Beyond the ancient quarrel: literature, philosophy, and J.M. Coetzee [First edition] 9780198805281, 0198805284, 9780191852381, 0191852384

Citation preview

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

BEYOND THE ANCIENT QUARREL

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Beyond the Ancient Quarrel Literature, Philosophy, and J. M. Coetzee Edited by

PATRICK HAYES and

JAN WILM

1

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

3

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © the several contributors 2017 Harry Ransom Center The University of Texas at Austin The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2017 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2017941745 ISBN 978–0–19–880528–1 Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Acknowledgements This book emerged from a symposium held at the Research Centre at St John’s College, Oxford, in June 2015, where initial drafts of the various chapters were discussed in a small-group workshop format. The discussions we had on that occasion created an absorbing dialogue between different ways of thinking about literature, which did much to shape both the structure and contents of this book. We wish to extend our gratitude to all those who attended for making the symposium the lively and productive event that it was. The John Fell Fund, the St John’s College Research Centre, and the Vereinigung der Freunde und Förderer der Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany, provided essential financial support that enabled the symposium to take place. We especially wish to thank J. M. Coetzee for granting permission to quote from his papers, held at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. Thanks also to Rick Watson for all his assistance. References to the location of specific quotations from the Coetzee Papers are provided in footnotes throughout the book. We are grateful to Silja Glitscher for providing editorial assistance during the work on this volume.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Contents List of Contributors

1. Ancient Quarrels, Modern Contexts: An Introduction Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm

ix 1

I. UNSET T L ING BO UN D AR IE S: P HILOSOPHY , L I T E R AT UR E , A ND L I T E R AR Y C RI T I C I SM 2. Health and Deviance, Irony and Incarnation: Embedding and Embodying Philosophy in Literature and Theology in The Childhood of Jesus Stephen Mulhall 3. Attuning Philosophy and Literary Criticism: A Response to In the Heart of the Country Maximilian de Gaynesford 4. Double Thoughts: Coetzee and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism Andrew Dean 5. ‘Good paragraphing. Unusual content’: On the Making and Unmaking of Novelistic Worlds Julika Griem

17

35 52

70

I I . E T H I C S A N D MO R A L P H I L O S O P H Y 6. ‘A Yes without a No’: Philosophical Reason and the Ethics of Conversion in Coetzee’s Fiction Derek Attridge 7. Coetzee and Eros: A Critique of Moral Philosophy Eileen John

91 107

I I I . R E A L I T Y , L A N G U A G E , A N D S U B J E C T IV I T Y 8. Coetzee’s Quest for Reality Alice Crary 9. Beyond Realism: Coetzee’s Post-Secular Imagination Martin Woessner 10. Coetzee’s Critique of Language Peter D. McDonald

125 143 160

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

viii

Contents

11. Coetzee and Psychoanalysis: From Paranoia to Aporia Jean-Michel Rabaté

180

IV. C ONTEXTS A ND IN STITUTIO NS 12. ‘Wisselbare Woorde’: J. M. Coetzee and Postcolonial Philosophy Carrol Clarkson 13. The J. M. Coetzee Archive and the Archive in J. M. Coetzee Jan Wilm

199

Bibliography Index

233 247

215

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

List of Contributors Derek Attridge is the author of J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (The University of Chicago Press, 2004) and several essays on Coetzee. Among his other books are The Singularity of Literature (Routledge, 2004) and The Work of Literature (Oxford, 2015), and the co-edited volumes Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995 (Cambridge University Press, 1998), The Cambridge History of South African Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2012), and Zoë Wicomb and the Translocal: Writing Scotland and South Africa (Routledge, 2017). He is Emeritus Professor at the University of York and a Fellow of the British Academy. Carrol Clarkson has published widely on aesthetics, legal theory, and South African literature and art. Her books include J. M. Coetzee: Countervoices (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009; 2nd edition 2013) and Drawing the Line: Toward an Aesthetics of Transitional Justice (Fordham University Press, 2014). She is Professor and Chair of Modern English Literature at the University of Amsterdam, and has a research affiliation with the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. She is an Honorary Research Associate at the University of Cape Town. Alice Crary is Chair of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. She writes and publishes on issues related to moral philosophy, philosophy and literature, Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, feminism and philosophy, philosophy and animals, philosophy of mind/ language, and philosophy and cognitive disability. Her publications include Inside Ethics: On the Demands of Moral Thought (Harvard University Press, 2016), Beyond Moral Judgment (Harvard University Press, 2007), the edited collection Wittgenstein and the Moral Life: Essays in Honor of Cora Diamond (MIT Press, 2007), and two co-edited collections, Reading Cavell (Routledge, 2006) and The New Wittgenstein (Routledge, 2000). Andrew Dean recently completed his DPhil at the University of Oxford. His thesis examined postwar metafiction and life-writing, focusing on authors Philip Roth, Janet Frame, and J. M. Coetzee—several chapters related to the thesis are forthcoming. He is a New Zealand Rhodes Scholar and the author of a short popular book on the effect of the economic reform period in New Zealand: Ruth, Roger and Me: Debts and Legacies (BWB, 2015). Maximilian de Gaynesford is Professor of Philosophy and Head of Department at the University of Reading. Formerly a Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, he is the author of several books, including The Rift in the Lute: Attuning Poetry and Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2017) and I: The Meaning of the First Person Term (Oxford University Press, 2006), and of articles on aesthetics, philosophical logic, the philosophy of mind, and language and ethics. Julika Griem is Professor of English Literature at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. She has published on narrative theory, intermediality, the two cultures, genre theory, and literature and space; her publications include books on Joseph Conrad, apes and monkeys as figures of aesthetic and anthropological reflection between 1800 and 2000, and the intrinsic logic of cities. Her current research projects are concerned with the Scottish author John Burnside, figurations of the whole, philological economies of scale, and methodologies of contemporary literature research. A further interest is dedicated to forms and styles of science policy and the humanities’ contributions to academic institution building.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

x

List of Contributors

Patrick Hayes is Associate Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, and a Fellow of St John’s College. His research focuses on debates about the nature and value of literature, from the Romantic period to the present day. He is the author of J. M. Coetzee and the Novel: Writing and Politics after Beckett (Oxford University Press, 2010) and Philip Roth: Fiction and Power (Oxford University Press, 2014). He is currently working on a history of life-writing in the period after 1945. Eileen John is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. Her research is in aesthetics, with particular interests in art’s ethical and cognitive roles and in the relations between literature and philosophy. She co-edited Blackwell’s Philosophy of Literature anthology and is Co-Director of the Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature and the Arts, University of Warwick. Peter D. McDonald is Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Hugh’s College. He writes on literature, the modern state, and the freedom of expression; the history of writing systems, cultural institutions, and publishing; multilingualism, translation, and interculturality; and on the limits of literary criticism. His main publications include British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 1888–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 1997), The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences (Oxford University Press, 2009), and Artefacts of Writing: Ideas of the State and Communities of Letters from Matthew Arnold to Xu Bing (Oxford University Press, 2017). Stephen Mulhall is Professor of Philosophy and Tutorial Fellow at New College, University of Oxford. His research interests include Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Nietzsche; philosophy and religion; and philosophy and the arts. His publications include The Wounded Animal: J. M.Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 2009), The Self and Its Shadows: A Book of Essays on Individuality as Negation in Philosophy and the Arts (Oxford University Press, 2013), and The Great Riddle: Wittgenstein and Nonsense, Theology and Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2015). Jean-Michel Rabaté is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He is one of the editors of the Journal of Modern Literature, a co-founder and senior curator of Slought Foundation, Philadelphia (slought.org), and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Recent publications include The Pathos of Distance (Bloomsbury, 2016), Think, Pig ! (Fordham University Press, 2016), and Les Guerres de Jacques Derrrida (Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2016). Jan Wilm is Lecturer in English Literature at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. He is the author of The Slow Philosophy of J. M. Coetzee (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016) and co-editor (with Mark Nixon) of a volume on Samuel Beckett and German Literature, Samuel Beckett und die deutsche Literatur (Transcript, 2013). He is currently writing a book on the aesthetics of snow and preparing a volume of essays on the German writer Michael Lentz. He also works as a literary translator, having translated work by Maggie Nelson and Andrew O’Hagan into German, and as a book reviewer for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, among others. Martin Woessner is Associate Professor of History and Society at The City College of New York’s Center for Worker Education, where he teaches courses in intellectual and cultural history at both graduate and undergraduate level. He is the author of Heidegger in America (Cambridge University Press, 2011). His essays and reviews have appeared in La Maleta de Portbou, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Raritan.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

1 Ancient Quarrels, Modern Contexts An Introduction Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm From Dusklands (1974) onwards, J. M. Coetzee’s fiction has been richly allusive to philosophical idioms and traditions, and his most recent work has staged philosophical questions in increasingly explicit ways. The texts that feature the character Elizabeth Costello (The Lives of Animals [1999], Elizabeth Costello [2002], and Slow Man [2005]), the volumes of correspondence with Paul Auster (2013) and Arabella Kurtz (2015), together with his latest novels The Childhood of Jesus (2013) and The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), all engage in overt ways with philosophical arguments about, among other things, the nature of justice, reason, subjective experience, the good life, and the good society. There has been some remarkable scholarship that reflects upon Coetzee’s engagement with philosophy, from Derek Attridge’s work on Coetzee and ethics ( J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading [2004]), to Stephen Mulhall’s study of how Coetzee’s ‘modernist realism’ engages with philosophical ideas (The Wounded Animal [2009]). But so far no study has succeeded either in gathering together the range of questions about literature and philosophy that Coetzee’s fiction provokes, or in examining what is really at stake in the kinds of thinking that his oeuvre stimulates. The closest thing to such a study is the collection of essays assembled by the philosophers Anton Leist and Peter Singer, J. M. Coetzee and Ethics: Philosophical Perspectives on Literature (2010). This collection brought together a range of philosophers, mainly from the analytic tradition, to reflect on different aspects of Coetzee’s work from the perspective of moral philosophy, with a particular focus on animal rights. While this volume includes some extremely good work, it was constrained by some key assumptions. Most strikingly, it tended to downplay the extent to which Coetzee’s writing obliges us to reflect upon what Socrates was already calling, in The Republic, the ‘ancient quarrel’ between literature and philosophy.1 Many essays tended to speak about literature and philosophy as if 1 Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), p. 1211. It suits Socrates to refer to the quarrel that he is starting between literature and philosophy as ‘ancient’, and the evidence he produces of its history is actually very slight: ‘But in case we are charged with a certain harshness and lack of sophistication, let’s also tell poetry that there is an ancient quarrel between it and philosophy, which is evidenced by such expressions as “the dog yelping and shrieking at its master,” “great is the empty eloquence of fools,” “the mob of wise men that has mastered Zeus,” and “the subtle thinkers, beggars all.” ’

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

2

Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm

they were self-evidently distinct forms of discourse, both in their nature and their functions. Moreover, the editors of the collection approached Coetzee’s work with the implicit sense of a disciplinary hierarchy. The very subtitle of the collection, Philosophical Perspectives on Literature, positioned literature as the passive object of knowledge which philosophy would illuminate, or which philosophy would use as incidental material for the purposes of a philosophical argument. These assumptions tended to close down the possibility that literature might itself pose questions about the value of philosophical reasoning, or that it might offer a disparate or even rival form of thinking in its own terms. Perhaps because of these assumptions, Leist and Singer limited the range of implication that Coetzee’s work carries to very specific fields of philosophical inquiry, and to a narrow concept of utility-to-philosophy. Coetzee’s writing is most likely to be useful, they implied, to those who are engaged in the specific field of ethics, and especially applied ethics. One aim of the present collection is therefore to let Coetzee’s fiction speak to a broader range of philosophical questions, and thereby represent the nature and value of his writing more adequately. It takes the discussion of Coetzee and philosophy into new terrain by allowing his work to resonate beyond the realm of moral philosophy—without neglecting this key preoccupation of Coetzee’s work—into other kinds of philosophical inquiry. It includes chapters on Coetzee’s relationship with, and impact upon, a diverse range of philosophical subjects, including the philosophy of action, the philosophy of language, the concept of rationality, questions about the nature of reality, and a distinct engagement with questions about aesthetics. It also opens out onto broader themes that intersect with philosophical inquiry, including education, theology, psychoanalysis, and post-secularism. Broadening out from subjectspecific areas, the present collection also explores the institutional environments that have mattered most for Coetzee’s engagement with philosophy, such as the status of his archive, and the philosophical legacies at stake in the resistance politics of his native South Africa. But as well as enlarging the parameters through which Coetzee’s fiction might be addressed, the deeper aim of this book is to examine the ways in which Coetzee invites us to reopen longstanding questions about the boundaries between literature, literary criticism, and philosophy. It is to ask how these different forms of discourse might be able to engage each other—though in a way that does not ignore their considerable differences, and the often disparate kinds of thinking they engage and demand. In short, our aim was to treat the assumptions that limited J. M. Coetzee and Ethics very much as open questions that Coetzee’s fiction helps us to explore. Are we sure we know what literature and philosophy actually are, how they can be defined and delimited, both in their ‘essence’ and from a disciplinary perspective? That is to say, are there forms of thinking that are truly specific to the one and necessarily excluded from the other? As Karl Ameriks has pointed out, [T]he very notion of a sharp distinction of the philosophical and the non-philosophical is itself the result of a fairly recent phenomenon. Prior to Kant, none of the truly great modern philosophers had lived the life of a philosophy professor—not Descartes, not

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Ancient Quarrels, Modern Contexts

3

Leibniz, not Hume. Conversely, the early romantics all studied philosophy closely, and most of them showed serious interest in an academic career in philosophy.2

Likewise, in his lectures on the cross-currents between literature and philosophy, Philosophien der Literatur (2013), Friedrich Kittler notes that while there ‘is no doubt that many languages on this earth have brought forth literature and that today there exists literature in nearly all languages’, he questions whether philosophy has been equally ubiquitous. Kittler historicizes the ways in which ancient Greece gave rise to philosophy, and emphasizes that a culture of writing, poetry, and music has played a key part in the shaping of what is called philosophy, suggesting that there existed and continues to exist a fruitful interaction and a cross-fertilization between these different forms of discourse.3 What, then, are the intellectual commitments that create disciplinary boundaries between literature and philosophy, or between philosophy and literary criticism? And what is the value of a body of writing such as Coetzee’s that invites us to question those boundaries? * * * There are many reasons why Coetzee’s fiction is particularly interesting to think about in relation to these questions. One of the most significant is the fact that, just as none of the great philosophers prior to Kant lived the life of a professional philosopher, neither has Coetzee exactly lived the life of a professional writer, at least as such a life is conventionally understood. He has been a writer-cumacademic, a ‘fictioneer’, as he has described himself, who has also published very considerable academic monographs on the history and theory of literature. He has co-taught seminars alongside philosophers at the University of Chicago, and has developed longstanding friendships with leading philosophers, such as Raimond Gaita, Robert B. Pippin, and André du Toit. In fact Coetzee’s interdisciplinary interests are considerably more diverse than this brief summary suggests. He graduated from the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 1961 with honours in both English and Mathematics, and initially it was unclear what direction he would pursue. He moved to London in December 1961, where he wrote his Master’s thesis on the fiction of Ford Madox Ford, while at the same time embarking upon a career as a computer programmer at IBM. There, he used his training in mathematics to run data tests for private clients on their new ‘mainframe’ computers; in his spare hours he ‘[e]xperiment[ed] with computer-generated poetry’.4 His interest in mathematics would resurface throughout his life, increasingly with regard to the philosophy of numbers. In

2 Karl Ameriks, ‘Introduction: Interpreting German Idealism’, in The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, ed. Karl Ameriks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 1–17; 12. 3 Friedrich Kittler, Philosophien der Literatur (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2013), p. 10 (our translation). 4 David Attwell, J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face to Face with Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 12. See also J. C. Kannemeyer, J. M. Coetzee: A Life in Writing, trans. Michiel Heyns (Johannesburg/Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2012), pp. 121–5. Also, see Coetzee’s treatment of this in his fictionalized autobiography Youth (London: Secker & Warburg, 2002), pp. 160–1.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm

4

The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus, the character known as David (in Childhood) and Davíd (in Schooldays) finds it first impossible to learn conventional counting routines, and then learns to dance ‘the numbers down from where they live among the aloof stars’; in Here and Now, his exchange of letters with Paul Auster, Coetzee engages a critique of mathematical conventions in his own voice.5 As Alice Crary shows in her chapter in this collection, Coetzee’s early interest in mathematics had developed by this stage into a complex reflection on arguments about counting, learning, and the concept of a private language, that find their classical expression in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. So perhaps it was unsurprising that Coetzee didn’t last long at IBM. In Youth, a text that is poised in an uncertain realm between fiction and autobiography (a mode that Coetzee has elsewhere described as ‘autrebiography’), the character known as ‘John’ is appalled to discover that, far from using mathematics in the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, he is being required by the men in grey suits to run data tests for a nuclear weapons manufacturer.6 One symptom, perhaps, of his growing alienation from corporate life was an increasing devotion to the fiction of Samuel Beckett, and Coetzee’s next move was to the University of Texas at Austin, where he would write his doctorate on Beckett’s English fiction. This doctorate was a most unusual piece of work. It was completed in 1969, at a time when English studies in America was still dominated by an approach known as the New Criticism. Concerned to establish literary criticism as a respectable discipline in its own right, the New Critics (a group that encompassed a diverse range of intellectuals, from John Crowe Ransom to Cleanth Brooks) had stressed the autonomy of the literary text, and strived to make literary interpretation into a teachable art. Only the properly initiated could generate the superfine attention to stylistic qualities such as paradox, irony, and ambiguity, and appreciate how the text was thereby woven into an untranslatable expressive whole, that was demanded by the professional critics. Coetzee never had any patience with this kind of literary hermeticism. Years later, when teaching at UCT, he typed up a memorandum on the related topic of Practical Criticism: Practical Criticism is not a critical theory but a package designed to simplify and streamline the preparation of large numbers of culturally semi-literate students for careers in schoolteaching. As a teaching package, it is modelled on a drastically oversimplified version of human psychology. Designed with the limitations of the 45-minute tutorial in mind, it fosters a skill in doing rapid explications of half-page texts with a tight semantic structure. Since such texts are largely unrepresentative of the vast body of literature, the relevance of Practical Criticism to literary criticism is smaller than one might be led to think.7

5

J. M. Coetzee, The Schooldays of Jesus (London: Harvill Secker, 2016), p. 68. J. M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge, MA/ London: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 394. 7 Practical Criticism descends from the writings of I. A. Richards; while it was not identical with the New Criticism, it was in many ways a precursor to it. The quotation is from a two-page memorandum entitled ‘Practical Criticism at U[niversity of] C[ape] T[own]’, dated July 1977, in the J. M. Coetzee Papers at the Harry Ransom Center, Container 113, Folder 4. 6

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Ancient Quarrels, Modern Contexts

5

By contrast, Coetzee’s thesis was determinedly interdisciplinary. It was an attempt to place literary interpretation on a stronger intellectual footing by integrating criticism with statistical analysis. The method Coetzee engaged with was known as ‘stylostatistics’, an approach pioneered by George Udny Yule and Wilhelm Fucks to study language patterning in complex texts: Coetzee’s hope was that stylostatistics could be integrated with more traditional forms of literary interpretation that try to account for the wider meaningfulness of a text. However, with remarkable honesty for a young man at the beginning of his career, Coetzee concluded that stylostatistics was simply not as useful as he had hoped it would be ‘as a creative tool of explication in single texts’. This was, he explained, due to the inability of a method grounded in statistical analysis to account for the way in which the event of reading is not a linear process, but involves the ‘incessant recursion’ of creating and revising hypotheses about a text. In contrast to the inventiveness of the subjective reader, stylostatistics ‘can only substantiate discoveries’, he concluded, and ‘never initiate them’.8 While this was an unpromising conclusion for a doctoral thesis to have reached, Coetzee’s distrust of seemingly obvious institutional assumptions was already taking him in interesting directions. As it ground to a halt, Coetzee’s thesis opened up a series of questions: To what extent…are points of stylistic density functions of the work itself and to what extent functions of our reading of it?…Should style be studied in its effects on the reader, and thus in its expressive aspect, or in its objectively verifiable formal properties? If the former, where are we to draw the line beyond which criticism degenerates into the subjective vagueness of ‘moods’ and ‘tones’? If the latter, how can we give equal weight to properties which are perceptible to an intelligent reader and properties which reveal themselves only under a grammatical or statistical microscope?9

Each of these questions turns on a deeper question about the nature of literature as a form of discourse, and about the nature (and limits) of literary criticism. For Coetzee, the question of what makes literature into literature (Is it an inherent quality? Is it the desire of the reader or a convention of reading that frames the text as literary?) is an entirely open one. It is equally unclear to him what literary criticism is, or what it should be: he makes no assumptions on this front. In Summertime (2009), the third instalment in his fictionalized autobiography, those people thrown into relationships with the young ‘John’ tended to find him a rather obtuse young man. But this obtuseness, which is certainly on display here in his doctoral thesis, is not dissimilar to the obtuseness that so frustrates the parents of young David (or Davíd) in the Jesus novels. His very inability to go along with institutionalized roles and routines brings with it not only a certain level of frustration and annoyance, but also a certain creative possibility.

8 J. M. Coetzee, ‘The English Fiction of Samuel Beckett: An Essay in Stylistic Analysis’, PhD thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 1969, pp. 160–2. 9 Ibid., p. 153.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

6

Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm

It was very much against his will that Coetzee ended up back in South Africa teaching English at UCT, a position he held until he retired from academic life in 2001. His first job was as an assistant professor at the University of Buffalo in New York state, then a thriving campus for literary studies, which featured such luminaries as Robert Creeley and Leslie Fiedler on its staff. Buffalo had embraced what Patrick Ffrench has called the ‘time of theory’, and it was here that Coetzee was exposed to thinkers such as Michel Foucault and especially Roland Barthes— an enduringly important influence—who moved freely between philosophical reflection and literary analysis.10 He lost his American visa as a result of participating in a protest on campus, and arrived at UCT in 1971. At this time, along with several other Commonwealth nations, the teaching of English literature in South Africa was dominated by F. R. Leavis’s strongly moralistic approach to literary criticism, which was actively hostile to more philosophical kinds of reflection on the nature and value of literature. Leavis had insisted that the value of reading was to increase our understanding of ‘felt life’, yet at the same time he strongly resisted any attempt to define what that actually was, on the basis that to do so would be to fall into the alienated form of philosophical reasoning that literature is (putatively) there to save us from. Coetzee was uncomfortable with the inward-looking and, he felt, intellectually lazy academic environment that this approach seemed to permit.11 Even as UCT gradually reformed, opening itself to other ways of thinking about literature, he tended to look elsewhere for intellectual companionship, which he eventually found in the Committee for Social Thought (CST) at the University of Chicago. The emphasis of this institution on thinking across disciplinary borderlines was very congenial to Coetzee, and in the 1990s he began a longstanding connection with the Committee, teaching courses on his own as well as together with the philosopher Jonathan Lear. As David Attwell points out, with Lear Coetzee ‘taught comparative literature on congenial terms—an entire semester on autobiography, or Tolstoy, or Proust; in these examples, themes and authors that were relevant to the writing he was pursuing at the time, especially the autobiographies’.12 J. C. Kannemeyer notes in his biography that the seminars organized by Coetzee and Lear tended to take the form of ‘relaxed Socratic conversations on a common topic with students’.13 Coetzee’s visits to Chicago continued until 2003, and in the fall term of 1996 he taught a course titled ‘Realism in the Novel’. The course encompassed readings of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, alongside Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote and James Joyce’s Ulysses. For the course, Coetzee had prepared a lecture titled ‘Retrospect’, which he begins by referring explicitly to the ‘ancient quarrel’ between literature and philosophy as it relates to realism:

10 Patrick Ffrench, The Time of Theory: A History of Tel Quel 1960–1983 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 11 See Kannemeyer, J. M. Coetzee: A Life in Writing, pp. 227, 366. 12 Attwell, J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing, p. 212. 13 Kannemeyer, J. M. Coetzee: A Life in Writing, p. 482.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Ancient Quarrels, Modern Contexts

7

You will have noticed that both Plato and Aristotle take it as a basic assumption that art is a matter of imitation (mimesis) of something that pre-exists. To Plato it is inconceivable that art can bring into existence something that never existed before. That is why Plato does not see any point to it. If you want to learn about honour and truthfulness and bravery, study them philosophically, or at least learn about them via people who exhibit them. Why bother to go to fictional representations of people who exhibit them? The various critics of Don Quixote agree; if there are no real heroes around, go to well-attested records of heroes, that is, to the historical record. (The historical record? says Quixote?—And that’s not a representation?)14

As Coetzee continues, Don Quixote emerges even more powerfully as a counterweight to Plato and Aristotle: I have been presenting Don Quixote to you not so much as an exemplary realist text… as a book in which the philosophical question of realism is approached in a fictional medium. In other words, fiction does not yield to philosophy by saying that philosophical questions can be approached in the discourse of philosophy.15

While it is clear that Coetzee’s sympathies lie firmly with the man from La Mancha, his academic teaching reflects the interest in thinking across disciplinary boundaries that his fiction also pursues, albeit in different ways. While Coetzee is of course not unique in the postwar period for combining his activities as a writer with a career as an academic, most writers involved with the academy have tended to offer courses in creative writing instruction rather than courses that stray onto the terrain of literary theory and philosophy. As Andrew Dean argues in Chapter 4, Coetzee is unusual for the extent to which he has interweaved his interests as a writer and as a literary theorist, cross-fertilizing the one from the other. Dean’s chapter explores Coetzee’s inaugural professorial lecture at UCT, Truth in Autobiography (1985), which Coetzee would later pinpoint as ‘the beginning of a more broadly philosophical engagement with a situation in the world’.16 This lecture followed the pattern of his doctoral thesis by obtusely questioning, rather than accepting and exploiting, longstanding institutionalized assumptions about the nature and value of literary criticism—which was, as he takes care to observe in the lecture, precisely the form of writing he was being paid increasingly large sums of money to do. Coetzee used the occasion of his inauguration to criticize the assumption that literary criticism can reveal truths about literature to which literary texts are themselves blind. What, he asks, are the blind-spots of literary criticism? What are the forms of desire (for power? for moral superiority?) that it must hide behind a mask of objectivity in order to survive, to keep its self-respect? Like Coetzee’s doctoral thesis, this lecture was therefore curiously self-undermining. But, as Dean points out, it also inaugurated Coetzee’s longstanding and increasingly overt interest in destabilizing the boundaries of literature, literary criticism, and philosophy. This interest would be developed in Foe (1986), a text that moves between fiction and 14 Harry Ransom Center, J. M. Coetzee Papers, Container 114, Folder 10. ‘ “Seminars taught abroad”, materials for courses taught at University of Chicago, University at Buffalo, Harvard, and University of Texas at Austin, 1984–2002’, ‘REAL-3. LEC’. 15 Ibid. 16 Doubling the Point, p. 394.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

8

Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm

literary criticism, the ‘lessons’ of Elizabeth Costello (2001), which move between fiction and philosophy, and Diary of a Bad Year (2007), where essays on moral philosophy (among other things) are joined with fiction and autobiography. No small part of what makes Coetzee such an interesting figure to think about in relation to the ‘ancient quarrel’ is therefore the ambivalent way in which he situated himself in the academy, and the attunement to philosophical debates about the nature and value of literature that this ambivalent situation afforded. But it is by no means the only factor. As Carrol Clarkson (Chapter 12) shows, Coetzee was very profoundly marked by the way he was positioned as a white male in apartheid South Africa. Clarkson draws attention to the ways in which Coetzee responded to the Black Consciousness movement of the 1970s and early 1980s, a movement which (as she points out) took its philosophical bearings from Frantz Fanon, and especially Fanon’s reading of Jean-Paul Sartre. Its critique of moral universals, and its attack on the notion of a normative human identity, were, Clarkson shows, absorbed into the very structure of Coetzee’s early texts, especially In the Heart of the Country (1977) and Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). But the situation in South Africa was important in other ways too. During the State of Emergency that was declared in the 1980s, there emerged a powerful demand from within the white intelligentsia for writers to make themselves morally and politically useful within the struggle against apartheid. The novelist Nadine Gordimer took a particularly strong version of this position when she reviewed Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K (1983), which she criticized for lacking this kind of usefulness. At the time of writing Gordimer was taking her literary bearings from the Hungarian Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács, and the high valuation he placed on a form of storytelling that could illustrate the development of historical progress in an allegorical way. Applying Lukács’s Marxism to South Africa, Gordimer believed that what was needed were literary texts that displayed the value of active and heroic black resistance to apartheid. Judged by those standards, Coetzee’s enigmatic narrative about a man with a hare lip who becomes a gardener, then nearly starves to death, seemed at best irrelevant. ‘No one in this novel has any sense of taking part in determining that course [of history],’ Gordimer complained: [N]o one is shown to believe he knows what that course should be. The sense is of the ultimate malaise: of destruction. Not even the oppressor really believes in what he is doing, anymore, let alone the revolutionary. This is a challengingly questionable position for a writer to take up in South Africa, make no mistake about it. The presentation of the truth and meaning of what white has done to black stands out on every page, celebrating its writer’s superb, unafraid creative energy as it does; yet it denies the energy of the will to resist evil. That this superb energy exists with indefatigable and undefeatable persistence among the black people of South Africa—Michael K’s people—is made evident, yes, heroically, every grinding day. It is not present in the novel.17 17 Nadine Gordimer, “The Idea of Gardening”, Life & Times of Michael K, by J. M. Coetzee’, review in New York Review of Books (2 Feb. 1984): pp. 3–6; 6.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Ancient Quarrels, Modern Contexts

9

It would have been possible for Coetzee to shrug off Gordimer’s review as merely a misreading. Gordimer seems to assume that Michael K is being presented as an exemplary hero of some kind, and she fails to register the text’s complex focalization, which playfully disorients the genre of the exemplary life; she also misses out on the many registers of irony and bathos that surround the protagonist. But in his response, which came in a lecture entitled ‘The Novel Today’ (1986), Coetzee chose to address the prevailing assumptions about literary value, which Gordimer’s review represented most powerfully, in a way that invoked the whole history of the ‘ancient quarrel’ between literature and philosophy. Fiercely rejecting the notion that literature should serve any cause other than the cause of literature, in this lecture Coetzee made what he called an ‘argument about supplementarity’. In times like the present, he claimed, the novel has only two options: it can choose to be a useful supplement to ideas about the good, or it can choose to occupy what he called ‘an autonomous place’, which he described as the position of ‘rivalry’.18 Even though Coetzee was here dealing primarily with questions about literature in its relationship with history and politics, the position he marked as ‘supplementarity’ can be traced back to the more primary debates about literature’s nature and value in Plato’s The Republic. Here, as part of an attempt to distinguish literature from philosophy, Socrates rejected what he called the ‘childish passion for poetry’, claiming that it is ‘not to be taken seriously or treated as a serious undertaking with some kind of hold on the truth’.19 Unlike philosophy, Socrates argued, literary representation is misleading: it is at a third remove from the forms, a representation of a reality that is already itself a representation, and it is therefore condemned to the realm of mere opinion, rather than truth. He also claimed that, again unlike philosophy, poetry arouses desire—eros—in a way that becomes tyrannical, because it is not properly regulated. But as any reader of The Republic knows, Socrates’ claims are at the same time ironically undercut by Plato. If rumours are to be believed, Plato himself started out as a poet, and, of course, his Socratic dialogues are dramatic and narrative in nature—indeed, Nietzsche thought of Plato as the first novelist.20 Socrates’ arguments against literature are embodied in a dialogue, and The Republic is a text that in certain ways reads like a novel. Equally, in other dialogues such as the Phaedrus Socrates emerges as a very accomplished poet in his own right, and, as Eileen John points out in her chapter in this collection (Chapter 7), he elsewhere makes a direct connection between philosophical wisdom and the work of eros. It quickly becomes apparent that even in The Republic, Socrates cannot in fact do away with the form of discourse that has been marked out as ‘literature’. While his Philosopher Kings must ascend from the cave, to which mere mortals are condemned, to witness the light of truth, they must then descend back from the light into the cave, and J. M. Coetzee, ‘The Novel Today’, Upstream 6, no. 1 (summer 1988): p. 2. Plato, Complete Works, p. 1212. 20 For an elaboration of this point, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Plato and the Poets’, in Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato, trans. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980). 18 19

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

10

Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm

communicate the truth through representations. Philosophers, it would appear, are thus always already in some sense poets: they must create the myths and metaphors through which the good and the true can be narrated and understood. Socrates, it turns out, does not therefore reject literature: he merely wishes to domesticate it. Or, to return to the terms of Coetzee’s lecture, it might be said that Socrates wishes to make literature into a useful supplement to philosophy: literature is a valuable technê, as long as it is properly disciplined. Descending from Plato is a long tradition of attempts by philosophers to follow Socrates and make literature supplementary to philosophy. In the South Africa of the 1980s, it was Lukács’s version of Marxism. In more recent Anglo-American philosophy, the best-known example of this tendency is the philosopher Martha Nussbaum. In a series of books (from Love’s Knowledge [1989] to Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of the Emotions [2002]) Nussbaum has sought to demonstrate how useful literature can be as a supplement to moral philosophy, most especially through its capacity to put moral abstractions in touch with the particularity of experience. In ‘The Novel Today’ Coetzee took up a position that can only be described as an extreme rejection of this long tradition. He rejected the ‘novel of supplementarity’ in the strongest possible terms as not merely a domestication but an infantilization of literature: such a novel, he suggested, ‘operates in terms of the procedures of history and eventuates in conclusions that are checkable by history (as a child’s schoolwork is checked by a schoolmistress)’. By contrast, the novel of rivalry ‘operates in terms of its own procedures and issues in its own conclusions… evolves its own paradigms and myths, in the process (and here is the point at which true rivalry, even enmity, enters the picture) perhaps even going so far as to show up the mythic status of history—in other words, demythologising history’.21 Coetzee’s audience was left in no doubt that if there is such a choice between supplementarity or rivalry—between literature in service to philosophy, and literature in service to itself, to its own autonomous mode of thinking—then he would choose rivalry. His analogy for literature was the cockroach: a scavenger, a creature that keeps to itself and does not do another’s business (unlike, say, a dog, which can be loyal and obedient if it is properly domesticated). Ultimately, what makes Coetzee such an interesting writer to think about in relation to the ‘ancient quarrel’ is the extent to which his fiction registers and explores this conflict between ‘supplementarity’ and ‘rivalry’, and the intelligence with which he resists the blunt alternatives that he defined in this highly charged moment. Coetzee chose never to reprint the lecture, thereby ensuring it would become one of his most-quoted texts. But in an essay of 1992, titled ‘Erasmus: Madness and Rivalry’, he quietly revisited its central terms. The theologian and philosopher Desiderius Erasmus, Coetzee claims, was caught between two extreme positions: on the one hand the often-questionable dogmas of the Catholic Church, and on the other hand what he thought of as the extreme levelling

