Life & Wisdom Quote by J. M. Coetzee

Coetzee lands the blade with that politely arched eyebrow he’s famous for: the sentence performs the very power move it describes. He frames Lady C as someone grandly “writing at the limits of language,” a phrase that reeks (deliberately) of high-cultural self-mythology. Then he punctures it by posing a question that pretends to be considerate while actually staging an execution. “Would it not be insulting to her…” is faux-courtesy; the real payload is the insinuation that her obscurity isn’t daring, it’s incompetence, and that any critic who translates it into sense is doing remedial work.

The intent is double. On the surface, Coetzee refuses the critic’s most common job: to be the patient interpreter, the one who redeems difficult writing by supplying meaning. Underneath, he’s warning about a specific literary economy where mystique becomes a shield. If an author claims ineffability, the reader is cornered: either you’re too dull to understand, or you’re crude for demanding clarity. Coetzee flips that trap back onto the writer. If she truly has reached “the limits,” then paraphrase is impossible; if paraphrase is possible, then the “limits” talk was marketing.

Contextually, it’s also Coetzee defending a severe ethics of language. He distrusts the idea that profundity requires fog. The jab isn’t anti-experiment; it’s anti-pretension, and it dares the reader to notice how often “difficult” is just a status signal wearing a philosopher’s coat.