorship, but regarded as pivotal to the trajectory his writing career would take. The failure to realise the novel for the big screen re-focused his creative practice towards his core calling: the writing of finely crafted prose fiction works, and it is maybe not be co-incidental that the books that Coetzee would write in the aftermath of his flirtation with film would become longer and more substantive, formally more inventive, and assured. The Waiting for the Barbarians film may not have made Coetzee famous then, but in pursuinghis literary craft with single-minded determination without the distractions of Hollywood, he followed a route that eventually did give him the ultimate recognition: the Nobel Prize.

References

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Coetzee, J.M. 1992. Doubling the Point. Essays and Interviews. Edited by: David Attwell. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard U.P.

Coetzee, J.M. 2014. Two Screenplays. Edited by: H. Wittenberg. Cape Town: UCT Press.

Coyne, Michael. 1998. The Crowded Prairie. American National Identity in the Hollywood Western, London: IB Tauris.

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