21

‘The Novel Today’, p. 3.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Ancient Quarrels, Modern Contexts

11

fury of Martin Luther’s Protestantism. Instead of accepting the terms of this opposition, Coetzee suggested, Erasmus was exemplary for the subtle ways in which he disturbed its boundaries. The key text here is Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly, which deploys a highly unstable form of irony as part of an attempt to take up what Coetzee rather beguilingly calls a ‘nonposition’ within the theological debates in which Erasmus was entangled. This text offers itself, he suggests, neither as supplementary to any of the given positions, nor as a rival alternative to the debate itself (which would have made it simply irrelevant). The ‘power’ of such a text, he explains, would reside not in the strength of any alternative it is asserting, but ‘in its weakness—its jocoserious abnegation of big-phallus status, its evasive (non)position inside/outside the play’.22 None of the contributors to this volume follow Coetzee in his pursuit of Erasmus as a model; neither, for that matter, do they adopt his talk of abnegating a ‘bigphallus status’ (all this being very Lacanian—and very 1980s). But in their different ways, each of the chapters uses Coetzee’s fiction to explore the more complex terrain he maps out here. It is this shared interest, rather than any agreed set of answers, that justifies the title of this book: Beyond the Ancient Quarrel. To go beyond the ancient quarrel is not to suggest that philosophy and literature are necessarily shared enterprises, or that their dialogue is inevitably a productive one, or that the ancient quarrel is (or should be) in any way resolved. It is instead to suggest that it is in those moments when a literary text is least amenable to being used as a mere supplement to a philosophical argument, where the norms and procedures of one discourse most profoundly clash with the other, that the truly interesting thinking begins. * * * It is for this reason that our collection begins with a section entitled ‘Unsettling Boundaries: Literature, Philosophy, Literary Criticism’. The boundaries at stake in Stephen Mulhall’s chapter are between literature, philosophy, and theology: more specifically, the ways in which The Childhood of Jesus ironically recounts themes from Plato’s The Republic, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, and the story of the Incarnation in the New Testament. Mulhall draws attention to the provocation offered by Coetzee’s text, and the uncertain direction of its many ironies. The Childhood of Jesus moves without warning, Mulhall shows, between seemingly trivial forms of literary playfulness, and seemingly serious philosophical interventions, without ever pausing to locate the terms by which it is to be understood. In the course of his reading, Mulhall refuses to recuperate the enigmatic and disorienting impact of this text into a format that is more easily digestible to normative reasoning. As such, his chapter stands as a provocation in its own right: a mode of literary criticism that questions many of the usual protocols that define what counts as an interpretation. Julika Griem’s chapter (Chapter 5) pushes the unsettling of boundaries in a different direction. Moving closer to the position Coetzee marked as 22 J. M. Coetzee, Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 103.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

12

Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm

‘rivalry’, Griem draws attention to the complex textuality of The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus, especially to the many levels of metafictional playfulness in these fictions. What if, Griem’s chapter suggests, these texts work in a way that is radically ‘other’ to the forms of philosophical reasoning they invoke? What would it be like to read them as if the experiences they offer of making, commenting upon, and metafictionally unmaking an experienced ‘world’ for the reader to become immersed in were—more than the engagement with philosophical themes— actually the most important thing about them? Both of these chapters raise questions about the status of literary criticism, and what literary criticism needs to do in order to respond effectively to Coetzee. In a chapter that explores what form of discourse might be adequate to respond to Coetzee’s early text, In the Heart of the Country (1977), Max de Gaynesford (Chapter 3) takes this question as his explicit theme. Distinguishing between the procedures of philosophical analysis and literary criticism, de Gaynesford argues that the force of Coetzee’s metafictional style, which not only portrays literary characters, but also stages the very question of what a character is, calls for philosophy and literary criticism to attune themselves to each other, to learn from each other’s distinctive modes of attention. And along the way, de Gaynesford’s chapter itself offers an exemplary act of such attunement. The questions raised in this opening section about the boundaries between literature, philosophy, and literary criticism are taken up in different ways by the chapters that follow, which engage with specific philosophical fields and particular contexts—initially through ethics and moral philosophy. Derek Attridge (Chapter 6) takes Coetzee’s short story, ‘The Old Woman and the Cats’ (2013), as the starting point for an exploration of the divergence between rational accounts of the good, and the ways in which literary experience can expose the reader to non-rational forms of evaluation and decision-making. Attridge shows that Coetzee does not shy away from the unsettling implication that Socrates also feared: namely, the potential of literature to betray its readers by seducing them into harmful experiences. While Attridge thinks of this non-rational attunement to alterity as ‘the ethical’ in itself, this is therefore a chapter that positions Coetzee’s fiction as radically at odds with philosophy’s dream of a normative understanding of the good and the true. In Chapter 7, Eileen John takes an example of normative moral philosophy, Thomas Nagel’s The Possibilities of Altruism (1970), as her point of departure, and turns the direction of Attridge’s argument around. Given the long tradition of disparaging literature for its unruly relationship to eros, what can a moral philosopher learn from the way Coetzee’s texts explore sexual desire? John’s answer to this question is subtle. On the one hand she shows that Coetzee’s oeuvre can usefully supplement Nagel’s account of altruism by its insistence that desire, and therefore a philosophy of action, must form part of any normative account of the good, not only because of its ubiquity in his work, but also because of its manifest importance in generating moral action. But on the other hand, she shows that Coetzee’s portrayal of desire reveals it to be too deeply interwoven with (among other things) aggressive drives to constitute anything like a reliable guide to action. If Coetzee’s fiction is a useful supplement to moral philosophy, the implication runs, one of

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Ancient Quarrels, Modern Contexts

13

those uses is precisely to mark the limits of such philosophizing, and to attune readers to the elements of risk within moral life. The third section, ‘Reality, Language, and Subjectivity’, brings together a series of reflections upon Coetzee’s relationship with more neglected fields of philosophical inquiry. It opens with two chapters on the vexed question of realism, a term that resonates very differently in literary studies and in philosophy. In ‘Coetzee’s Quest for Reality’ (Chapter 8), Alice Crary argues that instead of referring to the stylistic procedures associated with the nineteenth-century ‘realist novel’, a truly ‘realist’ text might be thought of as one that, rather than conforming to familiar genre-specifications, attempts by other means to expose readers to the real, that is, to how things really are. Crary highlights Coetzee’s efforts to elicit what she calls ‘transformative thought’: a process that involves both delineating the progress of individual characters in their quests for reality, and, in formal terms, inviting readers to imaginatively participate in such quests. She highlights resonances between these features of Coetzee’s writing and Wittgenstein’s procedures in his Philosophical Investigations. In doing so, Crary brings out a respect in which literature and philosophy are complementary discourses: literature can deal in the sort of objective or universal truth that is philosophy’s touchstone, and philosophical discourse can have an essentially literary dimension. By contrast, in ‘Beyond Realism: Coetzee’s Post-Secular Imagination’ (Chapter 9), Martin Woessner draws attention to Coetzee’s countervailing interest in fiction as discourse that is autonomous from reality. ‘I think of myself as using rather than reflecting reality in my fiction,’ Coetzee explained to the psychoanalyst Arabella Kurtz. ‘If the world of my fictions is a recognizable world, that is because (I say to myself) it is easier to use the world at hand than to make up a new one.’23 Instead of thinking of Coetzee as a realist, Woessner claims, we should think of his fiction as involving a ‘yearning for transcendence’ that invites us to participate in states that are ‘beyond realism’. He draws attention to Coetzee’s preoccupation with a range of post-secular themes involving the concepts of redemption, salvation, and grace. While Coetzee’s fiction does not, Woessner maintains, embrace a theological understanding of the world, or call for an end to secularism, it nonetheless attempts to ‘keep open a space—the space of the imagination, we might say—that a strict secularism, like an equally strict religious fundamentalism, threatens to shut down’. As such, Woessner’s chapter positions Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus not alongside Wittgenstein, but alongside Richard Rorty’s pragmatism, and especially Rorty’s claim that the ‘search for redemption’ lives on in our secular age in ‘novels, plays, and poems’.24 While many of the contributors to this volume follow Crary and Woessner in at least beginning from a position of viewing literature and philosophy as distinct categories, if only then to complicate that sense of difference, in two of the later chapters these disciplinary categories are challenged from the very outset. 23 J. M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz, The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction, and Psychotherapy (London: Harvill Secker, 2015), p. 69. 24 Richard Rorty, ‘Philosophy as a Transitional Genre’, Philosophical Papers, iv: Philosophy as Cultural Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 94.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

14

Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm

Jean-Michel Rabaté (Chapter 11) explores Coetzee’s transactions with psychoanalysis, exploring the ways in which his fiction both embraces and departs from Lacanian ways of thinking about the subject. In his wide-ranging exploration of the literature of psychoanalysis in relation to Coetzee’s oeuvre and the traditions and backgrounds which resonate with his work, Rabaté draws out the relationship that Coetzee’s oeuvre has with this tradition, emphasizing the porous boundaries between the literary and the psychoanalytical. In ‘Coetzee’s Critique of Language’ (Chapter 10), Peter McDonald reflects upon a largely forgotten philosophical work from the turn of the last century: Fritz Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (1901–2), remembered in philosophical circles because of a brief, categorically negative aside in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), and in literary circles for James Joyce’s and Samuel Beckett’s brief engagements with the work. Bringing this work of dubious philosophical standing together with Coetzee’s writings enables McDonald to explore the dubiousness of a familiar genre of literary essay—the type of essay that is structured around a conjunction between ‘X and Y’, where X is an intellectual of some kind, and Y is a literary text. Such essays tend to end up treating literary text Y as if it were simply an essay in another mode, which can be measured against the thought of X. What is involved, McDonald asks, in crediting the fact that such texts are in fact ‘intricately crafted literary works, not quasi-philosophical essays in disguise, albeit ones that interfere with any generalized ideas we might have about what is peculiarly “literary” or “philosophical”’? In answering this question, McDonald examines the faultlines between philosophical questions and literary experience. Concerns raised from within the philosophy of language, about how ‘Mauthnerian’ Coetzee might be said to be, are brought up against other forms of attention— including questions of literary history and practices of close reading—that foreground the specific craftedness of the literary text (in this case, Disgrace), and which have the potential to disturb the very salience of the philosophical questions being posed. As these summaries must suggest, the contributors to this collection take very different positions on the nature of the ‘ancient quarrel’ and the ways in which Coetzee’s fiction addresses it. And yet, as Jan Wilm points out in the final chapter in the collection, with the opening of the Coetzee archive at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, the question of what his oeuvre actually is, and how it might be addressed, has now become more complex still. Wilm reads Coetzee’s archive alongside his published work, and theorizes it as a counter-oeuvre that is driven by dynamics similar to Coetzee’s fiction. In particular, he draws attention to the dismantling of what constitutes centre and margin, the amalgamation of authoritative and counter-voices, as well as the position of history in relation to literature. In doing so, he emphasizes the powerful resistance made by Coetzee’s oeuvre to being finalized and exhausted—which is no doubt, as far as the questions posed by this book are concerned, a further source of Coetzee’s interest, a further way in which his oeuvre might be said to go beyond.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

PART I UNSETTLING BOUNDARIES: P H I L O S O P H Y , LI T E R A T U R E , A N D LI TER A R Y C RITIC IS M

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

2 Health and Deviance, Irony and Incarnation Embedding and Embodying Philosophy in Literature and Theology in The Childhood of Jesus Stephen Mulhall

In previous work on Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (2003),1 I identified a distinction between ‘embedding’ and ‘embodying’, around which Costello and her narrator organize their thinking about realism in modernist literature.2 Costello’s preferred term is ‘embedding’: she uses it to characterize the condition of Kafka’s ape (fantastically embedded into twentieth-century European culture) and enacts it in her version of Joyce’s Molly Bloom (who in Costello’s novel The House on Eccles Street is released from her bedroom and relocated in the broader life of Dublin in 1904); Costello suggests that such unintelligible conjunctions can nevertheless initiate a realistic investigation if what follows is a logically and emotionally rigorous unfolding of what that impossible embedding of one reality into another might reveal about both (Costello calls this ‘staying awake during the gaps when we are sleeping’).3 Costello’s narrator prefers the term ‘embodying’, at least when discussing the discomfort created for literary realism by ideas: he (or she) tells us that realism is premised on the idea that ideas have no autonomous existence, can exist only in things, so when it debates them it has to invent situations in which characters can give voice to, and thereby embody, them. In such debates, ideas are tied to the speakers by whom they are enounced, and hence to the matrix of individual interests out of which they act. A realistic treatment of these ideas of ‘embedding’ and ‘embodying’ should accordingly acknowledge their ties to the speakers who enounce them (which would mean acknowledging the specific differences between Costello’s matrix of individual interests and that of her narrator), and the revelatory possibilities of impossible conjunctions (which means accepting that a character in a fiction and the narrator of that fiction might nevertheless converse with one another, for

1

J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (London: Secker & Warburg, 2003). See chapter 11 of my The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 3 Elizabeth Costello, p. 32. 2

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

18

Stephen Mulhall

example about realism). We might therefore think of ‘embedding’ and ‘embodying’ as inflections of each other, as close as the spellings of the words embodying these ideas, as different as the speakers into whose actions they are embedded. And we might consider picturing the general relation between ideas and reality in the terms provided by these two particular ideas—namely, as one of ‘embodying’/ ‘embedding’. For if ideas must be embodied in things, and yet can also be embedded in other things (call them contexts), then they must be capable of being extracted from any of their particular embodiments; so every embodiment of an idea is an embedding of it, which means that no idea is fully absorbed into any of its possible embodiments, and no embodiment is reducible to its ability to incorporate a given (range of) ideas. This would be a realistic acknowledgement of the discomforting way in which ideas and reality depend upon, and are independent of, each other. In this chapter, I propose to exploit the relative (in-)dependence of these ideas from their initial textual embodiment, and use them to begin understanding another Coetzee text in which literary realism, and its discomfort with ideas and their relation to reality, are under interrogation: The Childhood of Jesus (2013).4 Since philosophy is characteristically concerned with ideas, their relation with reality, and the relative importance of the two relata, it is unsurprising that certain philosophical texts provide important points of reference in Coetzee’s text. I shall concentrate on two: Plato’s Republic5 (whose presence is hard to miss), and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations6 (whose presence is easier to overlook); but the significance of the orientation they provide (both singly and in impossible conjunction) is inseparable from the relation in which they stand to two other texts: Don Quixote7 and the Bible. THE J UST CIT Y The city of Novilla is infused by ‘the spirit of the agora’, manifest in Platonic forms and content. Simón has several philosophical dialogues with the city’s residents: Ana disputes the connection between beauty, goodness, and sexual desire; Elena argues that desire is only a source of endless dissatisfactions; and the stevedores are devotees of philosophy classes about how ideas engender unity in the midst of diversity—for example, how individual chairs participate in chairness, and so amount to embodiments or realizations of the idea or form of a chair.8 Simón repeatedly resorts to this image, thereby unifying a diversity of concrete contexts. He tells David that Ana’s reference to the bodily mechanics of sexual intercourse really concerned the way one mind might force ideas upon another; he then inverts the image with Elena, arguing that the mother provides the material 4

J. M. Coetzee, The Childhood of Jesus (London: Harvill Secker, 2013). Plato, The Republic, trans. D. Lee (London: Penguin, 1987). 6 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. P. Hacker and J. Schulte, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. Hacker, and J. Schulte, 4th edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009). 7 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Charles Jarvis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 8 The Childhood of Jesus, pp. 115, 30–2, 63, 119–22. 5

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Embedding and Embodying Philosophy

19

substance of a child whilst the father merely provides the idea, thereby presenting sexual intercourse as one concrete realization of reality’s participation in ideas.9 And against the stevedores, he argues that without ideas there would be no universe because there would be no being.10 By this, he primarily means no unified world of distinguishable existent things; but since his preferred example of an idea is that of justice, he also invokes the internal relation of ideas and ideals—models for how a currently unsatisfactory world might be made otherwise, brought closer to its distinctive telos, and so to itself. But invoking justice, understood as an aspiration to realize a world in which honest toil brings due reward, points us more specifically towards Plato’s Republic and its initiating definition of justice as a matter of giving a man his due. And Novilla’s way of life does indeed appear to embody the ideally just city that Socrates builds out of his conversational exchanges with Adeimantus and Glaucon. Its inhabitants happily endorse the Republic’s advocacy of radical sexual equality (asked whether she has a man in her life, Elena says that she has both male and female friends and doesn’t distinguish between them and the loosening of parent– child bonds; Elena carefully distinguishes biological from emotional parenting, arguing that the latter matters most and that both men and women are equipped to provide it, thereby implying that Socrates’ envisaged separation of children from their biological parents is a perfectly reasonable proposal).11 More generally, Novilla’s inhabitants have established a regime in which human desires are firmly under the control of reason—a world from which storms of passion (whether about sex or about food) have been exiled. This is what most disturbs Simón, who yearns for sexual intimacy and for a more varied, spicy diet, ideally involving the consumption of juicy animal flesh. But if he rejects the strictures of this Platonic Utopia, why does he resort so persistently to one of the central metaphysical doctrines underpinning it? Coetzeean realism requires us to relate these ideas to their embodying contexts—which in this case are conversations with inhabitants of Novilla, in which Simón’s primary concern is not to declare and defend his real beliefs but to further his own interests in the face of his interlocutors’ hostility or incomprehension by deploying their own ideas against them. With the stevedores, he wants to liberate himself from burdensome manual labour; with Elena, he is defending his decision to hand over David to Inés; and with David, he is attempting to mask Ana’s shaming exposure of his sexual designs on her by re-characterizing them in terms that the child will have to master if he is ever to become properly native to Novilla. In other words, the contextual embodiments of these Platonic ideas as Simón enounces them turn them to profoundly un-Platonic—even sophistical—purposes. It’s also worth asking just how Platonic the Utopia embodied by Novilla really is. Although Plato and Socrates both advocate reason’s mastery over desire, Novilla’s repression of bodily satisfactions goes far beyond that required by either. Does Coetzee’s portrayal of Novilla as an embodiment of Platonic ideals do Plato an

9

Ibid., pp. 34, 104.

10

Ibid., p. 115.

11

Ibid., pp. 55, 104.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Stephen Mulhall

20

injustice, offering caricature rather than satire (what one might call—remembering David’s delight in watching a television cartoon involving an animal character he calls ‘Plato’ rather than Pluto—a Mickey Mouse version of philosophy’s founder)? If so, then the un-Platonic uses to which Simón puts Novilla’s belief system offer no critical purchase on the real Plato. There is, however, a point in the Republic at which social (and so psychic) arrangements of the kind enforced in Novilla are explicitly articulated, only to be apparently rejected in favour of a more sophisticated level of human selfcultivation. This is at the beginning of book II, after Thrasymachus’ departure, but before the full complexity of the internal economy of Socrates’ just city—and, in particular, its need for a guardian class from whom the philosopher-kings will ultimately evolve—has been articulated. We might call this a gap during which most of Plato’s readers fall asleep. When Socrates asks how human society arises, his answer invokes mutual need (the fact that humans are not individually self-sufficient) and differences of aptitude, which generate a mode of communal life divided into five classes: producers, merchants, sailors, retail traders, and manual labourers. Such a society requires a bare minimum of clothing, equally simple food (such as barley-meal, beans, nuts, and vegetables), and basic forms of shelter and furnishing; its citizens lead a peaceful and healthy existence, living until a ripe old age, and bequeath the same form of life to their children. But Glaucon immediately calls this a community of pigs, lacking all ordinary comforts: Socrates calls them, rather, the luxuries of civilization. He reiterates that this society is the true one for human beings, ‘like a man in health’, whereas Glaucon’s civilized society is ‘one in a fever’; but he acknowledges that studying the latter might be justified because in that new context it might be easier to discover ‘how justice and injustice are bred in a community’.12 This passage implies that what most view as Socrates’ ideal city (the Utopia elaborated upon in the rest of the dialogue) is in fact his vision of a diseased condition of society and its citizens. The truly Socratic Utopia is to be found in the first half of book II: because it is internally articulated, it is a possible matrix of justice, insofar as justice is—as Socrates and Adeimantus note—a matter of the proper relationship between its elements; but because that articulation is so simple and transparent, because it is inherently stable and transmissible between generations, justice is not a complicated challenge but something self-evident to all. The issue becomes bewildering only when this society’s internal complexity expands to engender and satisfy desires that go beyond life’s necessaries—a world of artists, of those concerned with domestic consumption (especially women’s dress and makeup), and of hunters, fishermen, swineherds, and cattle-herders. So, Coetzee’s depiction of Novilla might really be an accurate portrayal of the Utopia that Plato and Socrates advocate, and Simón might really be a critic of philosophy’s founding ideal. Except for one thing—the distinguishing form of Platonic philosophical prose: irony. Novilla’s inhabitants are utterly devoid of

12

Plato, Republic, pp. 368–73.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Embedding and Embodying Philosophy

21

irony, apparently lacking any conception of it: as Simón puts it, they ‘do not see any doubleness in this world, any difference between the ways things seem and the way things are’.13 This is why Alvaro has such trouble with the idea of possible worlds, saying that the real world is the only world, why the idea of justice as an ideal in relation to which the actual world might be found wanting is opaque to the stevedores, and why that opacity leaves them sceptical of the reality of change and so of history.14 But Plato’s Socrates is a master of irony, which operates in the space between seeming and being, appearance and reality—the very gap that Plato’s theory of ideas opens up and exploits to lead us out of the cave of illusion and up towards a genuine understanding of reality. Accordingly, Socrates’ opening distinction between a healthy society and a feverish one may in fact be an ironic parody of contemporary Greek theories of the simple life, designed to support Glaucon’s conjunction of such simplicity with non-human animal life. After all, Novilla’s philosophy—however apparently Platonic in content—is employed by its residents to reaffirm their current arrangements: the theory of reality as dependent upon its participation in ideas is used not to reveal a gap between imperfect actuality and ideal reality that we might close, but rather to identify the actual with the ideal, and so to disavow any real distinction between seeming and being. Genuine philosophizing as the Republic understands it, the kind exemplified in the conversational construction of that understanding, is only called for by the circumstances of civilized luxury that also call for art; for this enlargement of our circle of desires requires guardians to protect society from external threats, and it is from them alone that (when properly educated) philosopher-kings can emerge. Coetzee is, of course, himself a master of irony, so he could plausibly be imagined not only to stay awake during such moments of Socratic irony, but to identify himself with them—or at least to invent literary equivalents. But, then again, this anti-Utopia tends towards the vegetarian—its well-balanced diet is almost entirely devoid of flesh and fish. So when the creator of Elizabeth Costello invites us to identify with Simón’s preference for salt and spice over bean-paste, and even with his lust for the juicy flesh of his fellow-animals, is that just one more ironic exploitation of the doubleness of things? CHILD A ND ELDER When Coetzee embeds into Novilla’s embodiment of Platonism two new arrivals who find its form of life profoundly alien, the friction thereby engendered discloses issues of a kind in which Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is particularly interested. One of his most famous remarks is ‘what has to be accepted, the given, is—one might say—forms of life’.15 He means that forms of life cannot be given, and so cannot stand in need of, rational justifications of the kind philosophy traditionally 13 15

14 Ibid., pp. 42, 115, 115–17. The Childhood of Jesus, p. 64. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ‘Philosophy of Psychology: A Fragment’, p. 345.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

22

Stephen Mulhall

aspires to provide (and of which the Republic is an exemplary instance); and since forms of life are plural, both various and in principle capable of being otherwise, differences between the forms of life inhabited by different individuals cannot be rationally adjudicated. Wittgenstein’s texts are littered with imaginary tribes whose ways of speaking and living diverge radically from our own, in order to show both that our ways of speaking and living are not fixed, and that none can claim to make better sense of things sub specie aeternitatis than others. So he imagines one tribe which responds with compassion to those whose pain derives from visible injuries, and with disdain to those who claim to suffer pain with no such source;16 another which charges for piles of wood according to the surface area it occupies rather than its volume;17 or people who contemplate selling cheese by weight despite its tendency to vary randomly in size.18 Simón’s initial experiences in Novilla have a strikingly similar aspect and affect. He quickly discovers that the inhabitants think that hospitality to strangers means allowing them to build a shelter in your yard when there is room in your house; that watching a game of football should be free (unless a cake is needed to award to the victors of the championship); that sexual intercourse is of no particular emotional significance, and the biological differences between men and women have no complex implications for their social relationships; that using technology to make work practices more efficient is not a good thing; that libraries should be exclusively stocked with non-fiction of some practical use, just as further education should focus on practical skills; and that rats are not vermin (since they are the most obvious source of meat to eat, and they play a helpful role in the stevedore’s foodstorage practices), but pigs may be (since they eat their own excrement).19 In other words, at every level at which this culture makes sense of the human condition in the wider world, the Novillan form of life is bewilderingly different to Simón’s own, drawing distinctions where no significant difference can be discerned and ignoring distinctions that are obviously important, and so appears to lack coherence, rationality, and humanity. Ultimately, however, Simón is forced to acknowledge that it makes perfect sense to those inhabiting it, that from their point of view the distinctions he wishes to draw or to ignore are as bewildering as theirs are to him, and that there is no available perspective from which to adjudicate between them. But the relation to Wittgenstein’s thought is even more specific: Simón and David embody a variation on a figure that runs throughout the Philosophical Investigations—that of the child, or rather that of the child and its elder, the adult who is responsible for his education, for inducting the child into his human community and its ways. Wittgenstein adopts this focus from the passage of Augustine’s Confessions with which he begins his text, in which a child acquires speech by observing his elders’ ways of articulating their desires (and so without their explicit aid, perhaps even despite their neglect). Wittgenstein’s child follows a

16

See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), p. 380. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), p. 149. 18 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 142. 19 Ibid., pp. 24, 169, 151, 120–1, 36, 112, 170. 17

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Embedding and Embodying Philosophy

23

different trajectory, in which his education involves the explicit attention, or at least the implied friendly or enabling presence, of an adult: and, as I note the major stations of that journey, I will register the corresponding episodes in Coetzee’s narrative of Simón and David. Wittgenstein’s child is sent to buy apples (Simón is particularly driven to find fruit for David, their first success being the discovery of a shop that sells oranges, although apples recur later when mathematics is at issue between them).20 He becomes involved in a game of building something with stones (Simón and David have to build their first night’s shelter from sheets of roofing); at this point, Wittgenstein also invokes images of a toolbox and the cab of a locomotive (which recur in Coetzee’s narrative when Simón mends the toilet and when David watches television at Daga’s), before examining how we play games of chess and football (David plays the former with Alvaro, and both watches and plays the latter).21 Then comes the most extended Wittgensteinian treatment of a child’s education: investigating how one learns to follow a simple mathematical rule; in so doing, he branches off into discussions of what is involved in reading, and ends with a long investigation of the idea of a private language, and throughout the adult teacher confronts what commentators call a deviant pupil—one whose responses to ordinary teaching practices diverge in a variety of ways from normality, each of which hinders his induction into their culture by putting into question what counts as the right next step in applying the rule, thereby placing pressure on the teacher’s authority (his claim to represent that culture in his claim to know what the right next step is, and what might be justified or effective responses to his pupil’s deviance). In all these ways, David seems to be a literary embodiment of Wittgenstein’s deviant pupil. After all, Simón’s difficulties in teaching David about numbers begin with David’s difficulties in grasping how to generate a seamless sequence of rightly related numbers—or, as Simón presents it, with recognizing that there are only gaps between them, not cracks.22 Whereas numbers are differentiated by their places in a sequence which thereby establishes properly spaced gaps between them, David encounters cracks between numbers into which he and they might at any point fall: given one number, it is an open question for David which comes next, or indeed whether any come next, or whether the sequence in fact falls apart, revealing its essential illusoriness. This is essentially an extreme variant on the difficulty encountered by Wittgenstein’s deviant pupil: having apparently mastered the sequence that is generated by adding two, this pupil continues the sequence beyond ‘1000’ with ‘1004, 1008, 1012’; and when his error is pointed out, he responds by saying, ‘But I am going on in the same way!’ In other words, Wittgenstein says: [T]his person finds it natural, once given our explanations, to understand our order as we would understand the order ‘Add 2 up to 1000, 4 up to 2000, 6 up to 3000, and so on’.

20

Ibid., pp. 34, 248.

21

Ibid., pp. 7, 127, 183, 43.

22

Ibid., p. 176.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

24

Stephen Mulhall

This case would have similarities to that in which it comes naturally to a person to react to the gesture of pointing with the hand by looking in the direction from fingertip to wrist, rather than from wrist to fingertip.23

This may seem to restrict the pupil’s deviance in a manner David would reject, since Wittgenstein’s pupil retains the assumption that numbers have a sequence, differing with us only about which it is; but if his deviant sequence is, on a certain interpretation of our explanations and examples, in conformity with them, then any sequence of numbers (even ones as chaotic as those David recites, in which the very idea of a sequence is put under pressure) could, on some interpretation, count as the application of a rule, and so the deviant pupil appears to dramatize a sceptical anxiety about the very idea of numbers as coming in sequences. The literature on Wittgenstein’s treatment of rule-following commonly assumes that the problem raised by this deviant pupil is what, if anything, determines that 1002 is the correct answer when one is asked to add 2 to 1000, and that Wittgenstein’s solution is to invoke the community—so what makes a given step the right one to take is its conformity with the way that the community is inclined to go on. Since there is no pertinent standard of correctness external to our form of life, the distinction between correctly and incorrectly applying it must be a matter of how the community draws it, and teaching it is a matter of bringing the pupil into conformity with that communal practice. This is why private rules are impossible, which is why Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule-following throws up the question of a private language and provides the central basis for dismissing it. It is also why Wittgenstein is led to one of his most famous images for the givenness of forms of life: ‘How am I able to follow a rule?’—If this is not a question about causes, then it is about the justification for my acting in this way in complying with the rule. Once I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do.’24

As Stanley Cavell has pointed out, such communitarian readings of Wittgenstein on rule-following imply an ethics and a politics of teaching: bringing a pupil into a rule-following community is essentially a matter of enforcing conformity—as if, having had my pedagogical spade turned, I am licensed to say to my pupil: ‘You simply must do whatever I am inclined to do.’25 The implied alternative is explicit in one of Wittgenstein’s earlier drafts of the Investigations, when he says: ‘[I]f a child does not respond to the suggestive gesture [to the teacher’s indications of how to go on], it is separated from the others and treated as a lunatic.’26 Cavell argues that communitarian readings of Wittgenstein realize just such a spirit; we

23

24 Ibid., p. 217. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 185. See chapter 2 of Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990). 26 Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the ‘Philosophical Investigations’ (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), p. 93. 25

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Embedding and Embodying Philosophy

25

might say that they take this remark of Wittgenstein’s literally, failing to hear its Swiftian tones, its irony. For Wittgenstein’s remark about bedrock does not characterize the pedagogical situation in Swiftian terms: what his teacher envisages saying to his pupil is not that he must do as he does, but rather, ‘this is what I do, this is how I and we do things: will you take me as exemplary, as an example you are willing to follow?’ And, of course, Wittgenstein’s teacher doesn’t actually say this to his pupil: he acknowledges an inclination to do so, but what they would convey is already manifest in his stance towards his pupil—in his willingness to provide whatever justifications he can, but to acknowledge when they run out by resorting to showing rather than telling (certainly not to telling off or separating off his pupil)—that is, to presenting himself and his actions as no more but no less than an embodiment of the sense his community finds itself able to make of these things we call numbers, in the hope that his pupil will be attracted to it. This non-coercive or democratic model of teaching is not only truer to Wittgenstein’s remarks about reaching bedrock; it is more closely attuned to the primary point of his introducing the deviant pupil. For in section 185, Wittgenstein expresses no sceptical anxiety about whether 1002 really is what results from adding 2 to 1000; rather, he points out that, even in the domain of pure mathematical reason, explanations and justifications may run out, may fail to convey understanding; hence, when they succeed, that is not because what is being conveyed is written into reality by Platonic forms, or accessible through pure recollection by all rational beings (as Socrates aims to demonstrate with the slave-boy in the Meno), but rather because teacher and pupil share a repertoire of natural reactions. Put otherwise, the normative is embedded in, and so dependent on, the natural—on human nature, on what comes naturally to us at a particular moment in human history (which may be measurable in years or in millennia); so deviance is a manifestation of differences that are no more but no less than natural, hence neither arbitrary nor necessary (just as our natural mode of walking is neither the only possible one, nor something randomly contrived). And this really should alter our understanding of the authority that adults bear as pedagogues—as individuals who aspire to induct the young into their form of life. Coetzee’s narrative of mathematical pedagogy enforces the difference between these two models of teaching by assigning each to a different character, but it uses that Wittgensteinian distinction to distinctly un-Wittgensteinian effect. The coercive Swiftian model is embodied in Señor Leon, the school teacher, who reacts to David’s numerical deviance by attempting to impose his community’s view, flatly asserting that he can be the only authority in the classroom27 and separating David out for exile to the remedial school at Punto Arenas. By contrast, having first reacted in a similar way, Simón undergoes a transformation. It begins when he acknowledges that his explanations are not passing David by, but are rather being

27

The Childhood of Jesus, p. 225.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Stephen Mulhall

26

absorbed and rejected, and this leads him to ask why: more specifically, it leads to his initial suspicion that David is something more than a very clever child, something for which at this moment he lacks a word.28 And the transformation ends when, in conversation with Eugenio, Simón finds himself motivating David’s deviance from the inside, seeing the world through his eyes. In that world, mathematical rules work only if each individual takes responsibility for the step from one number to the next (hence, avoids sloughing off that responsibility by invoking either metaphysical numerical necessities, à la Plato, or communal impositions, à la Swift), and only if we repress the even more enigmatic or miraculous step that each such step presupposes—the step from zero to one: that is, the step into the conceptual system of numbers and so into a mathematical understanding of the world, and more generally the step from nowhere to somewhere, the step into orientation by conceptual systems of thought. Simón confesses to finding this view not only intelligible but potentially revelatory, about numbers and the reality to which they apply: he even wonders whether ‘there [is] anyone on earth to whom numbers are more real’ than they are to David.29 Much of this matches Wittgenstein’s sense of the plurality, non-necessity, and naturalness of human forms of speaking, thinking, and living; but it is arrived at through a crucial, and apparently un-Wittgensteinian, intermediary encounter between Simón and David, one that is provoked when David makes the seamless move from deviant rule-following to the use of a private language—nonsense syllables that he claims mean something to him. Simón’s confident counterenunciation of the Wittgensteinian commonplace that a private language is a nonsensical idea because any genuine language must be communal is shaken by David’s dismissive gesture, and his command that he look at him as he speaks his ‘nonsense’: He looks into the boy’s eyes. For the briefest of moments he sees something there. He has no name for it. It is like—that is what occurs to him in the moment. Like a fish that wriggles loose as you try to grasp it. But not like a fish—no, like like a fish. Or like like like a fish. On and on. Then the moment is over, and he is simply standing in silence, staring. ‘Did you see?’ says the boy. ‘I don’t know. Stop for a minute, I am feeling dizzy.’ ‘I can see what you are thinking!’ says the boy with a triumphant smile. ‘No you can’t.’ ‘You think I can do magic.’ ‘Not at all. You have no idea what I am thinking.’30

The something that Simón sees is, presumably, the meaning of David’s nonsense: so his image of a fish escaping one’s grasp is an attempt to grasp what David’s private words mean to him; and that implies that, even when the meaning of words is his alone, David (and not just Simón) thinks of it as elusive, ungraspable. But

28

Ibid., pp. 150–1.

29

Ibid., pp. 248–9.

30

The Childhood of Jesus, pp. 186–7.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Embedding and Embodying Philosophy

27

Simón no sooner grasps this than it wriggles loose: David’s meaning isn’t like a fish, it’s like like a fish; and that way of grasping it is no sooner essayed than the meaning once more escapes, becoming only like like like a fish, and so endlessly on. Does this mean that meaning (whether private or public) lies essentially beyond our grasp, or does it rather indicate that meaning is graspable only as lying beyond our grasp— that meaning manifests itself to us precisely as ungraspable, which means only when we try (and fail) to grasp it, so that eluding our grasp is the way in which it manifests itself to us, the only way in which it can appear as it really is? Elusiveness is not, after all, absence, but rather a mode of presence; more precisely, it presents itself in or as the gap between appearing and being—between likeness and identity, and more generally between representations and the reality they aspire to represent. It is not just that David’s meaning is only like a fish; it is also that what Simón means by saying that David’s meaning is like a fish is merely a similitude of what he really means. No wonder Simón responds so brusquely to David’s claim that he sees what Simón is thinking: if what Simón thinks is so elusive to him, how can it be immediately manifest to David? But is David’s claim that Simón thinks that he, David, can do magic really not at all what Simón was thinking? Or does it in fact exactly capture what he was thinking, even if figuratively? If so, then either David is genuinely extraordinary, or Simón’s perception of meaning as inherently elusive does not authorize his public assertion that David is necessarily incapable of gaining access to what Simón thinks and means. Isn’t the idea of mind-reading as magic a perfectly serviceable way for a child to characterize the fact that the meanings he divines in others and in himself are elusive? Any proper evaluation of this invocation of the magical would have to reckon with the concept’s pivotal recurrence late in the narrative, when David blinds himself by igniting magnesium powder whilst reciting a magic spell that is supposed to render him invisible.31 Relevant issues would include the fact that Señor Daga (David’s ‘bad father’) provides the tools and script for the trick, that the performance does render him invisible (to himself, and to everyone else dazzled by it), but that in this respect his deeds outrun his eminently public incantatory word (since it is not his utterance of ‘Abracadabra’ but the subsequent eruption of light reflected in a mirror that does the trick). Without going any further, however, we can say that if this Coetzeean portrayal of the privacy and publicity of meaning is not essentially un-Wittgensteinian, then we would have to tell a far from common story about Wittgenstein’s conception of those notions—one attentive to the ways in which fantasies of privacy (and of publicity) shadow their realities, and so can shield us from acknowledging our common subjection to both (by putting our unknownness to others and our knownness by them beyond our control, outwith our individual responsibilities).32

31

The Childhood of Jesus, pp. 265–7. I confront these issues in more detail in my Wittgenstein’s Private Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 32

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

28

Stephen Mulhall B E N EN G E L I’S CA VE

Although Coetzee’s embedding of a twinned embodiment of Wittgenstein into his Platonic polis plainly creates friction between these two philosophical registers, they harmonize with respect to their relation to history. The inhabitants of Novilla lack a history, having been washed clean of their previous lives, and both Plato and Wittgenstein fit neatly into such a landscape: the former because the Republic conjures its ideal city out of words, and thereby inaugurates philosophy as a subject whose history lies before it; the latter because (as Cavell puts it)33 whereas some philosophers write according to the myth of having read everything essential in the history of their subject, Wittgenstein writes according to the myth of having read essentially nothing—as if philosophy exists only insofar as it endlessly brings itself back into existence in the present, from whatever materials happen to provoke the philosopher’s bewilderment and consequent desire for re-orientation. And when literature in the form of the novel finally appears in Novilla, its embodiment has a similar relation to the history of its enterprise; for the book that Simón finds buried in Novilla’s local library is An Illustrated Children’s Don Quixote—an abridged version of a novel with as good a claim as any to have inaugurated the history of the novel as a literary genre. Simón is delighted to have discovered an enjoyable comedy in which no one is drowned or killed, hoping that David will find it sufficiently attractive to learn to read. But David’s response to Don Quixote’s fight with the windmills quickly disabuses him: ‘David,’ he says, ‘Don Quixote is an unusual book. To the lady in the library who lent it to us it looks like a simple book for children, but in truth it isn’t simple at all. It presents the world to us through two pairs of eyes, Don Quixote’s eyes and Sancho’s eyes. To Don Quixote, it is a giant he is fighting. To Sancho, it is a windmill. Most of us—not you, perhaps, but most of us nevertheless—will agree with Sancho that it is a windmill. That includes the artist who drew a picture of a windmill. But it also includes the man who wrote the book. . . . A man named Benengeli.’34

David’s agreement with Don Quixote is rendered more comprehensible by one respect in which this adaptation differs from the original: whereas the original narrator describes the region as filled with windmills before recording the Don’s remarks to Sancho identifying them as giants,35 the version Simón reads to David begins by incorporating the Don’s view into the narration (‘Don Quixote and his friend Sancho . . . had not ridden far when they beheld, standing by the roadside, a towering giant with no fewer than four arms ending in four huge fists . . . ’),36 so that Sancho’s quizzical subsequent claim to see a windmill contests that initial assertion, and hence appears as a peculiar view of his own that his master is forced to account for by invoking the work of the sorcerer Maladuta. Simón’s agreement 33 Stanley Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America (Albuquerque Living Batch Press, 1989), p. 19. 34 The Childhood of Jesus, p. 154. 35 Cervantes, Don Quixote, p. 59. 36 The Childhood of Jesus, p. 152.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Embedding and Embodying Philosophy

29

with Sancho seems right to us because we are familiar with the original version, in which the narrative voice embodies Sancho’s way of seeing from the outset and so stacks the deck against the Don, whose alternative perspective then has to be accounted for (by an attribution of madness). But David’s reading of the Novillan version is authorized by that text: he is following exactly the same reading protocols as we are, so Simón’s claim that the text’s author sides with Sancho misreads text and author alike. But the Novillan version appears to differ from the original in another respect. We all know that Miguel de Cervantes is the author of the real Don Quixote; but Simón asserts in passing that its author (or at least, the author of the Novillan adaptation) is called Benengeli. On the other hand, in the chapter immediately after that concerning the windmills, Cervantes’s text breaks off, thereby enacting a break that its narrator ascribes to the manuscript his text transcribes: and he tells us that it is only because he is lucky enough to find the remainder of that manuscript in a bundle of old papers about to be sold to a mercer by a young boy at the Toledo exchange, and to have its Arabic script transcribed into Spanish by a morisco, that he can recommence his narration. And according to this Spanish-speaking Moor, the author of that manuscript is ‘Cid Hamet Ben Engeli, Arabian historiographer’.37 So when Simón tells us that the author of (the Novillan version of) Don Quixote is Benengeli, he is saying almost exactly what the narrator of the original says about its author; but whereas most of us would agree that this is an exercise in irony on Cervantes’s part, Simón seems to take its narrator’s claim at face value, as the literal truth. And yet, Simón’s identification with Sancho depends upon his detecting irony in the adaptation’s narrative internalization of the Don’s voice, which implies that he is sensitive to the phenomenon. So, does his identifying Benengeli as the tale’s author simply indicate that he has fallen asleep during a gap in Cervantes’ narrative, failing to hear the irony that fills or bridges it? It seems to me rather to show that one can identify some given claim or register of a text as ironic only if one is willing to regard some other claim or register as literal; something must stand fast in the text upon which irony might operate, but what stands fast and what constitutes the creation of ironic distance—call it a gap between appearance and reality—is ultimately a matter for the individual reader. Part I, chapter 8 can be read as portraying real windmills that a madman sees as giants, or as portraying real giants that a bewitched man sees as windmills, but either determination requires investing in a reality with which fantasy can be contrasted. Similarly, Part I, chapter 9 can be read either as revealing that Don Quixote is a transcription into Spanish of an Arab historiographer’s putatively documentary account of the adventures of a Spanish nobleman, or as suggesting this for ironic purposes; but even if we prefer the former reading, it would be possible to interpret Benengeli’s tale either as presenting an ironic portrait of the Don (Simón’s reading) or of Sancho (David’s reading). And counting hands will not legitimate one over the other—not the hand of the illustrator (whose windmill

37

Cervantes, Don Quixote, p. 68.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Stephen Mulhall

30

may be taken to inhabit a character’s fantasy), and not even the hand of the author (since not only the nature of the gesture which that hand is making, but whose hand it is, are themselves open to both ironic and literal interpretations). The fact that the only other episode of Don Quixote discussed by Simón and David concerns Montesinos’s Cave underscores the Platonic resonance of this dramatization of the destabilizing power of irony;38 the disagreement it provokes between Simón and David (over David’s freedom to regard the shadows that the Don encounters in the cave as real rather than illusory) simply confirms the extent to which—once introduced—an ironic relation to reality escapes the control of any who claim to master it, even a master of irony such as Socrates. But it also relates Coetzee’s invocation of Cervantes to his invocation of Wittgenstein. For transposing David’s education by Simón from mathematics to literature whilst maintaining David’s role as a putatively deviant pupil implies that what shows up in philosophy as the ineluctable possibility of going on otherwise with numbers shows up in literature as the ineluctable possibility of going on otherwise with words—more specifically with novels and the authority of their authors with respect to their created worlds. David’s and Simón’s pedagogical encounters show that, at each step in the narrative of Don Quixote, a reader can invoke ironic distance from a literal reading, and thereby transfigure the fictional world he takes himself to be inhabiting; and there is nothing outside the encounter of reader with text to determine which step is the right one. A novel that can claim to originate the form of the novel is thus bound to be as soaked in irony as Simón’s body is soaked in his past;39 after all, its motivating premise is to ironize the genre of chivalric romance by embodying it in Don Quixote, who is then embedded in a picaresque world—a world whose antiheroic, plebeian, and materialistic emphases allow it to stake a claim to realism that turns upon convincing us of the unrealistic nature of romance. Once the impossible embedding of genres needed to achieve this is effected, however, its irony escapes authorial control: for its portrait of its protagonist shows how easily reality can conform to his romantic interpretation of it—first as his friends offer reinterpretations of reality that are consistent with his chivalric one in order to moderate the ill-effects of his ‘madness’, and then (in Part II) as the world as a whole, having read the first part of the book, reconstructs reality for their own amusement in such a way that Don Quixote finds himself living in a world that fully answers to his dreams of it. Moreover, chivalric romance did not eschew all claims to make and maintain contact with reality as it really is: it had its own ways of doing so, ways that involved depicting archetypes or ideal forms of a distinctly Platonic nature, and so differed from those of the picaresque or of other subsequent literary genres (each of whom made the case for its own way of casting that relation with reality by castigating those of its predecessors) without losing the right to call its aspirations realistic. The dynamic between Don Quixote and Sancho thus embodies in literary form that between David and Simón, which is itself a literary

38

The Childhood of Jesus, p. 162.

39

Ibid., p. 143.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Embedding and Embodying Philosophy

31

embedding of one (Wittgensteinian) conception of what realism might look like in philosophy within another, contrary (Platonic) one. If ironic recounting is to literature what deviant counting is to philosophy, then the gaps which so worry David must always already inhabit both realms from their outset: no wonder he propels himself so willingly into the hole that leads to Montesinos’s Cave.

FILLING A G AP IN TH E G OO D B OOK For an author so persistently attracted to impossible embeddings of one reality into another, the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation—of God made human, of divinity becoming finite—must amount to the purest possible embodiment of such a strategy, and one patently inspired by exactly the realistic impulse Coetzee finds in his literary and philosophical exemplars: that of acknowledging material actuality to the fullest possible extent (in this case by rendering it identical with the ideal, with Truth, Being, and Goodness in their all-encompassing, Trinitarian selfidentity). This was more than enough to render Christianity foolish to the Greeks, those exemplary philosophers—imagine Plato watching his doctrine of participation transform itself into dogmas of consubstantiation and transubstantiation. But how might it be rendered in literature, and in particular a mode of literature that claims to share Christianity’s realist impulse? In a review on the New Republic website,40 Jason Farago reports that Coetzee prefaced a reading from this not-yet published novel at the University of Cape Town with the following remark: I had hoped that the book would appear with a blank cover and a blank title page, so that only after the last page had been read would the reader meet the title, namely The Childhood of Jesus. But in the publishing industry as it is at present, that is not allowed.

Imagine a literary utopia in which such a hope or fantasy was realized, and so in which the book attains its ideal condition: how might it have affected our reading of it? In one sense, it would have changed nothing: not a word, paragraph, or chapter break—nothing in what one might call the body of the work—would differ between the two versions of Coetzee’s book. In another sense, everything would have been different, because our initial reading would have been entirely innocent of an idea that, when introduced, places the whole text in a different light, one which would otherwise have conditioned our relation to every word of it from the outset. These apparently opposed reactions, as well as the fact that Coetzee’s hope can even be articulated, show that there is always a gap between a book and its title (a necessity this book registers in the fact that Novilla’s sole copy of [An Illustrated Children’s] Don Quixote has its spine, where its title usually resides, torn off). 40 Jason Farago, ‘J. M. Coetzee’s Stunning New Novel Shows What Happens When a Nobel Winner Gets Really Weird’, New Republic, 14 Sept. 2013, https://newrepublic.com/article/114658/ jm-coetzees-childhood-jesus-reviewed-jason-farago, accessed 30 Nov. 2016.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

32

Stephen Mulhall

Hence, a question can always be raised about how to read their relation, and in particular whether it is right to assume that the title embodies what less explicitly animates the text as a whole, the spirit that informs it, or the idea in which it participates, and typically precedes the text it names precisely because it can therefore provide useful guidance for the potential reader. By withholding his title until the end, Coetzee at once retains and problematizes this familiar baptismal aspect of authorial authority. For if the idea encapsulated in the title really does inform the text, a retrospective title should be an essentially supplementary and even superfluous piece of literary apparatus, since we ought to have been able to identify the relevant idea from the text alone. Suppose, however, that we actually encounter it with a sense of shock or surprise. We might take it as a pleasing, although admittedly unusual, version of a traditional literary trope—that of the twist ending, in which the underlying meaning of a text is disclosed only at its end. Or we might wonder whether that title really does properly name this text— perhaps because the text aspires to but fails to earn that title, perhaps because the idea it embodies gets no purchase on that text at all. The relevance of Christ and Christianity to Coetzee’s text is certainly not obvious. To begin with, whereas philosophy is explicitly woven into the existence of this fictional city’s inhabitants and implicitly informs the relationship of its most recent immigrants, and even literature survives in a vestigial manner, religion is entirely absent from the Novillan form of life: there are no traces of religious buildings or symbols, or of the patterns of behaviour, speech, and thought they might support. Goaded by the title, we can at least try to read Simón’s precipitous embedding of David into Inés’s life as a version of the Annunciation, the ‘family’s’ flight from Novilla to Estrellita as a version of the flight from Herod to Egypt, and the pedagogical torments endured by Simón and David as a version of the twelveyear-old Jesus’s dialogues with the elders in the Temple: but all of these analogies are strained in ways that other analogical relations (with Plato and Wittgenstein, for example) are not, presupposing transpositions and deviations so stringent as to call their legitimacy into question. Can we really imagine arriving at them without the title’s minatory imperative? On the other hand, Christianity, or more specifically its Good Book, is pervasively present in another mode: Simón’s speech and thought—through which every event in the narrative is presented (however freely and indirectly)—is soaked not only in irony and history, but in scripture. ‘One cannot live on bread alone’; ‘Behold this singular worker, in whom we are well pleased !’; ‘Instead of waiting to be transfigured, why not try to be like a child again?’; ‘You will have nowhere to lay your head’; ‘I slept while I should have watched’; ‘If you search you will be sure to find him’; ‘[H]e would like us to see him as he really is.’41 This feature of Coetzee’s text reminds me of Stanley Cavell’s remark that ‘the reason a reader like Santayana claimed to find everything in Shakespeare but religion was that religion is Shakespeare’s pervasive, hence invisible, business’.42 41 42

Ibid., pp. 49, 143, 187, 242, 246, 275 (emphasis in the original). Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 218.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Embedding and Embodying Philosophy

33

This suggests that (this piece of) literature is in competition with the Bible, and so with the Christian religion; more specifically, insofar as Simón’s in-formation by scripture is part of what he brings with him to Novilla (an aspect of the past that resists being washed away), it suggests that literature is here declaring itself religion’s successor—as if its place in Novilla could only be opened and taken by a founding literary text, one recounting the Passion of Don Quixote. It also coheres with the fact that Coetzee’s deferred title refers specifically to Jesus’s childhood, a phase of his life about which the New Testament is notoriously silent and only the Apocrypha speak. For if Coetzee’s text is intended to fill (at least part of ) that gap, and so to embed itself within the wider context of the New (and so what the New entitles the Old) Testament, one would precisely expect it to have attuned itself throughout to the linguistic medium of the older and larger textual body it means to complete and so encompass. Nevertheless, an invisible pervasiveness is hard to distinguish from a persistent absence; Santayana’s response to Shakespeare is at least as tenable as Cavell’s. But this might actually reinforce the relation of Coetzee’s text to Christianity; for the idea that something that is everywhere present might present itself as essentially absent is one way of characterizing God’s creative relation to the whole universe. If one comes to regard the whole of reality as God’s creation, there is a sense in which everything changes, insofar as every element of that reality now stands in relation to God; but given that God brings that universe into being ex nihilo, his creative relation to every existent thing cannot be a mode of intra-worldly causal power, and so cannot show up as an additional feature of the system of nature it sustains, from which it follows that there is equally a sense in which nothing about reality changes (science, for instance, can simply go on its way). To relate everything whatever to God is simultaneously to change nothing and everything; and one way of representing that insight in literary terms is surely to employ a title whose disclosure simultaneously alters nothing and everything in the text it names, and in our relation to it as readers. But the doctrine of the Incarnation tells us that the Creator God embedded himself in his Creation; so a literary confrontation with that doctrine would have to include such a point of divine embedding. And one might retrospectively identify one such uniquely pivotal point in Coetzee’s text—when Simón looks into David’s eyes as he speaks a putatively private language. For what Simón sees, or rather no sooner sees than it wriggles from his grasp, is like (or like like or like like like) a fish: and, of course, a fish is not only an ancient symbol of Christ and of Christianity, but a symbol which simultaneously exemplifies the incarnation of divinity into a material particular and disavows its exemplarity (being no more than a symbol, and so not only generically inadequate to that which it symbolizes but in this particular case absolutely inadequate to it, since what it aspires to symbolize is the impossible reality of God-made-man). In the ideal version of Coetzee’s text, then, the retrospective disclosure of its title would invite us to view it in two apparently opposite ways simultaneously: as relating in its every particular to something essentially external to it (because that something essentially exceeds representation), and as containing one particular in

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

34

Stephen Mulhall

which that something is at once and impossibly embodied and embedded (say, incarnated). Of course, the text we have is not its ideal version: this text has a dust-jacket, a spine, and a normally located title page, so our attempt to imagine ourselves as inhabitants of a world in which this text lacked that apparatus was always doomed to failure. We cannot transfigure ourselves into readers whose relation to this text was innocent of in-formation by its title; we have always already been exiled from that literary paradise. But that will come as no news to those whose faith in the Good News of the Gospel always incorporates the idea of our having unaccountably but undeniably fallen from innocence.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

3 Attuning Philosophy and Literary Criticism A Response to In the Heart of the Country Maximilian de Gaynesford

Some literary texts call for the attunement of philosophy and literary criticism.1 This can only be demonstrated convincingly case by case. So I shall focus here on a particular text, J. M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country (Heart, henceforth2), first outlining what attunement means, then offering various reasons why Heart calls for it, before concentrating on the main task of the chapter, which is to put attunement to work. By attunement, I mean a mutually shaping approach in which we really do philosophy in really doing literary criticism. By ‘doing philosophy’, I mean analysing material in genuinely philosophical ways, with the prospect of changing the way we think about things in general. By ‘doing literary criticism’, I mean adopting a genuinely critical approach, with the prospect of changing the way we respond to literary works. And I mean ‘mutually shaping’ in a strong sense: attunement is a single, unified activity. If this makes it seem that the normal disciplinary and classificatory boundaries between philosophy and literary criticism reflect deeper differences between them, then that is accurate enough. Very often, and not simply in seminar rooms, we are struck by three things: the different kinds of question that philosophy and literary criticism tend to ask, the different objects on which they tend to focus their attention, and the different modes of attentiveness they tend to focus on those objects. For example, a paradigmatic philosophical question in this area is ‘What is literature?’ Literary critics are often content to say this is not a literary question.3 1 I have argued for this elsewhere in relation to poetry: see Maximilian de Gaynesford, ‘The Seriousness of Poetry’, Essays in Criticism 59 (2009): pp. 1–21; Maximilian de Gaynesford, ‘Speech Acts, Responsibility and Commitment in Poetry’, in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, ed. Peter Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 617–37; Maximilian de Gaynesford, The Rift in the Lute: Attuning Poetry and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 2 References throughout are to the reprinted, currently available edition (London: Vintage, 2004). 3 Derek Attridge, ‘Introduction: Derrida and the Questioning of Literature’, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 1–29; 1. Some philosophers would also deny that it is simply a philosophical question; see Jacques Derrida, ‘Is there a Philosophical Language?’, in Points…Interviews 1974–1994, ed. Elizabeth Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995),

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

36

Maximilian de Gaynesford

This is presumably because answering it seems to require a focus on the essence of literature, and the mode of attentiveness frames itself around the need to identify a few very general differences between what does and what does not count as such. Paradigmatic literary critical questions, on the other hand, tend to be those that enable us to get to grips with the literary content of particular works. Given such questions, the focus tends to be on collecting and then relating many specific features of that work to each other, and the mode of attentiveness frames itself around the need to persuade us of the existence and relevance of those features to some reading or set of possible readings. These divergences go some way to explaining why it is that philosophy often changes the way we think about things in general but rarely affects the way we respond to particular literary works, and why it is that the reverse is true of literary criticism. If there are such differences between philosophy and literary criticism, it may seem problematic that attunement presents itself as a single, unified activity. But attunement is like walking in this respect, also a single unified activity. Someone able to walk would normally be able to move each of their two legs independently of each other, but they would have to unify these movements to engage in what would count, at least standardly, as walking. In the same way, someone able to attune philosophy and literary criticism would normally be able to appreciate literature and do philosophy independently of each other, but they would have to unify these activities to engage in what would count as attunement. Appreciating literature and doing philosophy contribute equally to this one exercise. The contribution is mutually shaping, with one constantly affecting and responding to the position and force of the other. So attunement contrasts with approaches which take a pre-existing philosophical outlook and impose it on literature, or which take a pre-existing critical outlook and impose it on philosophy.4 Attunement is to these affairs what walking is to hopping. In attunement, philosophy takes literary criticism as an opportunity to exercise itself, and vice versa. How? As a starting point, and only that, it is clear enough that appreciating literature as such has intimately to do with what language is, what it does, and what it is for, just as philosophy as such has intimately to do with these same questions. On the one hand, these questions invoke a good deal of philosophy. On the other hand, abstract ingenuity and formal resourcefulness alone are rarely enough to answer them. Sensibility and receptivity to the varied uses of language are also called for, capacities that are sustained and developed by appreciating literature. Building on this commonality, it is possible to find mutually enhancing ways of appreciating literature and doing philosophy, rather than simply using one to illustrate or ornament the other.

pp. 216–27; 217. I agree, for reasons that are our business here: it is a question that calls for the attunement of literary criticism and philosophy. 4 Toril Moi is rightly concerned about the first model, which is common in attempts to bring philosophy and literature together; Toril Moi, ‘The Adventure of Reading: Literature and Philosophy, Cavell and Beauvoir’, Literature and Theology 25, no. 2 (2011): pp. 125–40.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Attuning Philosophy and Literary Criticism

37

From this description, it ought to be clear that attunement does not posit some priority between literary criticism and philosophy, some privilege that one has over the other in terms of approach or point of entry. The call for attunement may be heard first in either area, but the response to it will necessarily invoke both and engage both in equal measure. Neither literary criticism nor philosophy are submerged in the process because, within attunement, neither changes its character as such; it will always be possible to distinguish their contributions. That is why we should speak of a unified activity rather than of a mixing of literary criticism and philosophy or of a compound of the two. It may be that there are particular kinds of literary work that call for attunement, but we will not be in a position to determine whether they form a recognizable type until we have gathered information from a large sample. It is unlikely that any literary work stands wholly outside the possibility of attunement. This is a brief, stratospheric, and necessarily inadequate summary, lacking nuance. Greater subtlety and precision should come as we proceed, and in the only way possible: by practising attunement in relation to specific literary works.

AT TUNEMENT AND IN THE H EART OF THE COUNTRY Some literary works call in a particularly direct and straightforward way for attunement. Heart is an example, as one of its major themes makes clear.5 When the novel was first published in its English version6—by Martin Secker and Warburg Limited in 1977—the dust-jacket set the scene: Stifling in the torpor of colonial South Africa, trapped with his serfs in a web of reciprocal oppression, a lonely sheepfarmer makes a bid for private salvation in the arms of a black concubine, child-bride of his foreman.

This weird sensationalism—it might belong to a Wilbur Smith novel—is chiefly notable for its fantastically skewed perspective: there is no mention of the narrator,7 not even a space left for her, though she is the central character in what is narrated, the figure whose development is the subject-matter of the novel, the only one whose thoughts and responses are considered along with her actions.8 And yet there 5 Many of Coetzee’s fictions belong to this category, but we are interested in reasons that are particular to this text. 6 ‘English version prepared by the author’ (London: Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd, 1977), copyright page. In the South African version (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1977), the dialogue was in Afrikaans. On the ‘disturbing’ effects of this ‘switching of languages’—for a South African reader— see Derek Attridge, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 22–3. 7 Preferable to the more rarified ‘speaker’ since she has, so essentially, a story to tell. 8 For the blurb in the South African version, Coetzee advised that Ravan Press use a review from the Irish Times, one that does focus on the narrator and her ‘delusions’ (see Peter D. McDonald, The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009], p. 311). Coetzee himself was responsible for the Secker & Warburg blurb, it seems (conversation with Peter McDonald).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

38

Maximilian de Gaynesford

is also something appropriate about this silencing of the narrator.9 For this is the nub at which the novel worries away: partly the way in which a speaker may be silenced, robbed of voice, left speechless, and partly the way in which that same speaker may nevertheless silence others or control the silence, deciding when (and when not) to be silent.10 As Coetzee comments, ‘[the narrator] is an anomalous figure: her passion doesn’t belong in the genre in which she finds herself.’11 Just to see the problems that the novel thus sets for itself, and for us, is to cross backwards and forwards between collecting specific details about the complexities of silencing and assessing their significance for the economies of self-fashioning and self-destruction, between noticing just and unjust actions and asking what conceptions of justice enable us to arrive at these judgements, developing our answers so that we are capable of recognizing more and better evidence for these judgements, of proceeding from clearer and sharper conceptions, and so on, back and forth. I do not mean to suggest that literary critical discussions neglect such crossings, but that when they do depend on them—for example, when a study of silencing in a realist novel draws implicitly on conceptions of justice as well as on the particulars of a case—they are engaging at least tacitly in attunement. I would only add that when a literary critical practice becomes fully aware and reflective about the need for attunement, it is stimulated to deepen the inquiry and draw further significance from the objects of investigation. For example, an openly attuned approach to Heart cannot but identify the specific kinds of self-reflexivity at work in the novel as a call to examine processes of interpretation that we would normally take for granted. Another reason for acknowledging that Heart calls for attunement has to do with a feature observed by Derek Attridge: there is nothing in the entire narrative from start to finish that, in the final analysis, could escape the possibility of being read as fantasy.12

This feature of the novel makes a particular question acutely pressing. To put the question in Attridge’s terms: what would a ‘responsible reading procedure’ for such a fiction be? Attridge is surely right about this. We need only add that this feature of the novel, and the question it raises about reading procedure, make the call for 9 The sense of ‘silencing’ in play here wavers, just as ‘mute’ does, between a dampening of sound (e.g. a trumpet-mute) and a cutting out of sound (e.g. a ‘mute button’). And it is worth asking why we are comfortable with a word that could mean either, when—so we might assume—it is so very important to know which is meant. Is it, perhaps, that it is convenient to avoid having to say which? 10 Heart, pp. 7–8, 28–9, 39. Coetzee’s discussions of censorship are relevant here (J. M. Coetzee, Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship [Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996], particularly his carefully attuned response to Catherine MacKinnon’s claims that the pervasiveness of pornography has worked not only to subordinate but to silence women [‘The Harms of Pornography’ in Giving Offense, pp. 61–82]). 11 Interview with David Attwell in J. M. Coetzee, Doubling The Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 62. 12 Attridge, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, p. 28.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Attuning Philosophy and Literary Criticism

39

attunement pressing. For to see this question for what it is, and to set about answering it, we have to cross backwards and forwards between literary criticism and philosophy, assembling specific details of the narrative and assessing their significance for issues of responsibility. One has to ask what reading procedure it would be appropriate to adopt, sharpening the answer for this particular occasion so that it is capable of taking into account the specific details of the text which led Attridge to his concern about fantasy, before then using a provisional form of that procedure to adjust what we look out for, thus recognizing fresh details as significant, relating them in new ways, sharpening our sense of what responsibility requires in the light of what we will then have learned, and then using that sense to identify and assemble further details—and so on, back and forth, between activities that are essentially philosophical and activities that are essentially literary critical. To be engaged in this process is to be engaged in attuning literature and philosophy, a process that we can already see is both systematic and cumulative. So this is a second reason why Coetzee’s novel calls for attunement: that its dealings with fantasy press us to ask Attridge’s question, and that answering it requires unifying the activities of the philosopher and the literary critic. Heart’s dealings with integrity—its nature and complexity, what it requires and how it is sustained, what weakens it and what destroys it—offer a third reason for recognizing that the novel encourages and requires us to form a single, unified activity out of philosophy and literary criticism. On the one hand, the narrator is presented as a person of integrity. Indeed, this is one of the most striking features of Heart. It can best be appreciated in conjunction with the silencing theme. The narrator counters her silencing with attempts to silence others and to control her own silence, where this qualified exercise of a qualified control is an aspect of her integrity. On the other hand, it is difficult to see exactly how this can be the case. On the usual conceptions, the narrator is anything but a person of integrity. She does not seem at all a unified, integrated person. She is not a person who has a true self to be true to. She is not an uncorrupted person, innocent, free from taint. This problem is related to another: how is the integrity of the narrator made manifest? For the manic monologue-form of Heart seems anything but promising as the expression of a person of integrity. It often seems closer to Yeats’ description of Ulysses (1922): ‘neither what the eye sees nor the ear hears, but what the rambling mind imagines from moment to moment.’13 To recognize these problems is to cross between noticing specific details of the narrative and assessing their significance in the light of various conceptions of integrity, sharpening the answers so that they can make sense of these details, sharpening our sense of the integrity that is in play here. So this is a third reason why Heart calls for attunement; to pursue the integrity theme in a literary critical way, getting to grips with the literary content of the novel, is to be constantly attentive to questions of philosophical significance, where pursuing these questions sends us back into a more acute search of the literary material. 13 Quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 530–1.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

40

Maximilian de Gaynesford T H E SP I NN IN G O F TH E S P I DE R

Heart calls for attunement. We know something about what this means and why it holds. But we have yet to appreciate what attunement might look like in practice, what shape an inquiry might take if it formed a single, unified activity out of philosophy and literary criticism. That is our task in this section and the one following (‘Brackets and what they Dis-enclose’), where we shall pursue some of the themes we have touched on. Start with a detail. The narrator likens herself to a spider—‘a black widow spider’14—and develops the metaphor in one particular direction: ‘I have always felt easier spinning my answers out of my own bowels.’15 This is partly a pun no doubt, converting anger at representations of her state (‘Do I feel rich outrage at my spinster fate?’) into something more positive, the spin-ster (‘When I was a little girl [weave! weave!] in a frilled bonnet I would sit all day in the dust’).16 And it reflects the resolve of the narrator (‘Prolong yourself, prolong yourself, that is the whisper I hear in my inmost’).17 The spider may also be prompted by Francis Bacon’s wellknown characterization: ‘rationalists, like spiders, spin threads out of themselves’, by contrast with empiricists who, ‘like the ants, merely collect and use’.18 ‘Those are the antagonists’:19 this is how the narrator introduces herself, her father, and his new wife, as if there were no protagonist. And in some ways there is not. Not in the sense in which, say, Descartes’ Meditations lacks a protagonist (namely, that the particularities of the ‘I’ are gradually stripped away, so that it becomes a voice without much individuality, making it possible for any reader to slip into the role). This narrator is always to the fore, with all that makes her individual. Rather, it is that the story leaves no room for a protagonist. She is so overwhelmingly self-critical—and the story is so much that of her self-criticism— that she can only figure in the role of antagonist, at once the opposing and opposed force. In and around her, the protagonist role is silenced. Though the narrator is to the fore with all the particularities that Descartes strips away, she negotiates a context that is in many ways like that of Descartes’ meditator, distrustful of others and of her environment, thrown back on her own resources, particularly her rich inner mental life.20 The complexity here is figured in various ways, but the main point can be simply illustrated. The central character is known to us throughout as ‘I’ and is named for us only towards the end—as ‘Miss Magda’21—by another character and in such a way that we may even doubt whether this really is her name. Without a certain name, she recedes somewhat, but into a silence that she may herself have chosen, and one that is in part protective, since being named gives one salience, but also grants others power over one.

14

15 Ibid., p. 150. 16 Ibid., pp. 5, 6. Heart, p. 43; also pp. 64, 75. Ibid., p. 6. 18 Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, trans. P. Urbach and J. Gibson (Chicago: Open Court, 1994), Book 1, Aphorism 95 (paragraph 64). 19 Heart, p. 1. 20 Ibid., pp. 4, 59, 137–8, 150. 21 Ibid., p. 111. 17

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Attuning Philosophy and Literary Criticism

41

This complexity may direct us to the usual philosophical questions: is knowledge possible under such constraints, and, if so, how? Because the narrator has some special faculties, perhaps? But what is of equally deep significance to our understanding of the novel is the way the narrator herself conceives of this complexity, grapples with the epistemic condition in which she recedes into a partly protective silence, by presenting herself under the metaphor of the spinning spider, at the centre of a world of her own making, steadfast, resolute, intense, single-minded, passionately devoted to her task: There is no doubt about it, what keeps me going . . . is my determination, my iron determination, my iron intractable risible determination.22

Steadfastness, resolution, passionate intensity: according to many philosophers— John Rawls, Alasdair Macintyre, Michael Slote, Lynne McFall—to have such characteristics is to be a person of integrity.23 That the narrator is such a person is something that comes across strongly to the reader, despite her acknowledged weaknesses of character and rationality. (Many of these are exaggerated or playful, e.g. ‘How can I be deluded when I think so clearly?’)24 And our appreciation of this coheres with Coetzee’s own: in resisting the temptation to interpret the narrator as mad, what he insists on is precisely her ‘passion’ and ‘intensity’ and ‘allembracingness’, calling it a ‘species of love’.25 Some think of integrity in other ways: as essentially a matter of being united in agency,26 or of being true to one’s (‘true’) self,27 or of remaining free from taint.28 The narrator is not in a position to satisfy these requirements, and this tells us a good deal about her. Too damaged to count as united in agency, she is not integrated, intact, or whole. Too sceptical of herself and others, she is scornful of the aim to be true to oneself, to be identified with one’s actions, motivations, projects. Too conscious of her own complicity in injustice, she does not mischaracterize herself as pure, innocent, decent. 22

Ibid., p. 19. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). Alasdair Macintyre, After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 1985). Michael Slote, Morals from Motives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Lynne McFall, ‘Integrity’, Ethics 98 (1987): pp. 5–20. 24 Heart, p. 137. Note how her confessions of ignorance about philosophy (p. 19) are offset later by her ability not only to quote but to confront passages—of Novalis (p. 138), Nietzsche (p. 139), Hegel (p. 141), Weil (p. 141), Rousseau (p. 146), Pascal (p. 146). Some passages, for example pp. 38–9, show a knowledge of Wittgenstein. 25 Interview (with Derek Attwell) in Doubling the Point, p. 61. Coetzee moves swiftly in a short conversation from ‘[she] may be mad (if that is indeed your verdict), but I, behind her, am merely passionate’ to ‘(I see no further point in calling her mad)’. 26 For example, Christine Korsgaard, Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); John Cottingham, ‘The Ethics of Self-Concern’, Ethics 101, no. 4 (1991): pp. 798–817; Gabriele Taylor, ‘Integrity’, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 55, no.1 (1981); Valerie Tiberius, The Reflective Life: Living Wisely with our Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 27 For example, Bernard Williams, ‘Persons, Character and Morality’ in his Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 1–19; Harry Frankfurt, ‘Identification and Wholeheartedness’, in his The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 159–76. 28 For example, Sissela Bok, Lying (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1978). 23

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

42

Maximilian de Gaynesford

Indeed, the narrator is particularly sensitive to perceived taint (‘wherein does my own corruption lie?’; ‘I am corrupted to the bone with the beauty of this forsaken world’29) and her monologue is replete with various ways of talking about it—ways of talking about other human beings as ‘low-grade people, degenerate types, Untermenschen, the unfit, slave races’; ‘phrases involving blood (blood-consciousness, pure blood, tainted blood, etc.)’; ‘certain terms from the fringes of the science of heredity (taint, flaw, degeneration)’ which Coetzee notes elsewhere have been ‘put a stop to’ by the Nuremberg trials and what they revealed.30 These contrasts also tell us a good deal about the kind of integrity that the narrator does manifest. We might regard it as a virtue of hers that she possesses integrity in spite of the fact that she does not satisfy these other requirements. But we may also think that it is precisely because she does not satisfy them—because she acknowledges her fragmentary nature, her lack of a self to be true to, her complicity in injustice—that she manifests integrity, or at least the particular kind of integrity she does manifest. Much of the narrative is constructed in such a way as to replicate the narrator’s conception of herself as a spinning spider, working away and producing material out of itself. This is the basic form: an idea or image will occur fleetingly in one section, a side-thought only, and will then become the principle thread of the next section, in which a developed form of that idea or image will occur fleetingly, and then become the principle thread of the next, and so on. This is an appropriately internal reason (or justification) for the prose style in Heart, which is far distant from the uniformly plain, flat, unadorned prose, in which nothing so luxurious as a metaphor emerges, or a striking employment of syntax, or a word of more than a few syllables

which Joyce Carol Oates finds in Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus.31 This ‘spinning’ form is established early and becomes increasingly complex. As illustration, consider the early sequence §§3–6 (p. 2). In §3, the narrator ‘extracts’ a ‘faint grey image’ which she immediately works up into something more material, from a grey image to an image of something grey, her ‘faint grey frail gentle loving mother’. She extracts the image ‘from one of the furthest oubliettes of memory’, where this word for a secret dungeon whose access is limited to a trapdoor in the ceiling may recall John Locke’s famous description of the mind as a ‘dark room’, ‘a closet wholly shut from light, with only some little openings left, to let in external

29

Heart, pp. 64–5, p. 151. J. M. Coetzee, White Writing (London: Yale University Press, 1988), chapter 6, p. 136. There need be no conflict here though the narrator does speak of a ‘Führer’ (Heart, p. 11). Internal evidence may be found, for example, in the fact that she is unsure whether there were bicycles when she was young (p. 2), that makes it plausible that the events described take place prior to the Nuremberg trials. Trying to work out when and where the events of Heart take place caused the South African censors considerable trouble; see McDonald, The Literature Police, p. 313. 31 Joyce Carol Oates, ‘Saving Grace: J. M. Coetzee’s “Childhood of Jesus”’, New York Times Review, 29 Aug. 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/01/books/review/j-m-coetzees-childhood-of-jesus.html., accessed 11 Oct. 2016. 30

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Attuning Philosophy and Literary Criticism

43

visible resemblances, or ideas of things without’.32 The use of ‘oubliette’ to suggest such a room may betray a taste in the narrator for sensationalist Romantic literature; Walter Scott adopted the word into English, in Ivanhoe in 1819.33 The image remains fleeting and diaphanous here, but it becomes the central theme and subject of the succeeding section (§4) as the ‘frail gentle loving woman’, the mother whose dying is poignantly described there. In §4, the fleeting sense of her compassion is introduced, which will become the central theme in §6, the ‘womanly warmth’ against which the narrator contrasts herself as ‘a zero, null, a vacuum’—where it is possible to see this nullity also as an inheritance from her mother, reading the threefold description of herself as ‘a zero, null, a vacuum’ (in §6) beside the threefold description of her moribund mother as ‘patient, bloodless, apologetic’ (in §4). And from here the original image is spun further, again using the original ‘grey’: what was in §3 a ‘faint grey image’ and then a ‘faint grey frail gentle loving mother’ becomes in §6 a description of herself as ‘a turbulence, muffled, grey, like a chill draft eddying through the corridors, neglected, vengeful’. Spinning makes this transition possible, a self-reflection that moves from disembodied image through to full, embodied human presence and back again to something disembodied.34 The practice develops many complexities in the course of the monologue. For example, the ‘impulse . . . telling me to hide in a corner like a black widow spider’ in §85 prompts the theme for the next section, ‘But the truth is that I have worn black widow-weeds longer than I can remember’, and then doubles back to reinvoke the insect in §86: ‘for all I know I was a baby in a black diaper waving my rickety little legs.’ The narrator is conscious of her spinning practice and increasingly reflective about it; it makes her impressively self-reliant, but it has its limitations which embarrass her: ‘That is what she gets from me, colonial philosophy, words with no history behind them, homespun, when she wants stories.’35 So there is an odd combination of resignation and pridefulness about her concluding comment: ‘I have always felt easier spinning my answers out of my own bowels.’36 The spinning form stands in clear relation to the use of numbered sections (§§1–266), which play so large a role in determining the appearance and form of Heart. Coetzee reflected later that his decision to use such sections was influenced by his interest in ‘film and/or photography’, and particularly ‘how rapidly narration could be carried out’ in film.37 This interest led him to ‘a heavy concentration’ on ‘cutting, montage’ in Heart, whose sequences are numbered precisely to assist this

32 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Nidditch, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), book II, ch. 11, §17. 33 Entry under ‘oubliette’ in Oxford English Dictionary. 34 This theme of ‘embodied’ and ‘disembodied’ prose is evidently of considerable significance to Coetzee; he uses it to distinguish between those works of Beckett which ‘matter’ to him, noting that the embodied works are of greater significance to him. Interview with David Attwell in Doubling the Point, p. 23. 35 Heart, p. 125. 36 Ibid., p. 150. 37 Doubling the Point, p. 59.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

44

Maximilian de Gaynesford

‘feature of technique’.38 They act ‘as a way of pointing to what is not there between them’.39 The numbering certainly intensifies the effects of spinning in Heart. By creating semi-discrete sections with gaps in between, ideas can be spun very rapidly. A faint image or idea can be introduced in the sidelines of one and then appear fully embodied and dominant in the next, where the reader can be relied on to fill in the transition, just as a film-watcher manages cuts. John McDowell’s phrase ‘spinning frictionlessly in a void’40 seems apt here. In part, this is because it is precisely in a void that the narrator’s spinning takes place. As she herself recognizes (or at least as she presents herself; the distinction is necessary because of games played with the reliability of the narration), she is forced to live off her own resources, being cut off from the rest of the world geographically (she lives in an isolated house in a desert region41), socially (she and her soon-to-be-dead father are exceptions, isolated members of a master class), and emotionally (her mother is dead; her brutal father has chosen a young wife inimical to his daughter). In part, McDowell’s phrase is apt because it is precisely in a frictionless way that the narrator’s spinning takes place. As she recognizes (or at least as she presents herself), she is in a hopelessly compromised, subordinate position, quite powerless to constrain what happens. Her labours, and indeed her presence, have little effect on the way things are. Conversely—though this is not so constantly part of her self-presentation—the world seems incapable of constraining her. In particular, the way things are seems to exert little or no influence on the material she spins out. The words we read seem detached, self-generating, self-sustaining. So it seems curiously beside the point to ask whether or not the narrator gives an accurate depiction of what happens, whether her words truly ‘match’ reality. We have the sense that the material would have been spun out this way regardless. McDowell coined the phrase for another purpose: we would be ‘spinning frictionlessly in the void’ if our experience failed to provide us with rational relations to the world. The metaphor McDowell puts in play is not that of an individual working away and producing material from out of itself, but of a rotating object, revolving on itself—a perfectly smooth sphere perhaps. ‘Spinning frictionlessly’ in this sense would be a poor or even hopeless position for the rational subject to be in, epistemically speaking. To be able to think knowledgeably, our thoughts must ‘have a grip’ on the world, must ‘gain purchase’ there. To count as such, the knowing rational subject must have their experience constrained by the way the world is. When these two senses of ‘spinning frictionlessly in a void’ rub up against each other, there is some friction: it becomes a pertinent question to ask just how the narrator’s spinning is even possible. She seems to be capable of acting in a knowing and rational manner. Either this is only ever mere appearance, or empiricism is 38

39 Ibid., p. 59. Ibid., pp. 142–3. John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 11. 41 Coetzee comments ruefully: it is a landscape ‘I know . . . all too well’. Interview with David Attwell in Doubling the Point, p. 142. 40

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Attuning Philosophy and Literary Criticism

45

wrong: there need be no rational constraint by the world if a subject is to act in a knowing and rational manner. Spinning (spider-spinning) is possible whilst spinning (sphere-spinning) frictionlessly in a void. The first option is unappealing: we may think the narrator mad, or touched by madness, but to suppose her incapable of ever acting in a knowing and rational manner is inconsistent with the text and would drain it of interest. To adopt the second option and thus challenge McDowell’s modest form of empiricism is to ask ‘how does the narrator spin whilst spinning?’ This inquiry into the spider and its spinning is in its opening stages, but we have done enough to answer the question set. For we have seen how the theme encourages and requires us to form a single, unified activity out of philosophy and literary criticism. The combination has revealed a variety of means through which the narrator’s integrity is achieved, and centrally by an instrument that develops the figure of the narrator. She meets the temptation to spin frictionlessly in a void, an object revolving on itself without any ‘grip’ on the world, with attempts to reconceive herself as a spinning spider, working away and producing material out of itself. And this integration of her self-conception as a spin-ster with her control over language, over her use of the monologue form, opens up an alternative conception of integrity, based around being constant and resolute, which seems to be possible for a person without the usual markers of integrity— being unified, being authentic, being uncorrupted. In short, we have moved from talking about attunement to practising it.

B R A C K E T S A N D WH A T TH E Y D I S- E N C L O SE The attunement that Heart calls for can be practised in many ways. We have just used it to work on a metaphor, that of the spinning spider. We shall now use it to work on an element of punctuation. Start again with a detail. The narrator describes herself as living ‘inside a skin inside a house’.42 Matching this, she seems most at home in brackets. It is in what she places there that we seem to get closest to her thoughts, her voice, her tone. Consider the close of the novel: I have never felt myself to be another man’s creature (here they come, how sweet the closing plangencies), I have uttered my life in my own voice throughout (what a consolation that is), I have chosen at every moment my own destiny, which is to die here in the petrified garden, behind locked gates, near my father’s bones, in a space echoing with hymns I could have written but did not because (I thought) it was too easy.43 42 Heart, p. 10. This notion of an embedding which is also an embodying resonates with other aspects of Coetzee’s work; for a discussion of both relations in the context of Elizabeth Costello’s reflections on the monologue by Red Peter in Kafka’s ‘Report to an Academy’, see Stephen Mulhall, The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), pp. 162–72 (embeddedness), pp. 172–83 (embodiedness). 43 Heart, p. 151.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

46

Maximilian de Gaynesford

The narrator uses the brackets to comment ironically on common forms (‘the closing plangencies’) which press almost inescapably on her own ‘voice’, even while she claims this voice as her own, so that we wonder how much of a ‘consolation’ this ownership really is. The brackets also serve as a correlative to the ‘locked gates’ and the echoing space they enclose, a resonance which in the final occurrence— ‘(I thought)’—returns the voice to the rationalist theme, turning the essential feature of the Cartesian meditator (‘I think’) into the past tense, making what is indubitable (if I am doubting, I cannot doubt I am thinking, because to doubt is to think) into what is thoroughly dubitable (how can I be certain that once I thought? The fact that I am doubting now, in the present, is no guarantee of what happened in the past). One use the narrator has for her brackets is to reflect, and reflect on, various aspects of her silencing. There are, for example, her own attempts to be silent: I close the door, sit down . . . This is the irreducible, this is my room (I settle deep in my chair)44

where the brackets help figure seclusion of self prior to intense thought (like Descartes setting out on his Meditations, or the eponymous hero strapped into his chair at the start of Beckett’s Murphy [1938]). There are the narrator’s attempts to silence others: (I have said nothing of the girl’s nakedness. Why?)45

where this is made complex by what the brackets contain, a saying of what is not being said. There is the narrator’s being silenced: Having failed to make my shouts heard (but am I sure they did not hear me? Perhaps they heard me but found me uninteresting, or perhaps it is not their wont to acknowledge communications), I turned to writing.46

where this being silenced is as much a matter of others not listening, not being unreceptive. There is the segregating of the narrator’s narrative, played out in part in that concluding passage with its ironic detachment: I have never felt myself to be another man’s creature (here they come, how sweet the closing plangencies), I have uttered my life in my own voice throughout (what a consolation that is)47

where the brackets sustain the sense that her narration is wholly removed, of a different order. This is akin to the use of brackets in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 49: Against that time (if ever that time come) When I shall see thee frown on my defects48 44

45 Ibid., p. 68. 46 Ibid., p. 144. 47 Ibid., p. 151. Ibid., pp. 52–3. The Oxford Shakespeare: Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 479. 48

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Attuning Philosophy and Literary Criticism

47

where the bracketing in the first line underlines the sense of what is there enclosed: that unlike the events which we might expect to be described in the poem, this is one whose time may not come, and hence we are to regard it as appropriately segregated, its existence as belonging to another order. Heart complicates the way brackets segregate, for example to double what is described: It is at times like these that I notice (what a helpful device a mirror is for bringing things into the open, if one can call it a device, so devoid of mechanism) how thickly the hair grows between my eyes49

There is a Beckett-like comedy to this: the reflexive passage set in the midst of the everyday. And the brackets seem to work like the mirror they speak of, a helpful device which brings into the open what the surrounding sentence would cover over. Brackets also reflect and offer their own commentary on the central themes of the novel. There is, for example, the general spinning economy: When I was a little girl (weave! weave!) in a frilled bonnet50

and resoluteness, the particular form the narrator’s integrity takes: (Yet what is it in me that shrinks from the light? . . . Prolong yourself, prolong yourself, that is the whisper I hear in my inmost.)51

and the narrator’s attempts to recede, to draw back, and to draw away: (and what do I, poor provincial blackstocking, know about philosophy, as the lamp gutters and the clock strikes ten?).52

From these examples, we can see how the narrator employs brackets not only to register and face up to the way she is silenced, but to exert an equal and opposite set of forces, to push back, setting up her own sphere in which she can exercise silence herself, both in silencing others and in choosing to silence herself. She uses brackets to counter being placed out-of-play by her father, stepmother, and servants (as well as by various geographical, social, and economic features of her situation), enabling herself to remain alongside them. Again, she uses brackets to counter being viewed by others in an excluding way, enabling her to view the whole situation which contains others from within that whole situation, as one amongst its various occupants. And this exercise of her capacity to think and act in an including way, by means of her uses of brackets, is also an aspect of her integrity. This use enables her to meet being segregated with attempts to find value in being unique, in being regarded as unique. It enables her to meet being contained by other people and by various features of her situation with attempts to reconceive containment—as inclusion rather than restraint. These uses of brackets call for philosophical reflection. By creating an inside, brackets raise the question of an outside. They form their own commentary. Nesting one text within another enables one voice to be nested within another. They are, if Samuel Taylor Coleridge is right, ‘the drama of reason’; ‘no work of 49

Heart, p. 23.

50

Ibid., p. 6.

51

Ibid., p. 6.

52

Ibid., p. 19.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

48

Maximilian de Gaynesford

impassioned and eloquent reasoning ever did or could subsist without them.’53 In its use of brackets, Heart complicates Dr Johnson’s dictum about parentheses— that in them, a sentence is ‘so included in another sentence, as that it may be taken out without injuring the sense of that which encloses it’. The basic idea retains a strong hold on theorists of punctuation. Strong contrary evidence in usage has not got rid of the idea, but seems only to have modified it. Eric Partridge is representative: ‘The essence of all parentheses is that . . . they explain or modify, but they do not determine the sense.’54 The idea is retained in the philosophy of linguistics with the notions of ‘bracket absorption’ and ‘bracket erasure’.55 If the narrator’s brackets enclose her deepest self, its reflections, then Johnson’s dictum is a very effective means of silencing her. But equally it may be that she uses the dictum for her own purposes: brackets enable her to say things, to ‘get away’ with doing so. Brackets have particular relations to silence and silencing, as we have seen. Christopher Ricks develops the thought in insisting that brackets speak to the eye rather than the ear, that their use draws attention to silence as something beyond what is voiceable.56 But Ricks is somewhat evasive here because he does seem to admit that something about brackets is voiced: [Brackets] belong with those signs of punctuation which the voice cannot sufficiently utter . . . the voice is not able to make adequately clear (adequate in both delicacy and clarity) whether the parenthesis is bracketed off, comma’d off, or dashed off.57

The point here is a good one: that the voice has no clear means of indicating that it is brackets, rather than some other parenthetical device (like dashes, commas), that are being used. Ricks agrees that punctuation which is markedly durational can be uttered. But he denies that brackets are essentially a mark of duration. They indicate a relationship that may or may not have a durational dimension. This is why he says ‘they speak to the eye and not to the ear’.58 Still, Ricks seems to me too absolute in all this. When he says ‘they speak to the eye and not to the ear’, what he might have said (and done the careful distinguishing work then necessary) is that they may speak to the ear, but in a way that differs in various respects from their speaking to the eye. Heart offers opportunities to pursue this more discriminating approach, once we attune our literary and philosophical attention. In her use of brackets, for example, the narrator sometimes assumes a sideways-on perspective to the world, seeming to regard herself as circumscribed within a boundary with the world outside, but nevertheless capable of making judgements about that world. This is a metaphor

53 Letter to Thomas Poole, 28 Jan. 1810. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, iii: 1807–1814 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 280–4; 282. 54 Eric Partridge, You Have a Point There (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953), p. 63. 55 See Geoffrey Nunberg, The Linguistics of Punctuation (Stanford: CSLI, 1990), pp. 57–64. 56 Christopher Ricks, The Force of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 294–5. 57 Ibid. My emphases. 58 Not marking what is logically comic about this speaking to an eye. How could the eye be expected to hear? Is this not another form of silencing—like putting one’s blind eye to the telescope? (William Gass argues that reading is hearing with one’s eyes.)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Attuning Philosophy and Literary Criticism

49

that John McDowell adopts to portray a common philosophical conception of the way mind and world relate.59 Sometimes, however, the narrator uses brackets to take up the perspective that McDowell contrasts with this sideways-on perspective. Like her, he is particularly interested in the case where one works at making someone else ‘intelligible’.60 We can find others initially ‘opaque’,61 but nevertheless retain the sense that the world this other person is engaging with is a shared world, so that we come to a standpoint from which we can join that other person in directing a shared attention at the world.62 And this also is figured in the narrator’s use of brackets. On occasion, they do not operate as a figure of the boundary one might have to break through, but as an opportunity for conscious self-reflection on the fact that one’s world is a shared world. For example: A woman with red blood in her veins (what colour is mine? A watery pink? An inky violet?) would have pushed a hatchet into his hands and bundled him into the house to search for vengeance.63

Here, whilst calming the violence of the image, the brackets also serve to set the narrator’s sense of herself within an overall context that includes her sense of others. Brackets are a means of uniting these impressions. This inquiry into brackets and what they dis-enclose is still in its early stages. But we have done enough to see what an inquiry would look like if it formed a single, unified activity out of philosophy and literary criticism. And we have begun to appreciate the breadth of the philosophy that an attuned reading of Heart calls upon. Not just ethics and moral psychology, which the focus on silencing and integrity makes central, but also philosophy of language (understanding what brackets are, what functions they perform), philosophy of action (understanding what effects brackets can achieve and how, what kinds of action they can perform), metaphysics (understanding the ways that Coetzee reconfigures the plight of the peculiarly Cartesian rationalist), and epistemology (what we might know, or fail to know, in making judgements about the world from a sideways-on perspective).

AT TUNEMENT IN R EVIEW We have now seen two examples of attunement in practice. In reviewing what we have observed, a recommendation by Martha Nussbaum proves useful. She laid down various conditions that any philosophical study of Shakespeare must satisfy if it is to ‘make any contribution worth caring about’.64 If we generalize these requirements, with one amendment, we arrive at a basic conception of what it is that attunement sets out to achieve. And we can then appreciate how we have been satisfying these conditions in investigating Coetzee’s Heart.

59 62 64

60 Ibid., p. 35. 61 Ibid., p. 34. McDowell, Mind and World, p. 34. 63 Heart, p. 68. Ibid., pp. 35–6. Martha Nussbaum, ‘Stages of Thought’, The New Republic 238, no. 8.7 (May 2008), pp. 37–41.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

50

Maximilian de Gaynesford

The first condition is that an inquiry must really do philosophy, ‘wondering and pondering in a genuinely philosophical way’. This is something we have made a start at with the discussion of silencing and integrity, of what brackets are and what they do, of the metaphysics and epistemology associated with the figure of the narrator. Second, an inquiry must really do literary criticism, ‘changing the way we see the work’. Again, this is something we have made a start at, noticing the dramatic salience of the pinning metaphor and of brackets in Heart, thus developing and changing the way we see the novel, both in particular places and as a whole, reconfiguring the elements, sharpening attentiveness, unlocking principles of composition, doing literary criticism in doing philosophy. Third, an inquiry must explain why philosophers need literary texts, what they supply that straightforward philosophical prose does not, why ‘the philosopher must care’. Our reflections on Heart go some way towards meeting this requirement. In thinking about what is at issue in silencing and being silenced, in comparing and contrasting different conceptions of integrity, in appreciating the effects that brackets achieve, there is much that a literary text can convey which ordinary philosophical prose finds difficult or impossible—a sufficiently rich sense of what is at stake for the narrator in her silenced and silencing position, in the complexities of her exercise of integrity, in her reasons for retreating into the use of brackets. But a full study would also show other uses: that there is a real prospect of improving our philosophy of language analysis of brackets, for example, if we use literary works like Heart to appreciate what they are for, what uses they have. These three conditions exhaust Nussbaum’s requirements, but we ought to add a fourth. An inquiry must explain why texts like Heart or authors like Coetzee need philosophers, what philosophy supplies that straightforward literary criticism does not, why we must care about philosophy. Again, our reflections on Heart only go some way towards meeting this requirement, but it is already evident what a full study might show: that there is a real prospect of improving our understanding of the novel if we use philosophy to appreciate the ethical, metaphysical, and epistemological questions it raises. Sometimes philosophy will give us reason to revise a critic’s view of the novel—its dealings with philosophy are not restricted to a kind of intellectual flummery in the quotations that occur towards the end, as is often assumed, but inform the metaphors and uses of punctuation which the narrator adopts, thus helping to create the conditions in which she is able to perceive herself and her situation. Sometimes philosophy enables us to offer a reasoned explanation for the impression that a critic was only able to register and record—it is often said that the novel constructs a narrator possessing a multilayered self, but philosophy helps demonstrate how and why this is so. These are isolated cases, dependent on the context provided by one or two features of the novel alone—its use of the spinning metaphor, of brackets. A philosophically informed full study could revise our view of the novel as a whole and give reasoned explanations for what we perceive. For example—and this is just one option, though an important one— philosophy can recognize the ways in which a literary text like Heart acts as a

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Attuning Philosophy and Literary Criticism

51

reflexive study of uses of language, singularly and uniquely equipped to provide its suitably directed appreciators with philosophical insights into those uses. The opportunity to appreciate philosophical distinctions and discriminations in a literary text can improve our ability to discriminate features of philosophical significance. And this opportunity to grapple anew with philosophy in turn heightens our capacity to appreciate what is rich and subtle in a literary text, which returns us more richly provided to pursue philosophy, from where we can go back more generously supplied to appreciate the text, and so on, back and forth. This vigorous spiralling is the best picture of what it is to attune literary criticism and philosophy. Where does this movement—circling, but with progress—end? There is no better answer I can think of than ‘when the call for attunement is satisfied’, which is not something that one reader can determine for another.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

4 Double Thoughts Coetzee and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism Andrew Dean

C O E T Z E E AN D T H E O R Y In ‘lesson’ three of J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (2003), the eponymous character—an ageing, Australian novelist—launches a bad-tempered assault on Thomas Nagel, based on his 1974 article, What Is It Like to Be a Bat. She scoffs at Nagel’s paltry imaginative capacities: ‘his denial that we can know what it is to be anything but one of ourselves seems to me tragically restrictive, restrictive and restricted.’ She continues: ‘To Nagel a bat is a fundamentally alien creature, not perhaps as alien as Martian but certainly more alien than any fellow human being (particularly, I would guess, were that human being a fellow academic philosopher).’1 For Costello, there are ways of knowing what it is like to be a bat that Nagel’s thought experiment cannot grasp. She knows, for example, ‘what it is like to be a corpse’.2 ‘To thinking, cogitation’, she says, ‘I oppose fullness, embodiedness, the sensation of being . . . a body with limbs that have extension in space, of being alive to the world.’3 Her argument ends in tendentious fashion: Nagel’s failure to enter bat-being, she says, is akin to the ‘horror of the camps’. The Nazis are like Nagel and the entire history of Western philosophy in that they ‘closed their hearts’—they did not allow themselves to ‘share at times the being of another’.4 With its controversial arguments and direct references to a number of philosophers, Elizabeth Costello set in motion a new interest in Coetzee’s work from within the discipline of philosophy. The novel features prominently in the 2010 edited collection, J. M. Coetzee and Ethics: Philosophical Perspectives on Literature. Cora Diamond in her essay in Philosophy and Animal Life (2008) and Stephen Mulhall in his book The Wounded Animal (2009) both incorporate Costello’s thinking into their own explorations of philosophical argumentation vis-à-vis literary thinking. Mulhall reads for a ‘dialogue’ in Coetzee’s work, ‘in which philosophy and literature participate as each other’s other—as autonomous but internally related’. The ‘wager’ that motivates his study, he writes, is that ‘Coetzee’s

1 2

J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (London: Vintage, 2004), p. 76. 3 Ibid., p. 78. 4 Ibid., p. 79. Ibid., pp. 76–7.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Double Thoughts

53

Elizabeth Costello’ gives philosophers ‘good reason’ to open longstanding philosophical ‘ideas and assumptions to question’, and that it does so ‘in ways that can properly be understood only if we understand that our primary relation to her is as a literary creation’.5 However, an interest in reading Coetzee’s fiction as a disturbing force within the routine operations of a discourse is not limited to philosophy. Arguments of this nature have been made about his work in other disciplines too, not least in literary studies, and Mulhall’s account particularly resonates with Derek Attridge’s influential readings of Coetzee’s work. In J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (2004), Attridge argues for literature’s distinctive contribution to ethical thinking: ‘the impulses and acts that shape our lives as ethical beings—impulses and acts of respect, of love, of trust, of generosity—cannot be adequately represented in the discourses of philosophy, politics, or theology, but are in their natural element in literature.’6 While for Mulhall it is specifically traditions of philosophy that Elizabeth Costello challenges, the implications of Attridge’s argument are comparable: the text’s value lies in the way it unsettles the discourses through which it would be received. Attridge argues such unsettlements take place in Coetzee’s work in an ‘ethically charged event that . . . befalls individual readers and, at the same time, the culture within which, and through which, they read’. The ‘event’, the moment when ‘literature happens’ and has ‘powerful effects on its readers’, is central to Attridge’s account: in his view, Coetzee’s work undertakes a ‘literary exploration’, as opposed to a propositional one, of various issues ranging from literary interpretation to political responsibility.7 Attridge’s arguments about the literary and its relationship to secondary discourses explicitly draw from the work of Jacques Derrida. In ‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’, an interview that Attridge himself conducted with Derrida, and which was collected in his edited volume Acts of Literature (1992), Derrida argues that there are certain ‘literary’ texts which ‘“question” . . . philosophy in a sharper, or more thematic, or better informed way than others’. For Derrida, texts of this nature do their questioning ‘via the actual practice of writing, the staging, the composition, the treatment of language, rhetoric’, rather ‘than via speculative arguments’.8 In a clear articulation of the thinking that later comes to underlie his approach to Coetzee, Attridge writes in the introduction to Acts that Derrida highlights aspects of literary texts ‘which make most demands on us, which are most difficult to write about in the conventional discourse of criticism because they shake the foundations of that discourse. And Derrida’s argument is that it is those aspects which mark literature as literature.’9 5 Stephen Mulhall, The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 3. 6 Derek Attridge, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. xi. 7 Ibid., p. xii. 8 Jacques Derrida, ‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 50. 9 Derrida, Acts of Literature, p. 6.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

54

Andrew Dean

Across two different disciplines, with their distinct orientations and modes of reading, emerge comparable arguments about the nature and value of Coetzee’s writing. One explanation for this similarity is provided in Acts itself. In his interview, Attridge asks Derrida whether literary criticism has ‘shown itself to be as governed by metaphysical presuppositions as philosophy, and more so than the literary texts it treats of ’. Derrida responds: ‘[t]o give too sweeping a reply, I would say yes.’10 He continues: In general literary criticism is very philosophical in its form, even if the professionals in the matter haven’t been trained as philosophers, or if they declare their suspicion of philosophy. Literary criticism is perhaps structurally philosophical. What I am saying here is not necessarily a compliment.11

If Elizabeth Costello disturbs both philosophy and literary criticism it could therefore be because the registers and protocols of literary criticism are ‘perhaps structurally philosophical’—and, moreover, because Coetzee, himself also a literary critic, knows this all too well. But the presence of a photocopy of a section from Attridge’s Acts of Literature among the Coetzee Papers at the Harry Ransom Center (HRC) in Austin, Texas, suggests another possibility. What the photocopy suggests is that there may be a certain circularity of influence at work: that Coetzee was himself influenced by Derridean ideas about literature as a form of writing that, as Attridge put it, can ‘shake the foundations of . . . discourse’. The idea that Coetzee’s fiction has a close relationship with critical theory returns us to early responses to his writing. The first book dedicated to Coetzee’s fiction was Teresa Dovey’s J. M. Coetzee: Lacanian Allegories (1988), in which she argues that his writing fuses ‘novelistic and critical discourses’, and may be considered ‘criticism-as-fiction, or fiction-as-criticism’.12 David Attwell, in his review of Dovey’s book, identified the many shortcomings of her approach: the novels are forced through a narrow scheme that amounts to ‘propaganda for poststructuralism’, the limits of theory go unexplored, and the influence of Lacanian theory on Coetzee is significantly overstated.13 Perhaps understandably, the limitations of treatments such as Dovey’s prompted reactions that tended to close down the investigation of critical theory’s influence on Coetzee. Attwell in his 1993 book, J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing, for example, writes that rather than treating Coetzee’s work as ‘allegorized theory’, he will emphasize the author’s literary borrowings.14 10 12

p. 9.

11 Ibid., p. 53. Ibid., p. 52. Teresa Dovey, The Novels of J. M. Coetzee: Lacanian Allegories (Craighall: Ad. Donker, 1988),

13 David Attwell, ‘Review of The Novels of J. M. Coetzee: Lacanian Allegories by Teresa Dovey’, Research in African Literatures 20, no. 3 (1989): pp. 515–19; 518. 14 David Attwell, J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 6. More recently, in J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face to Face with Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), Attwell makes the same case via the composition histories made available by the recently opened archive at the HRC: ‘Contrary to a widely held assumption that Coetzee’s novels are spun from quotations drawn from literary theory, the allusions to other writers (some theorists, but more often than not novelists, poets and philosophers) are brought in only once the work has found its own legs’ (p. 20).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Double Thoughts

55

Without wanting to repeat the mistakes made by such critics as Dovey, in this chapter I will nonetheless argue that the special way Coetzee’s fiction interacts with ‘structurally philosophical’ discourses (to recall Derrida) was in many ways shaped by his encounters with late twentieth-century critical theory. What both Mulhall and Attridge are identifying in Elizabeth Costello is in fact a longstanding practice of Coetzee’s, one that is informed by his encounter in the early 1980s with the writings of post-structuralist critics who were interested in promoting such disturbances. The apparently new interest in destabilizing routinized scholarly discourse in Elizabeth Costello in fact emerged much earlier in Coetzee’s writing career, rather more as a response to newly ascendant kinds of literary criticism than to philosophy per se. This is evident in works such as Foe (1986), in which Coetzee engages the distinctive capacities of literature to disorient the procedures of criticism itself—just as his fiction has been pictured disorienting philosophy—crucially thinking beyond criticism’s terms and processes. This engagement, I will argue, is in no small part what makes Coetzee’s fiction so interesting: we need not extricate the work from critical theory, but instead explore its connections, departures, and frictions with the likes of Derrida, Paul de Man, and others. Derrida describes ‘“Good” literary criticism’ as that which ‘implies an act, a literary signature or counter-signature, an inventive experience of language, in language, an inscription of the act of reading in the field of the text that is read’. My suggestion will be that Coetzee applies a ‘literary signature, or counter-signature’ to literary criticism and to philosophy, imagining them into life amid a series of fictionalized personal investments, antagonisms, moral considerations, and institutional expectations. Derrida suggests that he does not know ‘what name to give . . . those “critical” inventions which belong to literature while deforming its limits’:15 Foe and Elizabeth Costello are two such names.

L IT E R A R Y C R I T I C IS M A N D I T S L I M I T S J. M. Coetzee began his literary career not as a writer of fiction but as a literary critic. He submitted his Master’s thesis, The works of Ford Madox Ford with particular reference to the novels, to the University of Cape Town in November 1963.16 From 1965 to 1968 he read for a PhD at the University of Texas at Austin; before he had received his doctorate he had already accepted an appointment as an Associate Professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He taught there until his return to South Africa in 1971, and within a year he had accepted a post at the University of Cape Town.17 For the next thirty years Coetzee would be associated with his alma mater. He became a full professor there in 1983, and taught in various capacities until he retired in 2001, at which point he moved to

15 16 17

Derrida, Acts of Literature, p. 52. J. C. Kannemeyer, J. M. Coetzee: A Life in Writing (London: Scribe, 2012), p. 126. Ibid., p. 226.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

56

Andrew Dean

Australia.18 In the just over three decades in which he was employed in academic posts of one form or another, he published a collected volume of essays and interviews (Doubling the Point [1992]), two sole-authored critical books (White Writing [1988] and Giving Offense [1996]), translations of Marcellus Emants’s A Posthumous Confession (1975) and Wilma Stockenström’s The Expedition to the Baobab Tree (1983), numerous other critical essays in academic and literary journals (some of which are collected in Stranger Shores [2001] and Inner Workings [2007]), and an anthology of South African literature with André Brink. All of this was in addition to his literary work in that period, which included eight works of fiction and a volume of what Coetzee calls ‘autrebiography’. Even since retiring from his post, he has continued to publish on literary critical topics, such as in the books of correspondence with Paul Auster, Arabella Kurtz, and Berlinde de Bruyckere, in which he frequently addresses fiction and criticism. As a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin and an academic in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a significant proportion of Coetzee’s work was in the field of computational criticism (‘stylostatistics’), a field that brought computational methods to the analysis of style. His most comprehensive work in the field of stylostatistics was his PhD thesis at Austin, The English Fiction of Samuel Beckett: An Essay in Stylistic Analysis (1969). He published several articles on stylostatistics in the following years, including one, ‘Samuel Beckett and the Temptations of Style’, that was collected in Doubling the Point, and two, ‘Statistical Indices of “Difficulty”’ (1969) and ‘Samuel Beckett’s Lessness: An Exercise in Decomposition’ (1973), that were not. Each of these works attempts to generate objective measures for assessing literary experience, ones that are not constrained by the dominant discourses through which literature was then interpreted. Coetzee subsequently repudiated his work from this period. When Attwell asked him to reflect on the significance of his ‘absorption in quantitative stylistics’, Coetzee responded that statistical stylistics and generative stylistics are two distinct fields in which I immersed myself for a long while and from which I emerged with rather little to show for the experience. Why did I do it? A wrong turning, I suppose, a false trail both in my career and in the history of stylistics. It didn’t lead anywhere interesting.19

More specifically, his experiments did not lead where he wanted them to lead— namely, a path away from the subjective nature of literary criticism and towards a criticism that could, in the terms he deploys in his doctoral thesis, align ‘literary response’ with the literary ‘text’ itself.20 Yet, as Attwell argues in his introduction to Doubling the Point, Coetzee’s interest in stylistics may not have been a complete waste of time: the work was a ‘rigorous inquiry into the ontology of fictional

18

Ibid., pp. 368, 538. J. M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge, MA/ London: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 22. 20 J. M. Coetzee, ‘The English Fiction of Samuel Beckett: An Essay in Stylistic Analysis’, PhD thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 1969, p. 159. 19

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Double Thoughts

57

discourse, and an attempt to locate a position from which [he] himself might one day begin to speak’.21 By the mid-1980s, Coetzee’s reflections on literary criticism and its interpretative procedures had been markedly influenced by post-structuralist theory. Notes in the Coetzee Papers at the HRC confirm the author was reading Derrida, de Man, and others in research for his critical writing at this time, and their influence is clearest in two linked texts from the period—his 1984 inaugural professorial lecture, Truth in Autobiography, and his 1985 essay in Comparative Literature, ‘Confession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky’.22 In Truth in Autobiography, Coetzee draws a parallel between the situation of the critic reading for the truth of autobiography (a truth which the autobiographer does not know), and the situation of the autobiographer who seeks to speak the truth of himself (but who cannot speak that truth for reasons internal to the genre of autobiography). Discussing a convention of blindness in Rousseau’s Confessions (1782–9), Coetzee argues the autobiographer cannot ‘afford ’ to analyse this convention: ‘If you reveal the inner operations of the economy of confession, you kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.’23 Yet just as he presents this reading—unveiling the truth of Rousseau that Rousseau does not know—Coetzee finds that he too may be subject to some convention of blindness, an economy of criticism to match the economy of confession: By my own definition, can the activity I have been engaged in be called reading autobiography? And if the answer is, No, I have not been reading autobiography, I have been engaged in a different activity called literary criticism, which submits to no rules, then I can ask: If the desire of literary criticism is to tell every truth, to unveil whatever is veiled, to expose [e]very secret to sight, why does it not tell its own secrets? Or does it claim to have none? . . . Does that not make of criticism the only mode in which final truths can be told; and how sincere is that? The question I am asking is one about privilege. What privilege do I claim to tell the truth of Rousseau that Rousseau cannot tell? What is the privilege of criticism by which it claims to tell the truth of literature?24

Just as unveiling the ‘inner operations of the economy of confessions’ may kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, in unveiling the inner operations of the economy of criticism Coetzee finds himself faced with criticism’s possible end. This is a moment of performative contradiction: to reveal a motive for unveiling is to submit to criticism’s desire to unveil, to speak the truth of literature that literature does not know. Not to perform such a desire is to cease criticism. Coetzee does not develop this point. Instead, he simply ‘carefully count[s] the cost’ of answering his questions 21

Doubling the Point, pp. 1–2. ‘Confession and Double Thoughts’ was written before Truth in Autobiography was delivered. Coetzee sent a letter to the editors of Comparative Literature, dated 13 March 1983, asking for their consideration of ‘Confession and Double Thoughts’ (Coetzee Papers, Letter to Editors of Comparative Literature, Container 64, Folder 4, 13 March 1983). Coetzee’s speaking script for Truth in Autobiography is dated 3 October 1984 (HRC, J. M. Coetzee Papers, Speaking Script Truth in Autobiography, Container 64, Folder 2, 3 Oct. 1984). 23 J. M. Coetzee, Truth in Autobiography (Cape Town: University of Cape Town, 1984), p. 3. 24 Ibid., p. 5. 22

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

58

Andrew Dean

by asking further questions, this time wondering if literary criticism can ‘afford to say why it needs literature’. The lecture concludes with a forced closure, which is no resolution: ‘Discourse is, from a certain point of view, a rather simple thing, fully described by two simple statements: one, that it goes on; and two, that having gone far enough, it stops. The present discourse has gone on; now it stops.’25 In the expanded version of the lecture, published in Comparative Literature, Coetzee covers major confessional episodes across a wider range of authors, now focusing on the genre of confession. Of particular interest is the direction Coetzee takes after his reading of Rousseau—the point at which Truth in Autobiography turns to criticism—as he examines the encounter in Dosteovesky’s Devils (1871–2) between Tikhon, a monk, and Stavrogin, a figure around whom a terror plot is developing.26 By remaining silent on the difference between self-forgiveness and complacency in Stavrogin’s confession, Coetzee finds, Tikhon refuses to enter the unfinishable game of the discourse: [I]f one has read Dostoevsky attentively one might guess that this monk would never articulate the difference, on the principle that, once articulated, the difference would invoke efforts to incorporate it into a new game of deception and self-deception; further, that to articulate a decision not to articulate the difference could similarly become part of a game; and so on to infinity.27

For Tikhon to be drawn on the truth of Stavrogin’s confession would establish new motivations and new limits for Stavrogin, ones that have no potential end. This is the impossible condition of confession itself (in Coetzee’s account): absolution is the horizon of confession, yet the process by which one may come to the selfknowledge necessary for it, and how one may know that the truth has arrived, are by their natures never able to be articulated. This reading is important for responding to the unanswered questions of Truth in Autobiography: confession comes to offer an alternative model for criticism’s relationship with literary texts. Tikhon’s power, Coetzee argues, lies in his refusal to ‘present [his] account to Stavrogin as the truth about him, since by that act Tikhon would be presenting himself as a source of truth without question’. In the terms of Truth in Autobiography, Tikhon escapes critical discourse by refusing to supplant the literary text with some truth criticism would provide, an action that holds open the conditions in which Stavrogin’s confession ‘has the true potential to end in selfforgiveness’.28 As with confession, Coetzee here outlines an impossible condition for an ideal form: for criticism to begin (or end)—for it to escape the regression of the discourse—it must remain silent on the matter of truth. Coetzee’s thinking about criticism and confession in these works clearly draws from aspects of then-ascendant post-structuralist criticism. Coetzee writes in ‘Confession and Double Thoughts’ that his readings may be ‘Derridean supplements’, but

25

Ibid., p. 6. This chapter was excluded by Dostoevsky’s editor from the serialized version of Devils and by the author in later publications of the novel. It is known variously as Stavrogin’s Confession and At Tikhon’s. 27 Doubling the Point, pp. 290–1. 28 Ibid., p. 290 (emphasis in the original). 26

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Double Thoughts

59

his purpose is not to advance an argument about the ‘epoch of supplementarity’.29 Instead, he aims to advance an argument about ‘the possibility of reading the truth “behind” a true confession’, which has ‘implications peculiar to the genre of confession’.30 Whatever distance Coetzee may put between himself and Derrida in this moment—and Coetzee’s distinction here only relates to the end-point of Derrida’s reading, not its grounding or processes—archival materials show him reading crucial passages from Derrida’s writing on philosophy, literary criticism, and literary texts for his essay. Reading notes contained in the folder for ‘Confession and Double Thoughts’ include an entry on Of Grammatology (1967), in which Coetzee writes to himself, ‘160: literary writing and the habit of transcendent reading.’31 In Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s 1976 translation of Grammatology, the page to which Coetzee refers (‘160’) forms part of the chapter That Dangerous Supplement. In these pages, Derrida explores critical method and Rousseau, arguing that literary commentaries tend to jump ‘over the text towards its presumed content, in the direction of the pure signified ’.32 On page 160, Derrida explicitly considers philosophical and literary writing: [T]he philosophical text, although it is in fact always written, includes, precisely as its philosophical specificity, the project of effacing itself in the face of the signified content which it transports and in general teaches. . . . With the exception of a thrust or a point of resistance which has only been very lately recognized as such, literary writing has, almost always and almost everywhere, according to some fashions and across very diverse ages, lent itself to this transcendent reading, in that search for the signified which we here put in question, not to annul it but to understand it within a system to which such a reading is blind. Philosophical literature is only one example within this history but it is among the most significant.33

This note, and the argument Derrida advances, is closely aligned with the terms in which Coetzee expresses his dissatisfaction with criticism in Truth in Autobiography and ‘Confession and Double Thoughts’. The tendency of commentaries to move towards a transcendent reading—a reading opened by the literary text itself, but a reading that is blind to its own location—is one that Truth in Autobiography calls into question, and one to which the model of confession in ‘Confession and Double Thoughts’ begins to develop a creative response. Coetzee’s writing on confession and criticism also connects with the work of Paul de Man. In Doubling the Point, Attwell reflects on Coetzee’s reading of de Man in ‘Confession and Double Thoughts’, noting that this essay marks one of the few times that the author engages explicitly with ‘deconstructive theory or criticism’.34 In response, Coetzee pushes back against theory, suggesting that there is little value in him attempting to ‘rethink Dostoevsky in Derridean terms or—what would interest me more—rethink Derrida in Dostoevskian terms’, as he claims he lacks 29

30 Ibid., p. 273. Ibid., p. 272. HRC, J. M. Coetzee Papers, research materials, ‘Tolstoy-Rousseau-Dostoevsky’, Container 64, Folder 4, n.d. 32 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 1st US edn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 159 (emphasis in the original). 33 Ibid., p. 160. 34 Doubling the Point, p. 245. 31

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

60

Andrew Dean

‘the mind for it, to say nothing of the philosophical equipment’.35 But even while distancing himself from theory, Coetzee explicitly recalls de Man’s reading of Derrida’s work on Rousseau in Blindness and Insight (1971)—a book which is also included in the research notes for ‘Confession and Double Thoughts’.36 Here de Man writes that he wishes to ‘reverse the interpretative process and start reading Derrida in terms of Rousseau rather than vice versa’.37 Coetzee’s familiarity with de Man’s work is clear in the published version of ‘Confession and Double Thoughts’, which examines at some length ‘Confessions (Excuses)’, an essay in de Man’s 1979 book Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. Most important, though, are the connections between Coetzee’s central critical concerns in this period and de Man’s discussions of the relative priority of fictional and critical discourse. In Criticism and Crisis, the opening essay of Blindness and Insight, de Man begins with a reading of Mallarmé’s mock sensationalist claims about poetry in crisis in his 1894 lectures, La Musique et les lettres. Arguing that the lecture is ‘itself the crisis to which it refers’,38 de Man reflects on self-analysis and criticism: [T]he act of writing reflects upon its own origins and opens up a cycle of questions that none of his real successors have been allowed to forget. . . . Our question in relation to contemporary criticism then becomes: Is criticism indeed engaged in scrutinizing itself to the point of reflecting on its own origin?39

De Man surveys the ramifications of the simple answer, yes: defined by reflexive scrutiny, criticism always threatens to plunge into an ‘infinite regression’; at the same time ‘the conception of literature (or literary criticism) as demystification’ is ‘the most dangerous myth of all’.40 These are the problems Coetzee faces at the end of Truth in Autobiography, in which he explores how a critic may describe criticism’s project of unveiling. Such critical encounters prepared the grounds for the way his fiction Foe, which Coetzee was working on throughout this same period, would engage with literary criticism.

B E Y O N D T H E LI M I T S : FOE Like Elizabeth Costello, Foe fundamentally disorients the processes of evaluation that attach themselves to the novel. However, this time it is not the procedures of philosophy that are in play, but two different varieties of literary criticism, both of which were circulating during the composition of Foe: one is the emerging idiom of ‘postcolonial critique’ (in its post-structural guise); the other is a version of Marxist realism that had been attuned to the racialized politics of South Africa. 35

Ibid., p. 246. HRC, J. M. Coetzee Papers, research materials, ‘Tolstoy-Rousseau-Dostoevsky’, Container 64, Folder 4, n.d. 37 Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edn (London: Methuen, 1983), p. 123. 38 Man, ‘Criticism and Crisis’, in Blindness and Insight, p. 7. 39 Ibid., p. 8. 40 Ibid., pp. 10, 14. 36

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Double Thoughts

61

I suggest that down in the wreck that ends the novel—a new narrator follows the petals cast by Friday earlier in the novel into a shipwreck off the island—these differently schematic forms of literary critical discourse are pushed up to and beyond their limits. Indeed, in an August 1985 notebook entry Coetzee describes the effect the wreck would come to have on attempts to incorporate the novel into some kind of critical programme: ‘The wreck as a magic’, he noted, ‘something you can get into but can’t get out of.’41 In the early 1980s, at the same time as Coetzee was exploring in his critical writing the registers and protocols of literary criticism, South African literary critics, writing in a materialist tradition, were calling into question the political commitments of the novelist’s fictional work. Michael Vaughan, in a 1982 article in the Journal of Southern African Studies, wrote of the impact of Coetzee’s ‘liberal petty bourgeois class position and self-identification’ on the author’s fiction, noting that his work has ‘an enormous preoccupation with problems of consciousness’.42 This observation was not intended as a compliment. In the same issue of the journal, Paul Rich expanded on his reading of In the Heart of the Country (1977) to conclude that postmodernism in South Africa is ‘probably destined to remain the vehicle for expressing the cultural and political dilemmas of a privileged class of white artists and intellectuals’.43 Nadine Gordimer’s review of Life & Times of Michael K (1983) in The New York Review of Books in February 1984 was the most stinging of all, as she found that Coetzee’s novel adopts a ‘challengingly questionable position’: in Michael K, ‘[n]ot even the oppressor really believes in what he is doing, anymore, let alone the revolutionary.’ The novel ‘denies the energy of the will to resist evil,’ she wrote.44 The notebooks for Foe, in which Coetzee refers obliquely to the attacks on his work, show his frustration with these readings. By the time of Gordimer’s review in February 1984, he had been working on Foe for some time. The earliest notebook entries relating to the novel are dated December 1982; a little over a year later, he was into his sixth draft version. In March 1984, Coetzee noted: They (‘they’?) want me to be realist. They want my books to be-about. Specifically, to be-about South Africa, about social relations in that country. . . . ‘They’ include my publishers and my agents. As I am now, as I am writing now, I am their prisoner. I am their [tame?] South Africa. In their scenario, I will go on writing this way, with the necessary adjustments brought about by historical progress, and go on providing their meals. I have always written best out of an adversary position.45

41

HRC, J. M. Coetzee Papers, Notebook, Foe, Container 33, Folder 6, 28 Aug. 1985. Michael Vaughan, ‘Literature and Politics: Currents in South African Writing in the Seventies’, Journal of Southern African Studies 9, no. 1 (1982): pp. 118–38; 136. 43 Paul Rich, ‘Tradition and Revolt in South African Fiction: The Novels of André Brink, Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee’, Journal of Southern African Studies 9, no. 1 (1982): pp. 54–73; 73. 44 Nadine Gordimer, ‘“The Idea of Gardening”, Life & Times of Michael K, by J. M. Coetzee’, review in New York Review of Books (2 Feb. 1984): pp. 3–6; 6. 45 HRC, J. M. Coetzee Papers, Notebook, Foe, Container 33, Folder 6, 17 Mar. 1984. 42

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

62

Andrew Dean

‘Realism’ and ‘adversary’ are the two crucial terms of this entry. ‘Realism’, as Attwell describes, refers specifically to the common view in cultural politics in South Africa in the 1980s that ‘life under apartheid seems to demand a realistic documentation of oppression’.46 This view was sponsored by the United Democratic Front, Attwell continues, which in its ‘People’s Culture’ campaign had both advocated a ‘documentary form of realism that depicts the life experience of the oppressed’ and called on artists to ‘submit themselves to the discipline of a formal alliance with the mass democratic movement’.47 Avant-garde aesthetic practices, particularly those descended from modernism, were viewed suspiciously in this context, as these practices were thought to fail to describe social totalities (‘social relations’), and hence to fail to advance politics. Coetzee’s own understanding of the relationship between the aesthetic and the political was rather different, however, and it would be developed in Foe—the novel would indeed structure an ‘adversary position’. The challenge the novel would present to materialist accounts of politics in fiction cleared the way for the defences of the politics of his work in the tradition of postcolonial studies. In a 1990 article, Spivak found that Coetzee’s novel is responsible politics par excellence. In halting before the marginality of Friday, Coetzee manages to be a ‘friend to the wholly other’: the novel is ‘neither a failure nor an abdication of the responsibility of the historical elite’, as it stages the ‘full range’ of the impossibility of the white writer, ‘claiming corrective comradeship and complicity with Foe, and Susan Barton’.48 Attridge has similarly argued that Foe opens the possibility of a canon predicated not on notions of ‘transcendental and inscrutable value’, but on ‘an awareness of the historical production of value’. The novel, he concludes, participates in the struggle ‘to fashion cultural and political structures and procedures that will allow us not just to hear each other’s stories, . . . but to hear . . . each other’s silences’.49 Attwell, in J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing, suggested that the novel’s ending, in which Friday’s body becomes its own sign, ‘amounts to a deferral of authority to the body of history, to the political world in which the voice of the body politic of the future resides’.50 Central to these defences of the politics of the novel is the way the novel gives up the desire to go into marginal territory, into Friday; refusing to do so, for these critics, allows marginalized subjects to be heard in the classroom, in the canon, and in politics. These postcolonial readings were of course themselves strongly inflected by the post-structuralist theory Coetzee was reading at the time—another example of the circularity of influence at play. The presence of Spivak in both the first and second sections of this paper suggests as much: she was both Derrida’s translator in the 46

Attwell, J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing, p. 11. Ibid., pp. 15–16. 48 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Theory in the Margin: Coetzee’s Foe Reading Defoe’s Crusoe/ Roxana’, English in Africa 17, no. 2 (1990): pp. 1–23; 18–19. 49 Derek Attridge, ‘Oppressive Silence: J. M. Coetzee’s Foe and the Politics of the Canon’, in Decolonizing Tradition: New Views of Twentieth-Century ‘British’ Literary Canons, ed. by Karen R. Lawrence (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), p. 231. 50 Attwell, J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing, p. 116. 47

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Double Thoughts

63

1970s and a central figure in the reception of postcolonial literary texts in the 1980s. Her work is an example of how, as Timothy Brennan writes, ‘postcolonial studies entered the academy in the mid-1980s as a form of theory’—especially through the work of Derrida.51 For Neil Lazarus in The Postcolonial Unconscious (2011), the relationship is even stronger: there was a ‘supplementarity of postcolonial studies to post-structural theory’, he writes, such that the former both added to and substituted for the latter.52 The centrality of post-structuralist practices to postcolonial studies meant that the field developed something of a hostility to the materialism of Coetzee’s South African readers—a hostility of which Coetzee would likely have approved. Postcolonial studies’ vocabulary of ambivalence, dialogue, deferral, and negotiation deconstructs revolutionary narratives such as class-consciousness, imperialism, capitalism, and nationalism. This is true for Spivak above all: in her 1990 essay Marginality in the Teaching Machine, published in the same year as her essay on Foe, she writes that ‘postcolonial claims to the names that are the legacy of the European enlightenment (sovereignty, constitutionality, self-determination, nationhood, citizenship, even culturalism) are catachrestical claims, their strategy a displacing and seizing of a previous coding of value’.53 Lazarus describes Homi Bhabha’s 1992 essay, ‘The Postcolonial and the Postmodern’, as ‘directed against the assumptions of the “ideological discourses of modernity”’. It is ‘constitutively anti-Marxist’, Lazarus writes, and hence tilted against Vaughan, Rich, and Gordimer, who insisted on materialist readings of social totalities.54 Yet before we find that the novel simply endorses one critical approach over another, there are several crucial (and destabilizing) reservations. At the very least, Coetzee’s questioning in Truth in Autobiography of the privilege by which criticism claims to speak the truth of literature, and his exploration of confession as a critical mode in ‘Confession and Double Thoughts’, suggest that it is unlikely that Coetzee would write fictions that are simply critical supplements of one form or another. More significant, though, is Coetzee’s reckoning with the political stakes of these critical approaches. As Lazarus writes, the emergence of postcolonial studies can be read as both enacting a political shift and being the result of it—marking and inscribing the ‘reversal of the fortunes and influence of the insurgent national liberation movements and revolutionary ideologies in the “Third World”’.55 In these terms (no doubt controversial), postcolonial studies in its post-structuralist manifestation appears as the scholarly practice that both represents and constitutes political defeat. Whatever position we take on this, Coetzee when he was writing Foe had at least some recognition of the way postcolonial critique could vaporize political agency. In other words, he was not willing 51 Timothy Brennan, ‘Postcolonial Studies between the European Wars: An Intellectual History’, in Marxism, Modernity, and Postcolonial Studies, ed. Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 185. 52 Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 1. 53 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Marginality in the Teaching Machine’, in Outside in the Teaching Machine (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 64–5. 54 Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious, p. 12. 55 Ibid., p. 9.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

64

Andrew Dean

simply to write off ‘[s]overeignty, constitutionality, self-determination, nationhood, citizenship, even culturalism’, as it was under these banners that black South Africans were in the 1980s winning their freedom from minority rule. The South African experience, at least as Foe and Coetzee’s notebooks attest, was not of postcolonial belatedness, but rather of the prematurity of postcolonial studies: accepting Lazarus’s view, theory arrived at the scene of liberation to describe how it went wrong, before it had happened. It is for this reason more than any other that Foe does not simply endorse postcolonial critique. Instead, it does something rather different, rendering strange the positions of both Spivak’s and Coetzee’s materialist critics—leaving the novel in turn to become one of those ‘“critical” inventions which belong to literature while deforming its limits’. The notebooks show that, during the composition of Foe, Coetzee’s mind was sharply focused upon the reality of what white was doing to black in Interregnum South Africa. He writes in his notebook on 12 May 1985 of the seeming contradiction between his politically detached novel about literary history and the representation of a silenced black slave: ‘When the book comes out and people ask Why? I say: ‘Because I am tired of being a South African writer.’ And then they say: Then why Friday? And I think: Friday is the presence I cannot escape from.’56

This ‘presence’ was provoked not just by Defoe, but also by police actions in South Africa. On 28 March 1983, still just under three months before Coetzee began the first version of Foe available in the archive, and prior to any mention of Friday, he writes: ‘He wants to write a novel about Roxanna’s daughter and her relations to Defoe. But there is the story in the newspaper of a boy beaten to death in SWA,57 photographed with a chain around his neck. Presumably this was someone’s son too. “Somewhere someone was crying.”’58 On 12 April 1983 he gave the structure of the novel greater consideration. In this proposal, the story suddenly ‘breaks off ’: In the first person we have a writer who cannot go on with the story of Susan and Defoe because of the boy beaten to death. What is Susan’s woe compared with his? he asks. He returns to the story of Defoe, but the story of the boy keeps intruding as an interruption until he finds a way (or a way finds itself) for the worlds to mingle. Thereafter the boy keeps finding himself in London, or the girl in SWA, each pursuing his goal.59

The next entry, from 17 May 1983, contains the first explicit reference to Friday. In it the author wonders whether he should ‘[e]stablish a connection between Friday and the boy with the clenched fist’, the one from the photograph.60 The image of the boy never quite left Coetzee. In August 1985, when he was working on the final draft version of Foe, he writes, ‘Go back to the SWA photograph.’61 In chapter 4 of the published novel—the focus of Attridge, Attwell, and Spivak—the links between Friday and the photograph are clear. A new, intrusive 56 57 58 59

HRC, J. M. Coetzee Papers, Notebook, Foe, Container 33, Folder 6, 12 May 1985. ‘SWA’ refers to South West Africa, the pre-independence name for Namibia. HRC, J. M. Coetzee Papers, Notebook, Foe, Container 33, Folder 6, 28 March 1983. 60 Ibid., 17 May 1983. 61 Ibid., 27 August 1985. Ibid., 12 April 1983.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Double Thoughts

65

narrator enters Daniel Defoe’s house twice, centuries apart. The first time, the narrator feels for a pulse ‘in his throat’—it is ‘faint’, but it is there.62 The second time, marked as the present day, the narrator does not feel for a pulse. Instead, around Friday’s neck is a previously unobserved ‘scar like a necklace, left by a rope or chain’ (the emphasis here falls distinctly on ‘necklace’, a loaded term at the time).63 There is yet one more transition. After having read some of Barton’s manuscript, the narrator is mysteriously transported to the island, and is suddenly among the seaweed where Friday had earlier cast petals. Descending ‘hand over hand down the trunks’, the narrator finds a wreck, ‘huge, greater than leviathan’.64 Approaching Friday, now entombed in a wreck, the narrator begins to ‘finger the chain about [Friday’s] throat’.65 The negative imprint (the scar) has now been replaced by the chain that caused it. In the relationships linked together by the scars and chains around Friday’s neck—colonial history, ongoing colonial violence—the novel’s central problem emerges. How can the novel participate in a project of justice—in furthering the political aspirations of the boy necklaced in Namibia, and Friday, who shares his scar—without presuming to speak for the hopes and dreams of the subjugated other? This problematic is explicitly put into motion in the argument between Barton and Foe that concludes chapter 3. Coetzee emphasizes the significance of the passage in his notebooks. ‘Therewith, I think, is resolved the problem of the book,’ he wrote in October 1985, having sketched a version of the exchange.66 The conversation covers the nature of Friday’s subjection and his relationship to Barton. After Barton remarks that she wishes to be free of Friday, Foe suggests that it is Friday who may in fact wish to be free of Barton; having no tongue, however, Friday cannot express his desire. Foe tells Susan that ‘we, [Friday’s] later masters’ may have reason to be ‘secretly grateful’ for Friday’s silence: ‘For as long as he is dumb we can tell ourselves his desires are dark to us, and continue to use him as we wish,’ he explains. Barton then troubles the terms of Foe’s description, testing the content of Friday’s desire to be free. She tells Foe that Friday ‘desires to be liberated, as I do too. Our desires are plain, his and mine’.67 The real problem is Friday’s knowledge of the content of this freedom: ‘There is an urging that we feel, all of us, in our hearts, to be free; yet which of us can say what freedom truly is? . . . [H]ow can Friday know what freedom means when he barely knows his name?’

Foe has little time for Barton’s turn to Friday’s access to the knowledge of freedom, as opposed to questions of transcendent justice and liberation. The author responds by pointing to an extralinguistic and impersonal component to ‘freedom’: There is not need for us to know what freedom means, Susan. Freedom is a word like any word. It is a puff of air, seven letters on a slate. It is but the name we give to the desire you speak of, the desire to be free. What concerns us is the desire, not the name.68

62 63 66 67

J. M. Coetzee, Foe (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 154. 64 Ibid., p. 156. 65 Ibid., p. 157. Ibid., p. 155. HRC, J. M. Coetzee Papers, Notebook, Foe, Container 33, Folder 6, 4 Oct. 1985. 68 Ibid., p. 149. Foe, p. 148.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Andrew Dean

66

Barton never responds directly to this line of reasoning, focusing instead on the apparent similarity between Cruso’s and Foe’s language, and the precise nature of Friday’s subjection. It is not until she is alone that she realizes that Friday may indeed be ‘the helpless captive of my desire to have our story told’.69 Foe is sceptical of the politics of Barton’s quarrels over Friday’s access to knowledge. He asks, ‘as it was a slaver’s stratagem to rob Friday of his tongue, may it not be a slaver’s stratagem to hold him in subjection while we cavil over words in a dispute we know to be endless?’ While Barton argues that Friday is ‘his own master, in law, and has been since Cruso’s death’, Foe responds by suggesting that her words participate in his ongoing captivity: ‘Nevertheless, Friday follows you: you do not follow Friday. The words you have written and hung around his neck say he is set free; but who, looking at Friday, will believe them?’

Barton’s subsequent response is to compare the endless scepticism of his argumentative strategies (a theme we have seen across Coetzee’s criticism) with those of the slavers, and thus implicitly herself with Friday: ‘As long as you close your ears to me, mistrusting every word I say as a word of slavery, poisoned, do you serve me any better than the slavers served Friday when they robbed him of his tongue?’70 In this discussion Coetzee stages a dispute between those who would see Friday liberated through coming into the true meaning of the name of freedom (the acquisition of a language that would allow him to express the ‘urgings of [his] heart’), and those who would see Friday liberated through acting on his (perhaps unrepresentable) desire for freedom.71 This dispute engages the two claims to political responsibility in the novel that were then coming into contest. On one side is materialist anticolonial critique, as practised by Coetzee’s hostile critics in the early 1980s, which was less cautious about the non-linguistic location of agency, and more certain of a transcendent morality, political or otherwise, that would eventually see Friday become free. On the other is postcolonial critique, which was then emerging and would become ascendant from the mid- to late 1980s, which was less committed to an expansive, uncontested conception of ‘freedom’ around which opposition may be organized. In Barton, Coetzee is anticipating the positions that such criticism would eventually take—that is, willing to write off ‘sovereignty, constitutionality, self-determination, nationhood, citizenship, even culturalism’ as imperial categories. In light of the notebooks, though, it is clear that Coetzee does indeed reject the view that ‘freedom’ is little more than ‘seven letters on a slate’. This rejection takes place through the scar on Friday’s neck: it could just as easily have been left by Barton’s words, which she has ‘hung around his neck’, according to Foe, as by any slaver. In the logic of the novel, this suggests that cavilling over words, ‘in a dispute we know to be endless’, does little to resolve the conditions that resulted in a boy being necklaced in Namibia in 1983, and Friday to have his neck in chains both then and now. Friday’s scar presents significant problems to those who would seek to recuperate the politics of Barton’s view—that Friday cannot know what 69

Ibid., p. 150.

70

Ibid., p. 150.

71

Ibid., p. 149.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Double Thoughts

67

‘freedom means when he barely knows his name’—as her position ends up keeping Friday in chains, whatever its other values. But that is of course not to say that Foe is right and that what concerns us ‘is the desire, not the name’ of freedom. When Barton returns from her walk, she finds Friday in Foe’s robes, writing the letter ‘o’ repeatedly.72 It is a symbol of absence and negativity: Friday remains insubstantial and occluded, resistant to Foe’s attempt to force him to speak in the discourse of the European novel. This moment of irresolution—which endorses neither Barton nor Foe, neither Gordimer nor Spivak—opens towards the final chapter of Foe, in which Coetzee outdistances readings that search for the ‘pure signified’, some position on politics, representation, and the novel. Chapter 4, in this sense, must be read as a response to chapter 3—the final chapter forces a closure of the novel in much the same way as the end of Truth in Autobiography. Here, though, rational discourse becomes other, as the novel moves into a realm of indeterminacy. This view of chapter 4—not as an ascent into metaphysical reconciliation but as a descent into the frightening unknown—is only now beginning to be articulated. Patrick Hayes, in J. M. Coetzee and the Novel: Writing and Politics After Beckett (2010), finds that on first inspection the final chapter calls to a halt the novel’s ‘spiralling emptiness’ of political knowledge—it transitions into a different genre, more like the wisdomtale, opening to ‘a different form of literary knowing’.73 But, as he then shows, departing from the realist novel entails ‘robbing Susan of her tongue’: the marginal are not reconstructed as comrades, contra Spivak, but as foes, which leaves the novel at its conclusion juggling ‘divergent political impulses, and divergent sympathies’, keeping them, in Hayes’s view, ‘in a productive tension’.74 He ends with an argument between Susan and Foe in chapter 3, which specifically anticipates the descent into the wreck in chapter 4. Foe tells Susan about the ‘eye of the story’, that Friday sails across, and leaves us to descend into: until we have gone into the depths of the wreck, the one we can get into but not out of, we will not have reached the story’s ‘silence’, its ‘sight concealed’, its ‘word unspoken’.75 Going down into that eye in chapter 4, we finally choose not to ‘sail across the surface and come ashore none the wiser, and resume our old lives and sleep without dreaming, like babes’.76 In the wreck, the identities on which the political and ethical arguments have been founded begin to slide. The narrator—ungendered and nameless—slipping overboard once more (‘[w]ith a sigh, with barely a splash’) ducks under the water.77 The ‘dark mass of the wreck’ looms into sight. Down here is a nightmarish place, where light does not penetrate, where kraken lurk, distended corpses float, and pulpy masses block the way.78 Coming across Friday, it becomes clear that in the deep neither Foe nor Barton speak for Friday, but rather that the body of Friday speaks for itself. It is a place ‘where bodies are their own signs’: his wordless speech 72

Ibid., p. 152. Patrick Hayes, J. M. Coetzee and the Novel: Writing and Politics after Beckett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 114. 74 Ibid., pp. 119, 128. 75 Foe, p. 141. 76 Ibid.; Hayes, J. M. Coetzee and the Novel, p. 128. 77 Foe, p. 155. 78 Ibid., p. 156. 73

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Andrew Dean

68

is ‘[s]oft and cold, dark and unending’, running ‘to the ends of the earth’. Yet Friday is not set free in these closing pages—no new subject emerges—even as the novel ends with Friday’s break from everything that has been said about him over the preceding three chapters. Instead, Friday is locked forever in the deep, with a chain around his throat. We end below deck, stuck in sand and mud. Coetzee’s writing on confession and criticism offer guidance for what is happening here. Friday’s wordless stream, emanating from the body—‘[e]ach syllable, as it comes out, is caught and filled with water and diffused’—replaces the discourses of Foe and Susan with discourse of a different order.79 In part, Coetzee enacts the process that he describes in ‘Confession and Double Thoughts’, in which Tikhon’s silence on the matter of truth shows that engaging Stavrogin’s confession on Stavrogin’s terms would enter ‘a game of deception and self-deception, a game of limited truth’. ‘Tikhon’, Coetzee concludes, ‘ends the game by breaking the rules.’80 The wordless stream that emerges from Friday, running to the ends of the earth, breaks the rules of their dispute, casting the truths Foe and Barton would be able to generate as limited ones. There may be an order of truth that is not spoken in language, the silent speech of Friday’s body suggests, a way of knowing each other that is not restricted by the processes of sceptical questioning. It is telling, though, that when Attwell in Doubling the Point asks Coetzee about the way Foe ‘stages the “endless chain” of self-consciousness’, Coetzee opts to ‘translate’ the question ‘into practical terms’, centring on the ‘question about closure’.81 The novel’s ever-regressing attempts to keep in play divergent political and critical possibilities must end at some point—the novel cannot continue to get behind itself and forever outdistance attempts at critical integration. Instead, it ends ‘by force’, as Coetzee says, ‘confront[ing] head-on the endlessness of [Foe’s] skepticism’.82 In ‘Confession and Double Thoughts’, he outlines the risks that are taken in ceasing sceptical questioning: Self-forgiveness means the closing of the chapter, the end of the downward spiral of self-accusation whose depths can never be plumbed because to decide to stop at any point by an act of will, to decide that guilt ceases at such-and-such a point, is itself a potentially false act that deserves its own scrutiny. How to tell the difference between a ‘true’ moment of self-forgiveness and a moment of complacency when the self decides that it has gone far enough in self-scrutiny is a mystery that Tikhon does not elucidate.83

There is no way to know whether Coetzee’s decision to stop at the depth he does in Foe, in the wreck, itself deserves further scrutiny: has the narrator, in calling to an end the regressive argumentation about Friday in chapter 3, arrived not at selfforgiveness but rather at complacency? Two divergent possibilities remain: either we have passed over into the realm of the absolved, finally listening to the speech of Friday, or we are still in thrall to slaver’s stratagems, now even believing that we have passed into a different and higher order of knowledge. There is no authority 79 82

Ibid., p. 157. Ibid., p. 248.

80 83

Doubling the Point, p. 289. Ibid., p. 290.

81

Ibid., p. 247.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Double Thoughts

69

that could determine between these two possibilities. Moreover, if this closure is to be something other than one more attempt to incorporate Friday into our own discourses, to hang yet more words around his neck, there cannot be any way of knowing that it has succeeded. ‘True confession does not come from the sterile monologue of the self or from the dialogue of the self with its own self-doubt, but . . . from faith and grace,’ Coetzee writes in ‘Confession and Double Thoughts’.84 The truth of what has been won down in the wreck requires choosing between scepticism and grace, a choice that cannot be made from within the structures of reason, but rather only felt or intuited. In Coetzee’s terms, this is ‘[t]he wreck as a magic, something you can get into but can’t get out of ’. Coetzee’s fiction offers up such readings both because it is engaged with critical traditions and their registers and protocols, and because the author is motivated by a desire to take ideas through to and beyond their limits—but in and through the form of the novel (and in his autrebiographies). In this sense, I follow Coetzee’s suggestion in Doubling the Point: ‘I am concerned to write the kind of novel—to work in the kind of novel form—in which one is not unduly handicapped (compared with the philosopher) when one plays (or works) with ideas.’ ‘Where I do my liberating’, he said, ‘my playing with possibilities, is in my fiction.’85 The distinctive power of the literary is to go beyond the terms of our thinking, to deform its limits. In the loosening of an entirely different order as the narrator descends into the ‘eye of the story’ in Foe, the novel finally resists political thinking in both its materialist and post-structuralist versions. The only place to finish—or begin—is down in the wreck.

84

Ibid., p. 291.

85

Ibid., p. 246.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

5 ‘Good paragraphing. Unusual content’ On the Making and Unmaking of Novelistic Worlds Julika Griem

AGA I NST A PPL ICAT ION Since the publication of The Lives of Animals (1999), J. M. Coetzee’s turn towards an explicitly philosophizing form of writing has invited academic readers to tackle this author’s vexing literary texts by applying concepts from a professionally institutionalized philosophy. As a result certain kinds of interpretations abound. Because of Coetzee’s topics, many philosophically minded readers have confined themselves to questions of ethics;1 because of literary studies’ eagerness to gain relevance and legitimacy by borrowing from other disciplines, Coetzee scholarship has seen a wave of readings indebted to established philosophical theories and schools.2 The focus on ethics and the tendency to rely on the authority of imported critical terminologies may explain the comparably weak interest in the poetics of Coetzee’s allegedly philosophical writing. To redress this situation, Derek Attridge’s seminal study The Singularity of Literature (2004) established an antidote to reading Coetzee’s works in the name and under the spell of received philosophical ideas. Most recently, Jan Wilm has taken Attridge’s cue to tease out how Coetzee employs specific stylistic strategies of deceleration which can be seen to redefine his philosophic stance as an invitation to regain a fundamental sense of wonder and curiosity.3 The following considerations will support the project of defending the vexing qualities of Coetzee’s texts against the pitfalls of application. Like Attridge’s and Wilm’s studies, my contribution is more dedicated to literary form than to the content of philosophical ideas. Rather than conceptualizing Coetzee’s formal

1 See Derek Attridge, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (Chicago/ London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004); and especially the works of Mike Marais: See Mike Marais, Secretary of the Invisible: The Idea of Hospitality in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009). 2 See Teresa Dovey, The Novels of J. M. Coetzee: Lacanian Allegories (Craighall: Ad. Donker, 1988); also J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 3 Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004); Jan Wilm, The Slow Philosophy of J. M. Coetzee (London/New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Novelistic Worlds

71

experiments as singular or defamiliarizing, however, I shall address the problem of methodological reductionism by looking at the reductive features of Coetzee’s writing itself. As the first reviews of Coetzee’s most recent novel, The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), illustrate, the author’s reputation as a notorious reductionist continues to provoke, since it can be linked to the philosophical qualities of Coetzee’s writing in very different ways. Elizabeth Lowry, with palpable exasperation, found that the text conveys a scenery ‘so flimsily assembled that it could come straight from Ikea’. She claimed that the ‘driving energy of the book . . . is philosophical rather than narrative’, and that its setting is ‘eerily stripped down, often physically rudimentary, like a vista by De Chirico’.4 Duncan White was equally struck by Coetzee’s latest demonstration of limitation. Yet, he was ready to praise precisely what Lowry condemns, suggesting that a ‘philosophical approach to literature’ enables the author to use ‘fiction like steel wool to scrub away at himself in the hope of revealing unadorned truths’.5 The respective thrust of these reviews is fuelled by different normative notions of realist and experimental literature. Within the history of debating the literary and political virtues and vices of Coetzee’s repertoire of restraint, it seems far from settled whether less is more, or ‘a bore’ (as Robert Venturi put it when he challenged Le Corbusier’s mantra), so that it promises to be rewarding to reconsider this author’s alleged minimalistic mastery on the occasion of the most recent novel. What critics have paid little attention to so far is the fact that instead of simply rehashing the asceticism of The Childhood of Jesus (2013), The Schooldays of Jesus extends Coetzee’s canon of formal experimentation. Whereas he had already ‘autrebiographically’ connected Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime, the recent novels present a peculiar case of novelistic seriality. Clearly a sequel, Schooldays picks up where the prequel left its protagonists on the road again: middle-aged Simón, sixyear old child prodigy David, his foster mother Inés, and her Alsatian dog Bolívar have left their first destination Novilla and are arriving at Estrella, on the run from a school system whose representatives were not willing to cope with David’s renitent intelligence. To evoke a shared storyworld the two texts employ some of the techniques providing many popular serial narratives with recapitulation and continuity. In Schooldays, the characters refer to events narrated in Childhood, and they are placed within a diegetic world whose spatial and temporal parameters remain largely consistent throughout both novels. Coetzee also achieves some serial effects by combining repetition and variation on different levels. For a start, the reader of Schooldays is struck by enigmatic minimal changes: ‘David’ is now spelt ‘Davíd’,

4 Elizabeth Lowry, ‘The Schooldays of Jesus by J. M. Coetzee review—no passion in an ascetic allegory’, Guardian Online, 18 Aug. 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/18/theschooldays-of-jesus-jm-coetzee-review, accessed 11 Oct. 2016. 5 Duncan White, ‘The Schooldays of Jesus by JM Coetzee is maddening, obsure—and brilliant’, The Telegraph Online, 20 Aug. 2016, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/the-schooldays-ofjesus-by-jm-coetzee-is-maddening-obscure––and/, accessed 12 Oct. 2016.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

72

Julika Griem

and ‘Estrellita’ has expanded into ‘Estrella’.6 The dog named Bolívar reappears in Schooldays, but he is now accompanied by ducks, oxen, and a lamb; and the conspicuous character Daga, Simón’s first antagonist, is replaced and strengthened by a second antagonist called Dimitri. The sequel also revisits and rearranges the most prominent philosophical topics of the preceding novel. Simón’s longing for desire is now outbidden by a veritable crime de passion, and the search for salt in Childhood is replaced by a slightly more liberal offer of spices in Schooldays. In addition to these thematic echoes, Davíd is struggling more with numbers than with letters, and he provokes his first foster parents Simón and Inés by turning to his dancing instructors at the Academy as a new ersatz family. Despite these variations, one of the most prominent philosophical sujets continues to dominate the characters’ conversations: in Schooldays, too, the refugees’ new world yields only a sense of ‘here and now’, but not of ‘beyond ’.7 As Stephen Mulhall argues in his reconstruction of various references in Childhood in this collection (see Chapter 2), Wittgenstein looms large among the novel’s philosophical sources. Quite obviously, Coetzee was inspired by Wittgenstein’s recurring figure of a learning child and its teaching elder. Furthermore, Novilla’s lack of historical depth and spatial environment can be related to an inversion Stanley Cavell has traced in Wittgenstein’s attitude towards the philosophical canon: ‘whereas some philosophers write according to the myth of having read everything essential in the history of their subject, Wittgenstein writes according to the myth of having read essentially nothing.’8 This switch from everything to nothing, from a bow to fullness to a dedication to emptiness, serves quite well to provide the tabula rasa constellation of both Jesus novels with a possible philosophical foundation. David James has identified further literary genealogies of the repertoire of Coetzee’s stylistic economy. He demonstrates that the impulse to develop a manner of writing which has been described as restrained and toned down, frugal and austere, lean and temperate, was also triggered by Coetzee’s early interest in Ford Madox Ford, who next to Beckett served as a preliminary example of asceticism and accuracy. Various modernist models thus enabled Coetzee to develop what James calls ‘stoicism as register and ethos’,9 an attitude that Coetzee himself articulated as follows: ‘I do believe in sparseness—more spareness than Ford practised. Spare prose and a spare, thrifty world: it’s an unattractive part of my makeup that has exasperated people who have had to share their lives with me.’10 If Coetzee ‘has become one of the most ethically demanding novelists today precisely because he is also one of the most economical’,11 Childhood and Schooldays confront us with a further escalation of limitation. In these novels Coetzee works

6 Such shifts can already be found in Childhood, where, as the most conspicuous example, a quotation from Goethe’s Erlkönig contributes to the linguistic displacements of the novel. 7 J. M. Coetzee, The Schooldays of Jesus (London: Harvill Secker, 2016), pp. 17, 183. 8 See Mulhall in this volume, pp. 22–4. 9 David James, Modernist Futures: Innovation and Inheritance in the Contemporary Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 10 Ibid., p. 110. 11 Ibid., p. 108.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Novelistic Worlds

73

through multiple variations of reduction, and he does so in ways that intensify the irritating effects of the narratives’ shared diegetic world: with these books Coetzee has turned the screw of his ‘literalizing’ prose even further, but he has simultaneously achieved a degree of reflexivity that requires us to ask what it takes to form an idea of a or even the world in the mode of literature.12

MUN DOP HOR I A A ND MUND OP HOBIA The history of the term ‘world’ is marked by a productive tension between integration and disintegration: when we talk about a text evoking a world we seem to be implying both the potential of an open multitude and the possibility of grasping this multitude as a structured totality. According to Eric Hayot, uses of and discourses on ‘worlds’ ‘benefit from a byzantine etymological history’ which has continuously reconfigured parts and wholes as different versions of totality.13 A similar tension between one and many worlds and their respective options for totalization is considered in Nelson Goodman’s constructivist examination of plural worlds in Ways of Worldmaking (1978), where he concedes that ‘our passion for one world is satisfied, at different times and for different purposes, in many different ways’.14 In an essay departing from Goodman, Steven Connor draws on Bruno Latour’s observation that ‘there are lots of blogs but no globe’ to diagnose a current reluctance to imagine worldness: Once, there was a strong idea of the world without a corresponding experience of it. Once it was possible to imagine the world without being able to live it. Now we are forced to live in the world, and maybe also to live out the world, without being able any more to imagine it. And so we have a demanding experience of the world without being able, or, what may come to the same thing, without daring to imagine it. We have become mundophobic, world-shy.15

For quite some time, the ‘mundophobia’ registered by Connor has already led to ‘mundophoric’ efforts to theorize not just a but the world: despite a deeply engrained critical suspicion about figurations of wholeness as, for instance, expressed by representatives of the Frankfurt School,16 world paradigms have been reactivated in the disciplines of history, sociology, and literary studies,17 and 12 As two very recent takes on this question, See Pheng Cheah, What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016) and Mark Seltzer, The Official World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 13 Eric Hayot, On Literary Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 38ff. 14 Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1985), p. 20. 15 Steven Connor, ‘I Believe that the World’, http://www.stevenconnor.com/world/world.pdf, p. 17, accessed 1 Nov. 2016. 16 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994). 17 See Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Beck, 2009); Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham,

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

74

Julika Griem

concepts such as ‘noosphere’ and ‘biosphere’ have been revisited and combined with notions of sphericality and planetariness.18 More recently, Latour’s turn to Gaia hypotheses has recontextualized the project of an ‘associology’ fuelled by figurations of embeddedness and connectivity.19 In the realm of fictional storytelling a contemporary tendency can be seen to be compensating for current experiences of mundophobia. In this context, worldshyness seems to be frequently addressed by strategies of maximization: in the products of many popular narrative genres across the boundaries of different media we are witnessing an increased physical and social mobility, a geographical expansion of the diegetic worlds, an intensified historical layering, as well as a teeming proliferation of detail. Different, but functionally equivalent, tendencies of maximization pay off powerfully in modes and genres such as postcolonial magic realism, historical fiction, and fantasy. They are also successfully realized in the vast narratives of computer and role-playing games and in the so-called quality television series. But while the diegetic worlds of narratives have been frequently examined as, according to Connor, worlds ‘we can see round’,20 or even as worlds academic experts prefer to ‘see through’, some kinds of maximalist narratives offer possibilities to transform, at least temporarily, a world into the world. Not necessarily larger than life, these narratives are nonetheless vast enough to produce spellbinding effects of readerly participation:21 by immersing ourselves in abundantly staffed, semiotically rich, and hermeneutically challenging storyworlds, we temporarily regain a sense of the world in learning how to conceive of such a world as a complex whole. It appears, then, as if immersion in ever larger and differentiated diegetic worlds can be an attractive receptive mode in times of world-shyness. And quite obviously, it is not just serial TV narratives that succeed by means of an aesthetics of abundance and opulence. In the sphere of literary storytelling, variations of profusion, plenitude, and prodigality have recently been joined by a form of life-writing monumentalizing the most intimate, particularly in texts such as Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle (2009–11), and, arguably, in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan tetralogy (2011–14). As several literary theorists have confirmed, the carefully NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Rudolf Stichweh, Die Weltgesellschaft. Soziologische Analysen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000). For debates on world literature, see David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). For a survey of some of the world concepts underlying these contributions, See Hayot, On Literary Worlds, chapter 2. 18 See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Ursula Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 19 Bruno Latour, ‘Waiting for Gaia. Composing the Common World through Arts and Politics’, http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/124-GAIA-LONDON-SPEAP_0.pdf, accessed 1 Nov. 2016. On ‘associology’, See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 9. 20 Connor, ‘I Believe that the World’, p. 23. 21 On vast narratives, See also Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Novelistic Worlds

75

orchestrated excess of many recent TV shows correlates with some tendencies in the contemporary book market. Tom LeClair and Stefano Ercolino have focused on literary variations of ‘diegetic exuberance’, of ‘hypertrophic narration’, ‘ultradensity’, ‘programmatic inflation’, and ‘vertiginous excess’, of ‘overflow’, ‘inclusion’, and ‘implosion’.22 Reinforcing this interest in maximalist modes, Franco Moretti has tied the contemporary interest in vast narratives to the epic tradition. Through this move he most explicitly links the systemic claims of recent narrative trends to the ‘totalizing horizons’ of earlier narrative practices and forms.23 It is here that one is invited to reconsider the question of a return of epic forms of worldmaking and their promises and pitfalls of societal and aesthetic integration as envisioned by theorists such as Georg Lukács.24 As Hans Blumenberg stated in an essay on notions of reality informing different historical shapes of the novel: ‘Eine Welt—nichts Geringeres ist Thema und Anspruch des Romans.’25

THE RICHNESS O F REDUCTION

Isolation It is difficult to imagine a more striking counterpoint to current tendencies of narrative maximization than the writing of J. M. Coetzee. His art of refusal shows most clearly in his Robinsonesque settings. From the very start of his writing career, his storyworlds have been determined by gestures of separation: time and again, the storytelling relies on isolated locations hosting characters striving for selfsufficiency. In his Nobel speech of 2003, Coetzee’s continued literary interest in Defoe’s exploration of the modern ideal of self-governance through self-reduction in isolation surfaced most strikingly. With a densely intertextual homage Coetzee revisited and explicated the tropes of insularity that had already contributed to his novel Foe (1986), and also to the lives and times of characters such as Elizabeth Curren and Michael K. As a strategy of organizing diegetic worlds, confinement ranges high among Coetzee’s techniques of reduction. In both Jesus novels, spatial confinement is combined with evacuation. On its inside, the setting remains strikingly vacant, at least according to Simón, our irritated guide to the terrae incognitae of Novilla and Estrella: streets, parklands, and the countryside appear ‘empty’, flats are ‘simply furnished’, the docks seem ‘desolate’, and the newly arrived can find neither shops 22 Tom LeClair, The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary Fiction (Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989); Stefano Ercolino, The Maximalist Novel: From Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (New York/London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 23 Franco Moretti, Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to García Márquez (London: Verso, 1996). 24 Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Boston: MIT Press, 1971). 25 ‘A world—it is nothing less than a world, which the novel addresses and claims to attain.’ Hans Blumenberg, ‘Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Möglichkeit des Romans’, in Ästhetische und metaphorologische Schriften, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001), pp. 47–74; 61.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

76

Julika Griem

nor a proper town.26 The sequel opens with a similarly spare scenario in which descriptive economy creates quantitative and qualitative effects: Estrella appears to be ‘no(r) more than a sprawling provincial town . . . with a sluggish river meandering through it’, its flats remain ‘featureless’, and Simón eventually takes lodgings in an ‘uninteresting’ and ‘dreary’ neighbourhood.27 Time and again, Simón is struck by the ‘asceticism’ and placidity of his new home country. ‘Something’, as we learn in another passage of the first Jesus novel, ‘is missing’, and that ‘something’ can easily be taken to represent many of the achievements and calamities of late capitalist modernity.28 At first sight, the new home the family has found in the sequel does not seem to offer a much more pulsing and differentiated life: Simón experiences Estrella as ‘a city which has no sensations, no feelings’, and even the attractive dance instructor Ana Magdalena Arroyo appears ‘bloodless, sexless, lifeless’.29 In the sequel, too, Coetzee seems to have populated the novel’s world according to a principle of isolating reduction: arriving at a nearby holiday resort, the newcomers encounter just ‘a single rooming house’ and ‘one shop’.30 Rather than suggesting a flimsily assembled Ikea interior, however, Coetzee’s descriptive thrift in his recent novels achieves a more radical effect that can be examined as a decontextualizing singularization. In contrast to its bourgeois variant, the singularity of the objects31 constituting the world of Childhood and Schooldays has indeed a rather socialist dimension: nothing seems to be embedded in a richly materialized environment; even those of the rarely mentioned things such as an ukulele or a model ship gain only an enigmatic meaning because they are stripped of the attachments and values which objects accumulate in capitalist economies. On their outside, the evacuated settings of Novilla and Estrella have equally little to offer, as decontextualization creates cultural insulation. Whereas in earlier works Coetzee did not completely eliminate basic geographical and historical references, Novilla and Estrella remain unspecifiable as to their location and period. Their sense of indeterminacy is enhanced by the narrative mode: Coetzee employs the present tense and a large amount of direct speech to obliterate any mediating agency, and to wipe out any reference to a narrating and evaluating authority that could provide us with a sense of spatio-temporal and normative orientation. As a narrative product Novilla and Estrella have neither environment nor framework. They seem to be hanging suspended between an oblique past and a denied future; between underdetermined boundaries and ignored and lost memories. Instead of situating his narrated world through a scaffolding of specifying deixis and referentiality, Coetzee constructs it as a sealed-off enclosure which seems to be turning in on itself. 26

J. M. Coetzee, The Childhood of Jesus (London: Vintage, 2013), pp. 9, 67, 16, 11. J. M. Coetzee, The Schooldays of Jesus (London: Harvill Secker, 2016), pp. 1, 64, 112, 48. 28 The Childhood of Jesus, pp. 29, 239. 29 The Schooldays of Jesus, pp. 66, 74. 30 Ibid., p. 91. 31 See Lucien Karpik, L’économie des singularités (Paris: Gallimard, 2007): Karpik here examines a late capitalist economy of singularities and a type of product or service that is meant to attract distinction and suggest symbolic capital through very specific judgement devices. Coetzee’s last novels are conspicuously free of such forms of consumption. 27

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Novelistic Worlds

77

The diegetic world containing Novilla and Estrella denies its readers any experience of totalizing abundance. Thus, it is not just the newcomers’ new apartment that is ‘modest in scale and sparsely furnished’ with ‘two beds, a table and chairs, a chest of drawers, steel shelving, an electric cooker on a stand and a basin with running water’.32 Shortly before this sparing portrait of the protagonists’ new home, the following dialogue characterizes the novel’s resistance to referential excess: ‘Why are we here’, asks the boy, David, and ‘his gesture takes in the room, the Centre, the city of Novilla, everything’.33 In these two sentences, Coetzee’s economy of displacement again shows quite clearly in the microstructures of the text: whereas the italicized ‘here’ emphasizes the novel’s realization without specification, the sweeping move from the room to the Centre and the city to ‘everything’ demonstrates in its very syntactic rhythm an inclusive extension that denies diversity and differentiation and suggests a totality which remains, by jumping from ‘here’ to ‘everything’, not just undefined, but conspicuously empty. This interest in emptiness also extends to characterization. As a refugee trying to settle down in a society in which everybody arrives ‘naked’,34 Simón does not just figure as the latest reincarnation of Robinson Crusoe in Coetzee’s writing. Robbed of his past, feeling more and more disinherited, chronologically disoriented, and increasingly ‘ageless’,35 he is also stripped of significant constituents of an interiority which one of his philosophical sparring partners in the novel denounces as ‘inner voices’.36 Obsessively evoking the idea of a ‘blank slate’,37 Coetzee’s narration in his last two novels withholds the versatile apparatus of characterization that the genre of the novel has produced in order to create forms of psychological and social fullness, roundness, and complexity that owe their effect to the idea that there is a multitude to choose from. As a result, not only the novels’ objects, but also most of the characters awaiting the fugitives in Novilla, have the generic quality of the ‘actants’ in programmatically apsychological narrative genres such as fairy tales or quest romances. Only Simón, stubbornly insisting on the possibility of plurality, ambiguity, and contingency, seems to be fighting a lost cause against the minimizing effects of his author’s style. At a first glance, this situation is maintained in the sequel. Here again, Simón doubts whether ‘places like Estrella had a history’,38 and the sparsely evoked and continuously opaque new characters only yield ‘shadows of memories’.39 Even at the end of the sequel almost nothing seems to be left beyond Novilla and Estrella; the world of these narratives is an island that has become a world, and, due to the novels’ apocalyptic resonances, perhaps the only world left. Supported by the biblical subtexts of both texts, their setting also resembles an ark on which every kind of creature is meant to occur just once. Exposed to

32 35 37 38

33 Ibid., p. 17. The Childhood of Jesus, p. 52. 36 Ibid., p. 105. Ibid., p. 12. The Childhood of Jesus, p. 97; The Schooldays of Jesus, p. 17. 39 Ibid., p. 67. The Schooldays of Jesus, p. 24.

34

Ibid., p. 107.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

78

Julika Griem

insulation and evacuation, these creatures appear to be dominated by a fundamental flatness—by an intensification of the ‘depthlessness’ that has already been ascribed to earlier examples of Coetzee’s writing.40

Explication The grammar of reduction Coetzee develops in his latest novels does not just rely on decontextualizing world effects, however. He also engages many of his characters in topical discussions on the nature of the world they have been thrown into. These discussions contribute to one of the effects that readers have found most irritating: the tendency to present many generalizing and universalizing conversations in which not just a specific world but the very notion of worldness is debated in spuriously simplifying ways. In Childhood we become witnesses of the ‘philosophical disputation’ carried out between the workers on the docks. It is Simón who gets the debate going by asking about ‘any larger picture’, ‘any loftier design’. Alvaro, the fatherly and benevolent leader of the stevedores, retorts ‘Life is good in itself ’,41 and adds the following questions: ‘Do we die or are we endlessly reincarnated? Do the farther planets rotate around the sun or around one another reciprocally? Is this the best of all possible worlds?’42 The topical sujet of ‘the best of all possible worlds’ resurfaces in other conversations. To Simón’s provocative quip ‘[a]ll is for the best in this best of all possible worlds’ Alvaro responds: ‘This isn’t a possible world . . . It is the only world. Whether that makes it the best is not for you or for me to decide.’43 Having learnt early that ‘it would be prudent to put irony behind him’ in Novilla, Simón nevertheless keeps missing ‘news of what is going on in the world’.44 Time and again he has to realize, however, that his new environment resists any sense of possibility and contingency: the ‘native’ refugees of Novilla have learnt to distinguish between structured totalities and open multitudes, or, according to Alvaro, to make a difference between ‘good and bad infinities’.45 They seem to have internalized a notion of worldhood that is meant to stay clear of the utopian and dystopian reflection Coetzee has planted into the philosophical subtexts of his characters’ debates. The foregrounded world talk is dominated by the paradoxical tendencies of abstracting concretion and generalizing singularization. Most of the debates on the status of the refugees’ new world move from the contingencies and possibilities of a world to the constraints and limitations of the world. But in contrast to the differentiated and detailed storyworlds of popular vast narratives, Coetzee’s diegetic world in Childhood and Schooldays seems to prevent a form of readerly immersion triggered by diversity and plurality. This is particularly evident in Simón’s continuous critique of his new environment. What he is missing is not just salt and sex, but also a more fundamental sense of ‘secret yearning’ and ‘doubleness’, of 40 41 44

See Wilm’s discussion of a semantics of depth and flatness in The Slow Philosophy, pp. 52–3. 42 Ibid., p. 109. 43 Ibid., p. 41. The Childhood of Jesus, p. 108. 45 Ibid., p. 250. Ibid., pp. 42, 64.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Novelistic Worlds

79

‘duplicity’, ‘invisibility’, ‘irony’, and finally of ‘passion’.46 In the lean and austere world of Novilla the differentiation of opinions and lifestyles is toned down to such an extent that totality tends to tip over into totalitarianism: at least from Simón’s point of view, which dominates the free indirect discourse of the novels, Novilla’s confined insulation and unified closure are incompatible with ideals of individualistic pursuit and social plurality which he connects with a past in a world that no longer counts. This conflict is intensified by the murder case producing more Socratic debates in the second part of Schooldays. Dimitri, accused of having entertained an adulterous affair with Davíd’s allegedly ‘bloodless, sexless and lifeless’ dance instructor, confesses, after her dead body has been found in his shed: ‘I have done the worst thing in the world.’47 In responses reducing the world talk of the prequel to empty maxims, two female characters enter the debate: ‘If there were less passion around the world would be a safer place’—‘Without passion the world would stop going round.’48 Aesthetically speaking, it is just one of the disturbing traits of Childhood and Schooldays that the participants in the philosophical debates pick up on the novels’ world effects as if they were members of an evening class studying the texts of Plato and Wittgenstein, of Thomas More and Nelson Goodman. What Coetzee also performs in the sequel is an increasingly versatile play with the literalizing aspects of his poetics of reduction. As we follow the patchwork family on their quest from Novilla to Estrella key elements of the first part of the story are recycled as basic storytelling material in the second part. More precisely, Coetzee varies the effect of literalization by achieving a ludic traffic between content and form, in which constitutive stylistic features and philosophical preoccupations undergo functional and semantic metamorphoses. Thus, the author’s trademark ‘depthlessness’ returns as a surprising moment in the relationship between Davíd and his exhausted foster parents: ‘He has flattened us. We have been flattened. We have no more resistance.’49 In a move granting the sequel a surprising dose of late suspense, the Wittgensteinian complex of a boy and his elder struggling with numbers is turned into an element of emplotment, when, having escaped the authoritarian institutions of Novilla, the family’s new life in Estrella is overshadowed by a census taking place at the end of Schooldays. One of the novels’ main leitmotifs is also employed as a narrative event and provides the equally frugal new setting with a sprinkling of comedy: struggling with a world into which everybody seems to have been thrown ‘naked’, the continuously alienated newcomer Simón finds himself enjoying the community of sunbathing nudists during a visit to the Dance Academy’s summer retreat.50 Further instances of narrative elements shifting between concretion and abstraction, between constitution and reflection, can be found in the toponyms Coetzee uses to provide basic orientation in his carefully underdetermined diegetic world. With the name of Novilla, as many critics have pointed out, not only the idea of a new world, but also the literary genre of the novel—‘that ultimate, well-worn site 46 49

Ibid., p. 64. Ibid., p. 40.

47 50

The Schooldays of Jesus, p. 130. Ibid., p. 93.

48

Ibid., pp. 131, 136.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

80

Julika Griem

of inventing things anew’51—is under scrutiny. With the stars and their many resonances in the sequel’s setting of Estrella, the central question of a ‘beyond’ multiplies the narrative’s philosophical questions as formal provocations: which acts of literary worldmaking can we expect from a novel so radically questioning its generic repertoire?

Complication As The Childhood of Jesus unfolds, it is no longer just Simón who can be read as a character questioning the flattening world effects of his author’s programme of reduction. With David’s increasing refusal to succumb to pedagogical discipline at school, Simón’s situation becomes more complicated. To straighten out his foster son he is given advice by authorities who reformulate David’s resistance as ‘a confusion about a world from which his real parents have vanished, a world into which he does not know how he arrived’.52 Earlier on in Childhood, Coetzee illustrates the pedagogical adviser’s impression of David’s ‘private worlds’ in the form of a reading lesson with metafictional resonances. Having discovered an abridged children’s version of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, David begins to use the story of the deluded reader of chivalric romances as a blueprint for the cultivation of his own private worlds: in intense conversations with Simón we see the boy defending his right to misread the literary text. During these literary tutorials David’s obsessive interest in gaps, cracks, and voids emerges as a master trope53 as the two readers argue about problems of literary reception and the constitution of fictional worlds—with David speaking of his sense of a ‘hole’ opening up ‘between the pages’ of the book: ‘On the contrary, it’s señor Benengeli’s book that he gave to the world, therefore it belongs to all of us—to all of us in one sense, and to the library in another sense, but not to you alone in any sense. And stop tearing at the pages. Why are you handling the book so roughly?’ ‘Because. Because if I don’t hurry a hole will open.’ ‘Open up where?’ ‘Between the pages.’ ‘That’s nonsense. There is no such thing as a hole between the pages.’ ‘There’s a hole. It’s inside the page. You don’t see it because you don’t see anything.’54

With its recurring focus on Don Quixote, Childhood gradually shifts from the epistemological, political, and moral aspects of worldmaking towards hermeneutical problems of handling the fictional worlds of literary texts. Corresponding to this shift is a movement from flattening to deepening world effects which Coetzee Lowry, ‘The Schooldays of Jesus by J. M. Coetzee review. The Childhood of Jesus, p. 208. 53 See Urmila Sehsagiri, ‘The Boy of La Mancha: J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus’, Contemporary Literature 54, no. 3 (2013): pp. 643–53; 650. 54 The Childhood of Jesus, p. 166. 51 52

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Novelistic Worlds

81

brings to the fore through the semantic cluster of gaps, cracks, and voids. In fact, both protagonists are subjected to crucial episodes playing with literal and metaphorical options of falling. In the case of Simón, Coetzee simply stages a literal accident: he has the boy’s guardian fall between the docks and the bulk of a ship in the 27th chapter of Childhood. In the following chapter, Simón, freshly recovered, again argues with Alvaro about David’s problems with numbers and letters. Here, the novel’s text allows the figure of falling to unfold its full allegorial potential: David won’t follow us. He won’t take the steps we take when we count: one step two step three. It is as if the numbers were islands floating in a great black sea of nothingness, and he were each time being asked to close his eyes and launch himself across the void. What if I fall?—that is what he asks himself. What if I fall and then keep falling for ever? Lying in bed in the middle of the night I could sometimes swear that I too was falling—falling under the same spell that grips the boy. . . . What if between one and two there is no bridge at all, only empty space? And what if we, who so confidently take the step, are in fact falling through space, only we don’t know it because we insist on keeping our blindfold on? What if this boy is the only one among us with eyes to see?55

The topic of literary reading also seems to be introduced to remind some of the characters and Coetzee’s readers of the very possibility of depth in a diegetic world that has been flattened out so effectively. This idea of depth comes in literal and allegorical variations, and with political and philosophical, but also with philological implications. From a hermeneutic point of view, Simón’s and David’s disputes about the gaps and holes in the book and the universe resonate with the spatialized semantics of our ways of reading closely, deeply, and suspiciously as they have been reconsidered in recent debates on alternative forms of ‘distant’, ‘flat’, and ‘superficial’ philological reception.56 As a result of the narrative’s continuous oscillation between literal and metaphorial figurations of depth, Coetzee’s apparently ‘depthless’ prose in Childhood and Schooldays reveals a constitutive dimension in which space and spatialization, topology, and tropology are intricately intertwined. In Schooldays, Davíd is diagnosed as being ‘full of anxiety about gaps’ by his dancing instructo,r Señor Arroyo.57 Having enrolled in Arroyo’s astrologically underpinned dancing classes the boy learns to cope, but it takes sceptical Simón until the end of the novel to acknowledge the benevolent effect of the dancing lessons: My son . . . has come up with a plan for our general salvation: a rope bridge from shore to shore; souls pulling themselves hand in hand across the ocean, some toward the new life, some back toward the old one. If there were such a bridge, says my son, it would mean the end of forgetfulness. We would all know who we are, and rejoice.

55

Ibid., pp. 249–50. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’, Representations 108, no. 1 (2009): pp. 1–21; see also Wilm’s Slow Philosophy, pp. 52–3. 57 The Schooldays of Jesus, p. 97. 56

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Julika Griem

82

Simón continues to find himself ‘at sea . . . drifting further and further from solid land’.58 With his late conversion in Schooldays, however, the Robinsonesque protagonist seems finally ready for a development that changes the prequel’s narrative direction on various textual levels: the story of the strange child and his worrying elder also appears to be moving from voids and abysses to bridges and ropes, from falling to dancing, from stasis to movement, and from rupture to continuity. With a key scene complementing the discussions on Don Quixote in Childhood, Coetzee also steers Schooldays from discussions of reading to a reflection on writing. Simón signs up for a class in which he is given the assignment to tell the teacher something about himself ‘in the space of three paragraphs, linked each to the next’.59 He hands in an obediently structured summary in which the entirety of the novels’ serial narrative is compressed into exactly three paragraphs, earning him the minimalistically ironical comment: ‘Good paragraphing, unusual content.’60 With a view to the hermeneutical troping of the novel, Simón has created a mise-en-abyme which turns the text’s imagery of bridges and ropes into an exercise of reductive composition producing an abridged version no longer of Don Quixote, but of The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus themselves. Simón’s further ruminations in class let him gradually drift into the direction of ‘creative writing’, even though this is not the topic of his lessons. It becomes all the more obvious, therefore, that Simón is fashioned as a metafictional author figure who is haunted by an easily recognizable passion for spareness and thriftiness: a writer who sees himself as a ‘dullard’ and ‘a man of paper’ who is, as we learn later on, ‘parsimonious with words’, and anxious to have ‘each word checked and weighed’ before it is sent out.61 This latter comment is expressed by the alleged rapist and murderer Dimitri, the antagonist whom Simón in his writing exercises imagines as ‘a man of passion . . . who pours himself out without paragraphing’.62 As the prudent protagonist finally yearns for a more passionate fluency in his life and writing, he decides to continue the initial assignment of three paragraphs by a fourth, fifth, and sixth part which would be concerned with Dimitri. Coetzee thus grants his figure of the writer a lesson in what the makers of popular serial narratives in film and television would call continuity management. In addition to this foregrounding of seriality, the new paragraphs dealing with the passionate antagonist also continue and vary a play with numbers which up to this point has been confined to the symbolism of ‘three’. Both novels are saturated with allusions to various forms of trinities and triangles, and in Schooldays it is three Sisters who assist the unholy family in their ongoing unorthodox bildungsroman. Due to this shifting symbolic numerology, one is also invited to ponder how many further instalments the serialized story of Davíd’s changing family will see. The move from a reading of gaps to the writing of links gives a further twist to Coetzee’s art of omission. Next to surprising us with an ironical portrait of the master of reduction as a nudist and a ‘dullard’, the writing scenes also reconfigure the relationship of redundancy and regeneration. Having been accused of just 58 61

Ibid., p. 207. Ibid., pp. 176, 218.

59

Ibid., p. 174. 62 Ibid., p. 176.

60

Ibid., pp. 175–6.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Novelistic Worlds

83

recycling an easily recognizable repertoire of refusal, Coetzee in Schooldays in fact proceeds towards a meditation on the idea of the new. In one of his letters to Paul Auster, this idea still occurs in a rigid guise. Coetzee here confesses to be mainly interested in novels which try something that nobody has tried before: ‘I must say that I get impatient with fiction that doesn’t try something that hasn’t been tried before, preferably with the medium itself.’63 In The Schooldays of Jesus, we are invited to try a more complex reflection on innovation in both formal and philosophical terms. Through the carefully staged seriality of the two novels, Coetzee links his project of literary innovation to forms of repetition; and in the excessively displayed ‘world talk’ of both books, the idea of a new life looms as large as its many accompanying invocations of a tabula rasa. As a problem of narrative technique, redundancy and regeneration are interwoven in the transition from Childhood to Schooldays. It is here that spatial and temporal figurations of a new ‘world’ and a ‘new life’ are mapped onto each other in a complex combination of closure and continuity. Considering the philosophical dexterity of the two novels’ child prodigy, it is not surprising that it is David who at the end of Childhood contributes a totalizing horizon which challenges the narrative’s poetics of isolation. At this point, the family is on the move again. As usual, the text does not allow its characters and readers to substantiate the diegetic world with geographical detail—Simón announces that he does not have a map.64 Yet a moment later, he boldly promises Inés, ‘I will follow you to the end of the world.’65 Soon after, the crucial gesture of minimalist extension is granted to David. Having played with inflammable material he is temporarily blinded. In a characteristically paradoxical move Coetzee stages him as the novel’s concluding poeta vates, allowing him to endow the book’s toneddown totality with a culminating maximizing effect: ‘I can see’, he exclaims, ‘the whole world’—a world which shall be reduced again to a further stripped-down version in The Schooldays of Jesus.66 Due to many effects of displacement and dehistoricization, the departure at the end of Childhood remains ambiguous and thwarted by a sense of static circularity. Instead of taking the travellers towards revelation and dénouement, the perspective granted on the final page of the first Jesus novel remains characteristically underdetermined: ‘There is room’, Simón promises vaguely as ever; and just like at the beginning of their stagnant quest Coetzee’s disarmed and disenchanted pilgrims are ‘Looking for somewhere to stay, to start our new life’.67 In the sequel, the boy’s and his foster parents’ quest for a new life is reproduced to an even more disillusioning extent. In a scene replaying the final moment of the first novel with the adulterous couple of Ana Magdalena Arroyo and Dimitri, Davíd echoes and doubles the exact formulation accompanying the previous departure: ‘They have gone to a new life. They are going to be gypsies.’68 Later on this repeated promise is contradicted by 63 Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee, Here and Now: Letters 2008–2011 (London: Viking, 2014), p. 165. 64 The Childhood of Jesus, p. 262. 65 Ibid., p. 263. 66 Ibid., p. 269. 67 Ibid., p. 277. 68 The Schooldays of Jesus, p. 125.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

84

Julika Griem

the surviving protagonist of the erotic drama Coetzee has unexpectedly cooked up on a back stage of his spuriously flat diegetic world: according to Dimitri, there is neither a ‘beyond’ nor a ‘new life’.69 The novels thus continue to perform a serial dynamics which both rekindles and relativizes the idea of new beginnings and also of other worlds. Within the minimally growing and changing narrative structure of Childhood and Schooldays, Coetzee has combined suspense and suspension in most intricate ways. For some followers of Coetzee’s poetics of austerity it must have come as a surprise to put down Schooldays with the impression of Coetzee’s most recent alter ego dreaming of a repulsive lust murderer and dancing in slippers from which his toes are protruding in clownish ways.70 For those willing to cultivate their irritation, the last novel’s only glimpse into the story’s obscure past provides additional complication. In a further philosophical conversation on the arbitrary quality of numbers and words, Simón claims that he and Davíd might as well have been named ‘99’ and ‘66’, which again unhinges the epistemological and social hierarchies that seem to have stabilized the ‘unmade’ world of Childhood and Schooldays so far: ‘You remember meeting the boy on board ship and deciding he was lost and taking charge of him. Perhaps he remembers the event differently. Perhaps you were the one who looked lost; perhaps he decided to take charge of you.’71

T H E OE U V R E O N DI S P L A Y J. M. Coetzee already seems to be safely enshrined in the minimalist hall of fame (together with such revered figures as Kafka and Beckett) and would therefore have to be affiliated not with Venturi’s postmodernist ‘Less is a bore’, but with Le Corbusier’s modernist ‘Less is more’. As an artist of reduction who has frequently paid homage to canonized stylistic economies, Coetzee also seems to be relating quantity to quality in rather specific ways. Whereas some advocates of mundophoric narratives confuse matters of quantitative scale and scope with those of their qualitative effects and premises,72 Coetzee teaches us a lesson of intensification through reduction which complicates the relation between flatness and depth, between the design and the claims of his diegetic worlds, between their phenomenological frugality and their exegetic luxuriance. Yet, there is a point of contact connecting Coetzee’s minimalism to the maximalist aesthetics feeding on excess and exuberance, on profusion and plenitude. In his study on the ‘systems novel’, Tom LeClair has examined the normative implications informing judgements of minimalist and maximalist genealogies by addressing the question of formal mastery. In many contemporary maximalist narratives, such mastery is displayed as the capacity to handle a monumentalized 69

70 Ibid., p. 259. 71 Ibid., p. 198. Ibid., p. 183. This can also be observed with the contemporary success of ‘fat’ middlebrow novels relying on realist concepts of psychological depth and social panorama. Recent examples of this renaissance of Dickensian strategies are the works of John Lanchester, Garth Risk Hallberg, and Nathan Hill. 72

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Novelistic Worlds

85

wealth of material, a bulk of textuality. In Coetzee’s writing, mastery rather seems to be demonstrated as a powerful administration of absence. Accordingly, in Benjamin Markovits’s review of Childhood the novel’s irritating world effects come to the fore as a result of cunning authorial timing and control: The whole novel is a kind of escape act, an elaborate rope trick. Coetzee has tied himself up in a number of narrative problems and has to find a way to wriggle out of them. . . . He invents new predicaments, chapter by chapter, and resolves them. There’s something magical about his ability to keep going. You get the sense, as you read, of details filling in around you, as he turns to look at them. Which isn’t quite the same thing as a world that's already there, which you find out more about.73

Marcovits puts his finger on the fading epic forms which continue to shine through the narrative of both Childhood and Schooldays, but his image of the escape artist also captures a sense of mastery. Needless to say, this image is meant to characterize Coetzee’s notorious unwillingness to expose himself in the spectacles of the literary industry. As a further paradoxical effect of reductionist escape art, the continuous and controlled unmaking of diegetic worlds also reveals the author’s tightly interwoven oeuvre as a world in itself. Through carefully orchestrated references, Childhood and Schooldays are linked to previous works. A few examples must suffice, as Yoshiki Tajiri has already collected many of them:74 Simón does not just carry a Robinsonesque legacy, but his paragraphing exercise also brings back the narrative structure of In the Heart of the Country (1977), which the author himself described ‘as a way of pointing to what is not there between them’.75 The murderer Dimitri, driven by a destructive passion, rather appears as a revenant visiting from the Dostoevskian sphere of The Master of Petersburg (1994), a novel in which Coetzee has already explored the trope of falling.76 Simón’s fruitless conversations with various female characters are highly reminiscent of David Lurie and his daughter’s discussions about the allegedly anachronistic nature of male desire in Disgrace (1999). Even the final scene of Schooldays depicting a clumsily dancing Simón in the act of carefully letting go could be read as a serene counterpart to Lurie’s final effort of letting go in the company of dying dogs, and, in a very different way, to the Coetzee dancing awkwardly in Summertime.77 A further connection can be drawn between Childhood and Coetzee’s first memoir, Boyhood (1997). In a seminal scene of this autobiographical text young Coetzee is reported to find a photograph of his mother, ‘together with other women in long white dresses, standing with tennis racquets in what looks like the middle of 73 Benjamin Markovits, ‘The Childhood of Jesus by JM Coetzee—review’, The Guardian, 2 Mar. 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/02/childhood-of-jesus-jm-coetzee-review, accessed 1 Nov. 2016. 74 Yoshiki Tajiri, ‘Beyond the Literary Theme Park: J. M. Coetzee’s Late Style in The Childhood of Jesus’, Journal of Modern Literature 39, no. 2 (2016): pp. 72–88. 75 J. M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge, MA/ London: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 59. 76 Wilm, The Slow Philosophy, pp. 126–8. 77 J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Secker & Warburg, 1999), p. 220; J. M. Coetzee, Summertime (London: Vintage, 2010), p. 184.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

86

Julika Griem

the veld, his mother with her arm over the neck of a dog, an Alsatian’.78 The iconic image of the author’s and narrator’s mother resurfaces in Childhood. Here, it is Inés, accompanied by an Alsatian dog, who is (re-)discovered as David’s surrogate mother in a scene which reproduces the photograph in Boyhood: ‘On the other side of the fence is a tennis court, and on the court are three players, two men and a woman, dressed in white, the men in shirts and long trousers, the woman in a full skirt and a blouse with the collar turned up, and a cap with a green visor.’79 On the cover of the Harvill Secker edition of The Childhood of Jesus we find a photograph that seems to be illustrating the image linking Boyhood and Childhood. This paratextual resonance doesn’t just raise questions about the autobiographical contours of the characters of the later novel, but also about generic boundaries between fiction and non-fiction as Coetzee has explored them throughout his oeuvre. Is it just the fictional character Simón in whom, to quote the text of Childhood, ‘something stirs’ as the woman revisiting the later novel appears ‘obscurely familiar’?80 Is it also our sense of intertextual depth—and, correspondingly, our hermeneutic pleasure—which is triggered by showing our disorientied guide Simón on the brink of remembering a figure of his and also his author’s past? Finally, the image of the first English edition of the novel can be linked to a further example of Coetzee’s art of decontextualization: in an interview, the author stated that he would have liked to present The Childhood of Jesus without any identifying cover, as a story coming into the world of contemporary literature just as naked and bare as the refugees arriving in the world of Novilla and Estrella. Such glimpses illuminating the secretive dimension of Coetzee’s carefully controlled self-fashioning have been complemented with surprising candour in the collection of letters, published as Here and Now, that Coetzee exchanged with Paul Auster between 2008 and 2011. Beyond the programmatic title, which picks up one of the most obvious leitmotifs of the novels’ reduced and redundant worldmaking, several letters find Coetzee similarly occupied with the problem of numbers. Furthermore, he identifies his aesthetics of reduction as the phenomenon of a late style which brings to mind Simón’s thoughts on a new chapter in his late life: ‘Of course once you get beyond that starting point the writing itself takes over and leads you where it will. What you end up with may be anything but simple, anything but subdued.’81 Just like the vexing miniseries of The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus, this meditation subverts received notions of linearity: far from simply beginning somewhere and ending somewhere else, the writing process yields twists and conversions which make it fundamentally difficult to distinguish between origins and destinations, innovation and variation, redundancy and regeneration. In the light of the many correspondences between the letters’ and the novels’ circumvention of a ‘here and now’, the strangely stripped settings of Novilla and Estrella do offer some new bridges between Coetzee’s worlds and his work, between the economy of his style and the control of his image. Considering how this author has succeeded in polishing his spare prose as well as his reputation

78 80

79 The Childhood of Jesus, p. 68. J. M. Coetzee, Boyhood (London: Vintage, 1997), p. 48. 81 Auster and Coetzee, Here and Now, p. 97. Ibid., p. 69.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Novelistic Worlds

87

as one of the literary industry’s most successful escape artists, Childhood and Schooldays provide a highly reflexive and self-ironical look into a mirror which also invites us to reconsider Coetzee’s stylization of his oeuvre as a whole. It is the nexus of topology and tropology which has allowed Coetzee to create places resonating with formal problems. In his many literalizing moves, abstract phenomena such as ‘depth’ are transformed into concretized situations. Here, figural language seems to be working in different directions and on different levels: bathos, for instance, is often used as an element of the topoi informing both the world and the world talk of Childhood and Schooldays. The two recent books are not the first Coetzee novels in which the thrifty diegetic world provides a stage for reflection. In the final chapter of Elizabeth Costello (2003), Coetzee incarcerated his author figure in a blatantly Kafkaesque landscape introduced by the title ‘At the Gate’. Elizabeth Costello entered the stage of Coetzee’s oeuvre in The Lives of Animals, where her author engaged her in an intertextual pas de deux with Kafka’s speaking ape Red Peter. Coetzee had already referred to Kafka earlier, in the protagonist’s name and his resonating ‘burrow’ in Life & Times of Michael K (1983). At the end of Elizabeth Costello, the author’s recurring female alter ego appears to be locked into ‘Kafkaland’, as if this excessive intertextual gesture (a clearly foregrounded case of overdoing it) was apt to exorcize the ghost of this modernist authority dutifully invoked by Coetzee scholars. In The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus, Coetzee turns the screw even further. Here, Kafka again knocks on the door in the scenes depicting Simón’s and David’s early attempts to gain access to Novilla’s bureaucratic procedures.82 But in the process of accompanying the protagonists on their frustrating quest we are also taken on a tour through ‘Coetzeeland’, enabling us to nod and wink at many of the literary props and poetic devices, the modes and mannerisms substantiating the characteristic ‘gestalt’ of Coetzee’s oeuvre. Entering the empty stage and ploughing through the world talk of Novilla and Estrella, we seem to be visiting a Coetzee theme park displaying and performing not just the topical elements of this author’s work, but also the equally familiar reflexes and routines of his professional critics, doubling the tutorials over Davíd’s abridged Don Quixote while pondering a compressed version of Coetzee’s work.83 The slyly guided tour of his poetics that Coetzee correlates with the characters’ quest in Childhood and Jesus actually combines minimalist and maximalist gestures: it squeezes ‘big’ questions into barely furnished scenarios and transforms the underdetermined world of the novels into the overdetermined world of Coetzee’s ouevre. In its self-ironical version, the ‘Coetzeeland’ shining through the ‘flimsy’ construction of Novilla and Estrella reminds one of a literary Legoland, a spatialized primer marketing the successful brand of a Nobel Laureate easily recognizable by his ‘spare and thrifty style’. This minimized authorial theme park can be related to See Tajiri, ‘Beyond the Literary Theme Park’, p. 74. To tease out how Coetzee’s writing attracts theoretically reflexive readings Elizabeth Anker applies the related metaphor of the ‘funhouse’: ‘Why We Love Coetzee: or, The Childhood of Jesus and the Funhouse of Critique’, in Critique and Postcritique, ed. Elizabeth Anker and Rita Felski (Durham, DC: Duke University Press, 2017), pp. 183–208. 82 83

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

88

Julika Griem

further spatial configurations with totalizing potential. On the one hand it corresponds to a diegetic world resembling an isolated ark the author has populated with singularized characters constantly questioning their situation and status. On the other hand, the ark can be seen as a part of an archive. It is in one of the most luxuriously equipped cathedrals of contemporary literature research where, among much more material, numerous versions of individual Coetzee novels are now provided to reinforce that sense of depth—and philological bliss—the two recent novels allow us to glimpse at through the gaps and cracks of a Coetzeeland named Novilla and Estrella. In the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, the spare and thrifty worlds of J. M. Coetzee are displayed as a minimalist spectacle of maximalizing mastery. Between ark and archive, the strange world made and unmade in the two Jesus novels no longer necessarily plays out isolation against immersion, simplification against complication, or, in the words of John Barth’s early postmodern diagnosis, exhaustion against replenishment.84 It is true: the music accompanying Simón’s clumsy dancing seems to be emphasizing the Protestant core of Coetzee’s pleasure of unmaking his worlds, with a line taken from a cantata of the author’s favourite composer J. S. Bach: ‘Welt, Deine Lust ist Last.’85 But the strange cast populating the minimized series of The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus cannot be domesticated as philosophical ‘beasts of burden’;86 rather, they invite us to reconsider how philosophical questions can be tied to aesthetic and philological questions. It is therefore hardly a coincidence that Simón, the stubborn advocate of irony and ambiguity, has to practise ‘applications’ while he dreams of creative writing. According to the words of the character called ‘Juan Sebastián Arroyo’, the ongoing project of Coetzee’s vexingly philosophizing narratives cannot be easily reduced: ‘It’s because I am not a philosopher that he calls me a philosopher.’87

84 John Barth’s two essays ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’ and ‘The Literature of Replenishment’ can be found in his The Friday Book: Essays and Other Non-Fiction (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). 85 Johann Sebastian Bach, Cantata 161: ‘World, your pleasure is a burden’, from the second recitativo. 86 The Childhood of Jesus, p. 15. 87 The Schooldays of Jesus, p. 234.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

PART II ETH I CS A ND M ORAL PHILOSOPHY

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

6 ‘A Yes without a No’ Philosophical Reason and the Ethics of Conversion in Coetzee’s Fiction Derek Attridge

Are we obeying the principle of reason when we ask what grounds this principle that is itself a principle of grounding? We are not—which does not mean that we are disobeying it either. Jacques Derrida

T H E LO O K OF T H E A N I M A L In a round table published in the volume The Death of the Animal, John Coetzee makes a number of arresting assertions on the subject of ethics. Among his comments is the following: [T]here are people (among whom I number myself) who believe that our ethical impulses are prerational (I would be tempted to go along with Wordsworth and say that our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting, that what Wordsworth calls our moral being is more deeply founded within us than rationality itself), and that all that a rational ethics can achieve is to articulate and give form to ethical impulses.1

The notion that ethics is prior to rationality is one that is particularly associated with the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, who famously called ethics ‘first philosophy’: my responsibility for the other, Levinas insisted, is primary, and the philosophical discourse of morality—along with politics, social justice, and everything Levinas included under the heading ‘the third’—is secondary. We shall see in a moment that this similarity of approach between the novelist and the philosopher is not a simple coincidence.2

1 Paola Cavalieri, The Death of the Animal: A Dialogue (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), p. 121. 2 Emmanuel Levinas’s most influential works are Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969) and Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1988).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

92

Derek Attridge

In another part of the same conversation, Coetzee gives as a specific example of his understanding of the source of ethical instincts the way in which individuals become ethically invested in the question of the human treatment of nonhuman animals: We (participants in this dialogue) are where we are today not because once upon a time we read a book that convinced us that there was a flaw in the thinking underlying the way that we, collectively, treat nonhuman animals, but because in each of us there took place something like a conversion experience, which, being educated people who place a premium on rationality, we then proceeded to seek backing for in the writings of thinkers and philosophers.

As in the other comment, any philosophical accounting for ethical responses is seen by Coetzee as merely post hoc, a product of our shared veneration of rationality. And in further particularizing the experience he is describing, he refers explicitly to Levinas: ‘Our conversion experience as often as not centered on some other mute appeal of the kind that Levinas calls the look, in which the existential autonomy of the Other became irrefutable—irrefutable by any means, including rational argument.’3 Once again, Coetzee’s emphasis is on the total irrelevance of the faculty of reason to the ethical domain. Now, Coetzee is well aware that for Levinas the look of the animal other does not have the ethical force of the face of the human other, an androcentric prejudice for which his great admirer Derrida took him to task.4 I know that Coetzee’s awareness of this fact goes back at least twenty years, although my evidence is purely anecdotal: in 1994 I gave a talk on Levinasian ethics—on which I was beginning to draw in elaborating a theory of literary responsibility—to an audience at the University of Cape Town, among whom was John Coetzee, my host for the visit. A discussion period followed, and Coetzee’s rather icy question was something like: ‘What would Levinas have to say when the eyes that are looking at me are those of the slaughter-ox?’ Not having given much thought to such issues at the time, I had no satisfactory answer, and I admit I still find it a troubling question. Derrida, too, makes much of the look of the animal in The Animal That Therefore I Am—in his case, his cat’s.5 What I want to focus on in this essay, however, is not the question of animal others per se, but the question of the relation between ethics and reason which for Coetzee is so closely connected to it. Coetzee doesn’t, of course, shrink from presenting strong rational arguments when he feels it’s appropriate to do so, but there are moments in his discourse when it’s hard to know just how seriously to take him, when reason seems to give way to something else. For instance, in The Death of the Animal he points out, with impeccable logic, that if a right to life were enforced for livestock, herds would

3

Cavalieri, The Death of the Animal, p. 89. For Derrida’s critique, see The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), pp. 105–18. 5 Ibid., pp. 3–11. 4

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Philosophical Reason and the Ethics of Conversion

93

simply be cut back and ‘within a few years the only pigs left on earth will be in zoos and sanctuaries’. What is needed, therefore, is an additional right: the right to multiply. And then Coetzee adds: I am reminded of the image (Christian in origin, though no doubt heretical) of clouds of souls waiting to be born, calling on us (men and women) to bring them into the world by the only means known, incarnation. Who are we to deny these souls entry?6

Here, logical reason yields to something else: fantasy, mysticism—or perhaps literature.7

CATS AND T HE CONVERSION EXPERIENCE It is to literature that I turn now, since my main interest is in J. M. Coetzee’s fiction, not John Coetzee’s pronouncements in propria persona, pronouncements which may or may not find support in the novels and short stories. The short fiction ‘The Old Woman and the Cats’, published only in 2013 but presented much earlier by Coetzee in readings around the world, replays in fictional mode many of the concerns of his contributions to The Death of the Animal.8 We are, as so often before, in the presence of Elizabeth Costello and her son John. (The former isn’t named, but the latter has a wife called Norma, and the exchanges between mother and son are instantly recognizable as continuing those in Elizabeth Costello [2003], so I think it’s justifiable to use the names here.) Costello has taken up residence in a remote Spanish village, where her son is making a short visit, ‘to talk about death, the prospect of death, his mother’s death and how to plan for it’.9 He is dismayed by the large number of half-wild cats in her house, and the conversation immediately takes a Levinasian turn (without any overt mention of Levinas): John comments on the white mark on one cat’s face, and his mother responds: ‘Cats don’t have faces.’10 But it’s soon clear that in saying this she is far from displaying a Levinasian disregard of animals; on the contrary, she argues that animals, like humans, are possessed of souls, but while the latter’s souls are manifested in their faces the former’s remain invisible. It seems that Coetzee has continued to turn over the question of animal faces since that seminar at the University of Cape Town in 1994.11 6

Cavalieri, The Death of the Animal, p. 120. In The Good Story, Coetzee reflects on his own fondness for fantasy ‘at the age of eight or nine’: ‘I never thought of giving up my fantasy life and attaching myself to the real. Rather, I accepted fantasising as a kind of affliction that had been visited on me at birth, a congenital disease that I was doomed to carry. I am glad, looking back, that I had the good sense not to cure myself of my disease. I hope those sweet little French children [in the film Ce n’est qu’un début] don’t get the idea into their heads that rational analysis and reason-backed strategising is the only way there is of dealing with the world’ (J. M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz, The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy [London: Harvill Secker, 2015], p. 156). 8 J. M. Coetzee, ‘The Old Woman and the Cats’, in Cripplewood/Kreupelhout, ed. Berlinde De Bruyckere and J. M. Coetzee (Brussels: Mercatorfonds, 2013), pp. 7–28. 9 ‘The Old Woman and the Cats’, p. 10. 10 Ibid., p. 7. 11 On 29 April 1996, Coetzee wrote in a notebook, in the midst of notes towards Disgrace and shortly before starting notes on The Lives of Animals: ‘Reread Levinas on the face in the context of 7

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

94

Derek Attridge

As in Coetzee’s Lives of Animals, John provides the rational foil to his mother’s ventures into what he regards as fantasy, though here without Norma’s aggrieved presence at his elbow. When Costello informs him that she follows where her ‘soul’ tells her, he responds, as might a rationalist reader of Coetzee’s fiction, ‘When the word soul is employed I generally cease to understand.’12 And when she explains how she came to adopt the feral cats in the village, John gives a careful reply that bears directly on the topic of this chapter. The argument between them is worth spelling out in some detail. The occurrence that Costello relates conforms to the type of psychological event Coetzee names as the origin of ethics in The Death of the Animal: a conversion experience. Costello recounts how she came upon a half-starved cat in a culvert in the process of giving birth, and continues: That was when I made my decision. It came in a flash. It did not require any calculation, any weighing up of pluses against minuses. I decided that in the matter of the cats I would turn my back on my own tribe—the tribe of the hunters—and side with the tribe of the hunted. No matter what the cost.

John, ever the rationalist, points out that cats are hunters too, but his mother insists that such ‘moral problems’ are irrelevant to her non-rational ethical impulse: I abhor the mind-set that sees life as a succession of problems presented to the intellect to be solved. A cat isn’t a set of questions. The cat in the culvert made an appeal to me, and I responded. I responded without question, without referring to a moral calculus.

The precedence for Costello of the ethical demand as an experience over any rational calculation is clear. Then John reminds his mother of what we recognize as the specifically Levinasian lesson she taught him when younger: [Y]ou used to lecture me on the regard of the other, on the appeal that we dare not refuse when we meet the other face to face, unless we are to deny our own humanity. An appeal that is prior to and more primitive than the ethical—that was what you called it.13

In John’s memory, at least, his mother’s version of Levinas places the responsibility ordained by the face of the other even before ethics—though by ‘ethics’ is probably meant something akin to Kierkegaard’s sense of the term, that is to say, a general moral code rather than a singular non-rational impulse. (‘The ethical as such is the universal’, writes Kierkegaard, contrasting it with ‘the movement of faith’, which begins ‘precisely where thinking leaves off ’.14) But the lesson, it is clear, went beyond the position endorsed by Levinas:

animals. The animal’s face’ (Harry Ransom Center [HRC], J. M. Coetzee Papers, Container 35, Notebook 13 Dec. 1994–5 Mar. 1997). Among the (undated) photocopies collected in boxes labelled ‘Research materials’ in the Center’s archive is a copy of the bibliography from Adriaan Peperzak’s introductory study of Levinas, To the Other, which was published in 1993 (To The Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas [West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1993]). 12 ‘The Old Woman and the Cats’, p. 21. 13 Ibid., p. 22. 14 Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Alastair Hannay (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), pp. 82–3.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Philosophical Reason and the Ethics of Conversion

95

The problem, you said, was that the very same people who talked about how we are interpellated by the other did not want to talk about being interpellated by animals. They would not accept that in the eyes of the suffering beast we may encounter an appeal that can likewise be denied only at heavy cost.15

(When I read this I can’t help recalling Coetzee’s question to me about the eyes of the slaughter-ox.) Rational John sees, or thinks he sees, the chink in his mother’s logic: he reminds her of her denial that animals have faces—how, then, could the cat have made its appeal? Costello’s response is that it was motherhood, not a look, that engaged her, and soon she is, by way of explanation, indulging in a fantasy that takes us straight to Coetzee’s contribution to the round table quoted earlier: At the borders of being—this is how I imagine it—there are all these small souls, cat souls, mouse souls, bird souls, souls of unborn children, crowded together, pleading to be let in, pleading to be incarnated. And I want to let them in, all of them, even if it is only for a day or two, even if it is only so that they can have a quick look at this beautiful world of ours. Because who am I to deny them their chance of incarnation?16

Here again is the idea of the right to life not as the continuation of an existence that has begun, but as the right to come into being—a proposal that doesn’t sit easily with Aristotelian rationality. The debate continues, John’s pragmatic reflections making no impact on his mother as she holds forth in what he calls a ‘rhapsodic mood’,17 and it ends with her reassertion of the difference between a calculation and a conversion experience: I know exactly how that process of deliberation and decision feels and tastes, exactly how little it weighs in the hand. The other way I speak of is not a matter of choice. It is an assent. It is a giving-over. It is a Yes without a No.18

Although Costello now places ‘decision’ on the side of calculation, she had earlier used the word when speaking of the compulsion she experienced—‘in a flash’—to side with the cats; this earlier usage comes close to Derrida’s, naming the moment beyond calculation when we find ourselves following through on one option rather than others. There is a second example of this moment in the second main strand of the narrative, which concerns Pablo, the old man Costello has taken in after he is threatened with incarceration for repeatedly exposing himself in the village. Her decision to trust him to look after the cats when she is dead is related to her decision to harbour them in the first place: both involve a risk in trusting the other that echoes Mrs Curren’s entrusting of her long letter to Mr Vercueil in Age of Iron. Costello’s stance in this story is reminiscent of her comments on the role of reason in the lectures and conversations of The Lives of Animals,19 comments that 16 Ibid., p. 23. ‘The Old Woman and the Cats’, pp. 22–3. Ibid., p. 24. 18 Ibid., p. 25. Costello’s ‘Yes without a No’ may remind the reader that Coetzee was employed as a computer programmer for three years: the kind of assent at stake here is not one side of a digital opposition, but pure affirmation. Thanks to Michelle Kelly for pointing this out to me. 19 Incorporated in J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (London: Secker & Warburg, 2003), pp. 59–115. 15 17

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

96

Derek Attridge

have received a considerable amount of attention. Among her remarks are that ‘reason may not be the being of the universe but merely the being of the human brain’20 and ‘reason is simply a vast tautology’,21 and hence that her attempt to convince her audience by presenting a rational argument is fated to fail. Moreover, the overvaluation of reason leads inevitably to the undervaluation of animals. [T]he fact that animals, lacking reason, cannot understand the universe but have simply to follow its rules blindly, proves that, unlike man, they are part of it but not part of its being: that man is godlike, animals thinglike.22

An early summary of Costello’s position in the notes towards these lectures gives a good sense of the Levinasian cast of Coetzee’s thinking: The overall justification is an ethics of the appeal, which does not or does not travel between man and beast at the decisive moment. This is her way of avoiding the hierarchisation of the animal world. The bacillus and the elephant are in theory on the same level. It is a matter of seeing the animal’s face, but not as a reflection of one’s own (empathy with it). Every contact has to be unique, as though preceded by no history.23

Costello’s advice is to ‘read the poets who return the living, electric being to language; and if the poets do not move you, I urge you to walk, flank to flank, beside the beast that is prodded down the chute to his executioner’.24 (There’s the slaughter-ox again.) These, then, are the two ways the conversion experience may happen: (a) in the presence of the animal (we’ve seen how in ‘The Old Woman and the Cats’ Costello argues against the idea that the look of the animal is the only way its ethical demand may be made) or (b) in the reading of literature. And it is, after all, in a work of literature, a short story, that Coetzee finds a powerful way of conveying the importance of these issues.

TH E V IEW F ROM PHILO SO PHY Unsurprisingly, Costello’s views on reason and ethics have attracted a great deal of interest from philosophers. Cora Diamond, in a powerful essay reprinted in the volume Philosophy and Animal Life, argues that Coetzee—and Costello—are engaging with a difficulty (‘the difficulty of reality’, to quote the title of her piece) 20

21 Ibid., p. 70. Elizabeth Costello, p. 67. Ibid., p. 67. Coetzee can be seen working out this argument in the notebooks lodged in the HRC: ‘In an age which no longer has any reason to prize reason what happens to the arguments (by Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant) for reason: that man may use animals because man has reason? . . . If one wants an instance of painstaking logical analysis go to Regan. Is there not a crucial compromise made in admitting that the contest should be conducted on the grounds of reason? Does that not concede the reasonability of the opponent, whereas in truth one believes that reason is simply a veil over passion in his case? The argument should be conducted as an animal argues’ (10 May 1997) (HRC, J. M. Coetzee Papers, Container 34). Although the argument is placed in Costello’s mouth, the notebooks suggest that Coetzee is working it out for himself, on the basis of a wide range of reading also recorded in the Center’s archive. 23 HRC, J. M. Coetzee Papers, Container 30, 30 Sept. 1996. 24 Elizabeth Costello, p. 111. 22

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Philosophical Reason and the Ethics of Conversion

97

that philosophy may not be able fully to comprehend (indeed, that thinking itself may balk at), and emphasizes the literary representation of Costello as someone wounded by her exposure to one important manifestation of this reality: the reality of animal life.25 In another essay, ‘Anything but Argument?’, Diamond gives a fuller account of the ethical operation of literature as she understands it, taking issue with the assertion by Onora O’Neill that ‘if the appeal on behalf of animals is to convince those whose hearts do not already so incline them, it must . . . reach beyond assertion to argument’.26 Diamond counters that ‘Miss O’Neill’s conception of moral thinking makes it impossible to account for the moral force of many kinds of literature’, and she discusses examples by Wordsworth, Dickens, Austen, and James to show that the moral significance of literary works ‘is not a matter of its leading us to grasp facts of which we had previously been aware’27—a sentiment very much in line with Costello’s (and, I would argue, Coetzee’s) position. However, Diamond’s understanding of what she calls ‘the root of morality in human nature’ exemplified by the literary works she cites doesn’t, to my mind, go far enough in her characterization: ‘a capacity for attention to things imagined or perceived’ or, again, ‘a loving and respectful attention’ seem inadequate ways of articulating the shock administered by some novels, poems, or plays.28 Certainly, the conversion experience advanced by Coetzee as the source of our ethical outlook is much more than a matter of ‘attention’. Stephen Mulhall begins The Wounded Animal, his acute philosophical study of Coetzee, with an extended discussion of Diamond’s response to O’Neill, a response with which he is wholly sympathetic.29 He follows this with a consideration of Costello’s critique of rationalism, summarizing, and offering a corrective to, the standard philosophical rebuttal of her argument that reason may be not ‘the flowering of a faculty that allows access to the secrets of the universe’, but instead ‘the specialism of a rather narrow, self-regenerating intellectual tradition whose forte is reasoning . . . which for its own motives it tries to install at the centre of the universe’.30 As Mulhall points out, Coetzee builds this standard rebuttal into his text, placing it in Norma’s mouth: ‘There is no position outside reason where you can stand and lecture about reason and pass judgement on reason.’31 And he further points out that Costello herself is aware of the philosophical unacceptability of her claim—hence her appeal to a series of examples of a ‘literary’ critique of reason in the shape of readings of Aquinas, Wolfgang Köhler, and Thomas Nagel. These are not a random trio, as Mulhall observes, but representatives of three major 25 Cora Diamond, ‘The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy’, in Stanley Cavell et al., Philosophy and Animal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), pp. 43–90. See also Anne Le Goff ’s discussion of Diamond’s essay and John McDowell’s response to it, ‘Living with Animals, Living as an Animal’, in Language, Ethics and Animal Life, ed. Niklas Forsberg, Mikel Burley, and Nora Hämäläinen (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), pp. 124–38. 26 Cora Diamond, ‘Anything but Argument?’, Philosophical Investigations 5 (1982): pp. 23–41. 27 Ibid., p. 29. 28 Ibid., p. 40. 29 Stephen Mulhall, The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). This discussion of Diamond is on pp. 4–18. 30 Elizabeth Costello, p. 37. 31 Ibid., p. 93.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

98

Derek Attridge

modes of reason: theological (Aquinas), scientific (Köhler), and philosophical (Nagel).32 Rational modes of thought are exposed as inadequate to capture the full range and richness of human experience (including the experience of animal life), and hence as a less than reliable guide to morality. Mulhall’s is a very subtle account of the limitations of a philosophical approach wedded to rationality, though it does not face head-on the uncomfortably direct challenge to reason mounted by Costello and Coetzee. A somewhat different tack is taken by another philosopher, Alice Crary, who argues in an essay published in the volume J. M. Coetzee and Ethics that Coetzee does not reject rationality as a source of ethical norms, but assumes a ‘wider conception of rationality’, one that embraces sensitivities that are not matters of reason in the narrower sense—and that literature is capable of fostering these sensitivities.33 She offers a reading of Disgrace that emphasizes its preoccupation with the emotional responsiveness that is required for full moral understanding— and that David Lurie, for much of the novel, lacks. It is in the final section of her essay that she confronts the position I’ve been sketching: the assertion that Coetzee situates morality ‘outside the domain of rationality altogether’.34 Her response is that what he rejects, as inappropriate to moral judgements, is the narrow conception of rationality, not the wider one she has been promoting. This approach is appealing in many ways (even if it would leave a hard-headed scientific rationalist unimpressed), but it is doubtful whether even this wider conception of rationality is wide enough to encompass the radically non-rational basis for ethics evident in both The Death of the Animal and ‘The Old Woman and the Cats’. Crary’s reading of Disgrace suggests that its moral importance is in the lesson it offers its readers through its narrative and characters, teaching us how we might enrich our vision of the world. I’m not sure this reading does justice to the way the novel, as an experience the reader lives through, challenges the very basis of our moral norms. To take one example from Disgrace—an example with which Cary Wolfe starts his Introduction to Philosophy and Animal Life 35—David Lurie, driving back from the clinic where he has been helping put down dogs, ‘has to stop at the roadside to recover himself ’.36 His tears and shaking hands bespeak an overwhelming event that is surely related to the ‘conversion experience’ referred to by Coetzee—and is not a matter of any kind of extended rationality. A valuable essay by Martin Woessner, ‘Coetzee’s Critique of Reason’, published in the same volume as Crary’s essay, is directly concerned with the issues I have raised. Although Woessner is not a professional philosopher, he broaches the philosophical question of rationalism with great clarity, delineating as the thread that runs through all Coetzee’s novels ‘the critique of reason, not for the sake of 32

Mulhall, The Wounded Animal, p. 39. Alice Crary, ‘J. M. Coetzee, Moral Thinker’, in J. M. Coetzee and Ethics: Philosophical Perspectives on Literature, ed. Anton Leist and Peter Singer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), pp. 249–68. 34 Crary, ‘J. M. Coetzee, Moral Thinker’, p. 262. 35 Cary Wolfe, Philosophy and Animal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), pp. 1–2. 36 J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Secker & Warburg, 1999), p. 143. 33

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Philosophical Reason and the Ethics of Conversion

99

critique—not, that is, for the sake of reason—but for the sake of moral life’.37 Coetzee, he argues, is a critic of the ‘cosmetic rationality of western civilization’ (this is Woessner’s rather appealing misquotation of the Nobel Citation, which refers to ‘cosmetic morality’), and he gives examples from a number of fictions that bear out this description.38 (The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus, published after Woessner’s article had appeared, provide even more confirmation of it.) Woessner understands that Coetzee’s ethical stance ‘is one that cannot be schematized, quantified, or taught, only dramatized via the unique form of the novel’39 and sees that the fictions, far from being ameliorative, chronicle ‘the desperation that marks life at the edges of the Western tradition’.40 However, Woessner, who finds his inspiration in Richard Rorty, takes as his watchwords two terms very familiar from the traditional criticism of the novel, ‘empathy’ and ‘imagination’, which may not be enough to get to grips with Coetzee’s radical break with traditional moral norms. In the end, like Crary, he views literature as having ethical influence through its exemplary force: Coetzee’s novels, he says, ‘give us stories and vocabularies that might help us to expand the boundaries of our sympathies’;41 they ‘help us to envision acting with love and charity and compassion’.42 I wouldn’t quarrel with any of these assertions, but they don’t capture what literature may achieve as literature: historical accounts or journalistic investigations may work ethically in exactly the same way. Coetzee’s challenge goes deeper than this. A philosopher whose writings on ethics are well known to Coetzee and who is likely to have made a more direct impact on his thinking than Levinas or Derrida is Raimond Gaita, and Gaita’s approach—partly derived from Wittgenstein—has much in common with Coetzee’s.43 The influence may, in fact, have been mutual: one of Gaita’s books, The Philosopher’s Dog, bears a recommendation by Coetzee and discusses passages from Coetzee’s fiction in the course of its arguments. (It is dedicated, incidentally, to Cora Diamond.) Here is a typical statement by Gaita, from his book Good and Evil: Because literature is imaginative, philosophers have always acknowledged that it can provide much food for the thought of philosophers and scientists, but only when what is nourishing to thought—genuinely cognitive content—can be abstracted from literary style and be brought to judgement before a court of philosophy and science. . . . Moral philosophy, even when pressing its meta-ethical task, its task of understanding this strange phenomenon we call morality and the place it has in our lives, should welcome prose enlivened by the realisation that to think of philosophy as a quest for understanding is not therefore to think of it as ideally free of feeling.44 37 Martin Woessner, ‘Coetzee’s Critique of Reason’, in J. M. Coetzee and Ethics, ed. Leist and Singer pp. 222–46. 38 Ibid., p. 225. 39 Ibid., p. 226. 40 Ibid., p. 240. 41 Ibid., pp. 239–40. 42 Ibid., p. 240. 43 See, in particular, Raimond Gaita, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2004); A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice (London: Routledge, 2000); and The Philosopher’s Dog (London: Routledge, 2003). Nora Hämäläinen discusses Gaita’s references to Disgrace in ‘Honour, Dignity and the Realm of Meaning’, in Language, Ethics and Animal Life, pp. 179–94. 44 Gaita, Good and Evil, p. xxxv.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Derek Attridge

100

And Gaita faces squarely the challenge of finding, in Disgrace, an ethical basis for David Lurie’s apparently pointless insistence on the wrongness of the beating of dog’s corpses into convenient packages for the incinerator. Gaita admits that some people, although they accept that humans can still be harmed after death by not being treated with dignity, will find it hard to accept that dead animals can be harmed in a similar way. And, having quoted the relevant passage, he comments: Someone who is moved by Coetzee, but who is not persuaded that dogs can be dishonoured by what is done to their dead bodies, would not be persuaded by further facts about dogs of the kind investigated by scientists.…Nor, I think, will someone be persuaded by reviewing their principles (if they have any) about how dogs should be treated.45

In explaining his position he emphasizes the role of the reader’s affective response to Coetzee’s writing: Coetzee invites us to extend our concept of dishonour to what we can do to dead dogs. We may accept or reject that invitation and if we accept it we might extend it more generally, or connect it with an understanding of how we can act for the sake of dead animals. If we accept the invitation it will be, I am sure, because of the quality of the writing and the way it has moved us. But if we try to extract from the fact that it has moved us a cognitive content, factual or conceptual…then we will not have refined our subject matter to make it suitable for, say, science or philosophy. We will have lost our subject matter.46

In a presumably unconscious echo of the passage he is discussing, Gaita insists that readers’ experience of (the) fiction—‘the quality of the writing and the way it has moved us’—should not be beaten into a convenient shape for rational use.

THE RISKIN ESS OF ET HICS None of these philosophers takes much, if anything, from Levinas’s account of ethics, which is based not on a set of norms or a static relationship, but on an event, a double event, in fact: the event of the other’s looking at me (or, more accurately, the other’s presence to me, since, like Costello, Levinas makes it clear that the ‘look’ need not be literal) and the event of my response—typically, in Levinas’s Biblical terminology, hineni, ‘Here I am’, expressive of my readiness to do whatever is needed to succour the other. And works of literature are also best understood as events, taking place in every reading that does justice to their literary quality, a reading that—like Levinas’s ethical response—is a paradoxical fusion of the active and the passive. (Gaita’s account of how the passage in Disgrace has power articulates a similar understanding of the ethical force of literature operating through the event of reading.) The specificity of literary works lies in the fact that they give us not information, moral exempla, or philosophical truths, but 45

Gaita, The Philosopher’s Dog, pp. 47–8.

46

Ibid., p. 59.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Philosophical Reason and the Ethics of Conversion

101

experiences, and experiences which, by taking us into new territory of meaning and feeling, are capable of changing us, however minimally or transiently.47 If we put together Coetzee’s observation in The Death of the Animal that our moral outlook is derived from particular experiences—a process he stages in many of his fictions—with Costello’s recommendation that her audience read poems in order to feel the force of her position (and perhaps be changed by their reading), we have the beginnings of an account of the ethical power of the literary. Diamond’s insistence on appreciating the intensity of Costello as a person within the fiction is relevant here, too: if The Lives of Animals alters the behaviour of any of its readers as a literary work, it is not because of the arguments Costello presents but the reader’s experience of her presentation of them, which includes an affective engagement with the character created within the fiction. But—and it’s a big but—can ethics dispense entirely with rational grounding and rely on the chance experiences life (and works of literature) may throw up? Might not my encounter with a member of another species—a rabid dog, say, or a charging rhinoceros—work a change in me from an animal-loving outlook to an animal-hating one? Can’t a novel render me more rather than less selfish, or a poem instil attitudes that demean the other gender, or a play make me fearful of immigrants? There are other domains that offer a non-rational grounding for ethics, of course—most obviously, religion. In another chapter of Elizabeth Costello, ‘The Humanities in Africa’, Costello’s sister Blanche attacks what her strong Christian beliefs lead her to call ‘the monster of reason’48 that in her view has taken Western civilization off the true ethical path. But religious grounding doesn’t avoid the difficulty of abrogating reason as a guide to morals. Someone who was very aware of the problem was Kant, who uses the story of Abraham and Isaac—the story used by Kierkegaard as an instance of the leap of faith—to emphasize what he sees as the danger of an ethical theory based on non-rational religious experiences. In The Contest of the Faculties it is Abraham’s willingness, on hearing a voice from above, to murder his own son that provokes Kant’s philosophical indignation: For if God should really speak to man, man could still never know that it was God speaking. It is quite impossible for man to apprehend the infinite by his senses, distinguish it from sensible beings, and recognize it as such. But in some cases man can be sure that the voice he hears is not God’s; for if the voice commands him to do something contrary to the moral law, then no matter how majestic the apparition may be, and no matter how it may seem to surpass the whole of nature, he must consider it an illusion.

The moral law for Kant, of course, does have rational grounding, and it is this that Abraham should have trusted:

47 I have presented this argument in The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004) and The Work of Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 48 Elizabeth Costello, p. 123.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

102

Derek Attridge

Abraham should have replied to this supposedly divine voice: ‘That I ought not to kill my good son is quite certain. But that you, this apparition, are God—of that I am not certain, and never can be, not even if this voice rings down to me from (visible) heaven.’49

The obvious concern that arises from references to the voice of God, prerational ethical impulses, conversion experiences, the call of the infinite, or mute appeals of the other is that they open the door to evil as much as to good; without the constraints of reason (or a Kantian understanding of moral duty based on rational grounds) any psychological event, however bizarre or destructive, could be taken as an ethical command by the individual or community experiencing it. Can we accept Lurie’s defence that his forcing himself on Melanie was at the bidding of Eros? Isn’t Dmitri’s murderous act in The Schooldays of Jesus a response to the urgings of his heart? To object in this way is, of course, a rational objection to the elbowing aside of rationality, and it may therefore not stick—certainly, Elizabeth Costello would think this. (Another of her acid comments is ‘Of course reason will validate reason as the first principle of the universe—what else should it do? Dethrone itself?’.50) Yet this opening to the other, it seems to me, is itself an ethical good, irrespective of outcomes, and not just in the reading of literature. It is, of course, a version of Levinas’s primal ‘Here I am’. It is what Costello means when she advises her audience not to seek for principles to take away from her talk, but rather ‘open your heart and listen to what your heart says’.51 Derrida’s many accounts of hospitality are concerned with the same understanding of ethics, and he stresses that openness to the other may bring evil as well as good.52 Coetzee is certainly not oblivious to the riskiness of this conception of the ethics of literature. The possibility of a literary work’s doing damage is at the heart of another so-called ‘lesson’ in Elizabeth Costello, ‘The Problem of Evil’, and we may suspect that reading Byron has had a less than wholesome effect on Disgrace’s David Lurie. When, in The Master of Petersburg, Councillor Maximov tells Dostoevsky that he makes reading sound like ‘demon-possession’ we have another glimpse of the riskiness of opening oneself completely to the experience of literary reading. The writer as well as the reader may proceed by a non-rational responding to voices, external or internal (the latter are termed ‘countervoices’ by Coetzee), with the same openness to any possible outcome, good or bad. The ending of The Master of Petersburg has Dostoevsky accepting the vision of evil that has appeared to him for the sake of literary creation (the last chapter is titled ‘Stavrogin’ after the morally dead villain of The Possessed ). And in the final lesson of Elizabeth Costello, ‘At the Gate’, Costello tells her judges that as ‘secretary of the invisible’ she is open to all voices, not just the victims’: ‘If it is their murderers and violators who choose to

49 Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), p. 115. 50 Elizabeth Costello, p. 70. 51 Ibid., p. 82. 52 See, for instance, Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000) and Jacques Derrida, ‘Hostipitality’, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 358–420.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Philosophical Reason and the Ethics of Conversion

103

summon me instead, to use me and speak through me, I will not close my ears to them, I will not judge them.’53 I don’t think Coetzee offers a solution to this conundrum, but then, as a writer of fiction, he is not obliged to. (He could be pressed on the issue when speaking philosophically—though as we’ve seen, he has no inhibitions about turning a philosophical discourse into a literary one.) What he does is to dramatize the problem, giving concrete form to the riskiness of any openness to the other, inviting the reader to experience the dangers as well as the rewards of trusting to the unknown (as Mrs Curren trusts Vercueil in Age of Iron and Elizabeth Costello trusts Pablo in The Old Woman and the Cats, and as Simón learns to trust David in The Childhood of Jesus). The event, as I am using the term, is intrinsically unpredictable, and hence the desirability or undesirability of its outcome is necessarily unknowable in advance. The endings of Coetzee’s fictions again and again stage the undecidability inherent in the event of trusting the other: will Vercueil post the letter? Will Pablo look after the cats? Is taking David at his word a disastrous mistake or a passport to a new life? Is Dostoevsky’s willingness to follow where his creative impulses lead him an artistic achievement or an appalling betrayal? There are no rational answers to these questions, just as there is no rational basis for Lurie’s insistence on the dignified treatment of the corpses of dogs or Paul Rayment’s refusal of a prosthetic limb. Whatever reasons may be given for such impulses, they are, as Coetzee says, post hoc rationalizations.

L I T E RA R Y F O R M, ET H I C S , A ND T H E L I MI T S OF REASON The world of Coetzee’s fictions is not that of individuals lurching from one irrational and unrestrained impulse to the next, however; the novel has form as well as content, and gives form to what it represents. Coetzee’s dismissive assertion that ‘all that a rational ethics can achieve is to articulate and give form to ethical impulses’ (my emphasis) may hold a clue to the specifically literary dimension of the problem of the conversion experience. In Disgrace, we read of Lurie’s attempts to provide a rational explanation for his unwillingness to let the dead dogs be beaten with shovels: Why has he taken on this job? To lighten the burden on Bev Shaw? For that it would be enough to drop off the bags at the dump and drive away. For the sake of the dogs? But the dogs are dead, and what do dogs know of honour and dishonour anyway? For himself, then. For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing.54

We may be reminded of Costello’s reply to President Garrard’s query about the source of her vegetarianism: when Garrard suggests that it ‘comes out of moral conviction’, she replies, ‘No I don’t think so. . . . It comes out of a desire to save 53

Elizabeth Costello, p. 204.

54

Disgrace, p. 146.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

104

Derek Attridge

my soul.’55 These explanations are at once deeply meaningful and extremely inadequate; they turn what is a profoundly other-directed response into something apparently self-directed. And we understand that the reason why they are inadequate is because there is no rational explanation of Lurie’s and Costello’s behaviour. But the whole context of the works in which they appear—the building up, by means of linguistic and generic resources, of complex characters who appeal as much to our emotions as to our intellect, the creation of a world of places, events, and relationships—enables us to feel with them, to understand in a non-rational way the compulsions which lead them to act in the way they do. That is to say, the novels as formal arrangements of language—form understood not as a matter of static organization but, as I’ve been emphasizing, as an event, one that involves all aspects of the writer’s craft—make these impulses anything but random or absurd. (Hence Gaita’s emphasis on ‘literary style’ and ‘the quality of the writing’ in my quotations earlier.) Where philosophy can construct rational arguments in favour of this or that line of action, a literary work can stage actions that remain unjustifiable in rational terms but that have an impact upon the reader with the force of their rightness. In the hands of a lesser writer than Coetzee, we would be merely puzzled and perhaps repelled by Lurie’s honouring of dead dogs, Costello’s vegetarianism, Mrs Curren’s trust of Vercueil, Rayment’s refusal of a prosthetic limb, and many more actions and attitudes in the oeuvre. When the characters in question attempt rational explanations of these actions and dispositions, the explanations work in the same way as the novels in which they occur: they give verbal form to impulses that are inherently non-rational, and through this form they convey—to themselves, occasionally to an auditor within the fiction, and usually to the reader—the force and rightness of those impulses. When Costello says ‘It comes out of a desire to save my soul’ she is not stating a psychological or theological truth that can be extracted from the context: it is a verbal event imbued with emotion that the attentive reader understands as such. The importance of that sense of rightness can be gauged by the few occasions when it is missing. In responding to The Childhood of Jesus it is difficult to empathize with Simón when his choice of a mother for David lights on an apparently unsuitable woman whom he has met by chance, and Simón’s own rationalizations of his action don’t have—to me, at least—the force of Costello’s or Lurie’s. Many readers find the compulsion driving Dostoevsky to reach his dead son in The Master of Petersburg equally obscure. In Disgrace, the explanations given by Lurie for his preying on Melanie—not strictly rational, since he appeals to the 55 Elizabeth Costello, p. 88. Costello’s—and Coetzee’s—use of ‘soul’ has much in common with Gaita’s employment of it. Gaita points to expressions like ‘soul-destroying’ and ‘suffering that lacerates the soul’ and states that ‘[t]he sense of such ways of speaking does not depend on the outcome of a metaphysical speculation about the existence of immaterial entities’. The soul, in this sense, is mortal, and ‘[t]he inner life, the life of the soul, consists of our emotions—love, grief, joy and, of course, intellectual passion—whose very existence is partly constituted by reflection’. It is this capacity for reflection on the quality of such emotions that distinguishes humans from other animals, according to Gaita; and on this argument, whatever David Lurie may believe, animals do not have souls. See Gaita, A Common Humanity, pp. 239–41.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Philosophical Reason and the Ethics of Conversion

105

irrational force of Eros—are clearly inadequate, and the personal context (such as the disastrous final encounter with the prostitute who calls herself ‘Soraya’) is insufficient to justify his actions. In all these instances, the character in question acts on an impulse that is not wholly validated by the fictional context. The Magistrate’s physical attentions to the barbarian girl in Waiting for the Barbarians constitute a more complicated case: their motivation remains as obscure to the reader as it does to the Magistrate himself, but the novel, rather remarkably, is able to suggest that they are the realization of a deep, and not wholly reprehensible, need. (This is one of many examples in Coetzee’s fiction of moments that are ethically significant though they don’t offer any kind of detachable moral lesson.) It may be, then, that the riskiness of an ethics of the heart is at least tempered by a consciousness of the operation of form or, to use another word Coetzee is fond of, grace. Costello’s daughter, in As a Woman Grows Older, comments on the effects on readers of her mother’s fiction: ‘You teach people how to feel. By dint of grace. The grace of the pen as it follows the movements of thought.’56 The reader’s engagement with the novel as an articulation in language of ethical choices—at least in the case of novels as fully achieved as Coetzee’s—is not a matter of accepting rational justifications of those choices (however broadly we define rationality), but of a complex experience, both mental and affective, of their being made, and of their rightness (or occasionally their wrongness) as this takes place in the fictional world. If this operates as a lesson for the reader—and I’m not sure it has to—it is the lesson that apparently arbitrary impulses like Costello’s adoption of the feral cats are anything but arbitrary; they spring from a life’s experiences and reflections on those experiences. In his account of the ethics of hospitality, Derrida distinguishes between ‘unconditional’ and ‘conditional’ hospitality, the former being a conception of hospitality as absolute and unlimited, however destructive to the host it may turn out to be, the latter a version of hospitality hedged with conditions and limits. His contention is that conditional hospitality on its own is not ethical, since it is entirely a matter of the rational calculation of benefits and losses; to be truly ethical it requires animation by unconditional hospitality, which is not rationally grounded. Derrida struggles to articulate the way this animation of the conditional by the unconditional operates, however; and this is hardly surprising, since the argument he is making is not a rational one.57 A literary work can do a better job, by making it possible for the reader to feel the force of the unconditional as it gives substance and urgency to an ethical choice, a choice that is made within the context of reason—the accumulated wisdom of a thinking human life—but is permeated with the extra-rational force of absolute openness to the other. The problem for philosophy is that it operates as a rational discourse, and hence finds it difficult to convey the ethical force of the literary event—the same problem that Elizabeth Costello faces in giving philosophical lectures on the human 56 J. M. Coetzee, ‘As a Woman Grows Older’, New York Review of Books, 15 Jan. 2004, http://www. nybooks.com/articles/2004/01/15/as-a-woman-grows-older/, accessed 19 Aug. 2016. 57 I have discussed this struggle in chapter 10 of The Work of Literature.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

106

Derek Attridge

treatment of animals (which is to say, the problem that Coetzee faced when invited to give the Tanner Lectures at Princeton). If Costello can be said to have overcome the problem and to have changed the behaviour of the members of her audience (though there are few signs that she did), it will have been because of her own compelling presence as a person; the impact of her passion, her dignity, and her frailty may have itself produced a conversion experience in some of her auditors. At any rate, these are the factors—as Cora Diamond appreciates—that may work on us as readers of The Lives of Animals, rather than any appeals to reason that she makes. This outcome is possible because Coetzee has solved his problem by delivering not a philosophical discourse but a fiction, a fiction in which the exceptional handling of linguistic and generic forms has the power to engender a conversion experience in the reader. We may find his assertions in propria persona—like the one I began this chapter with—extreme, but in doing so we are using reason to judge a statement that offers itself as rational. Literature works differently. If I seem to have been rather hard on philosophy in its dealings with literature, I had better end by pointing out that literary criticism isn’t in any better position, since it too is governed by the protocols and expectations of rationality.58 My arguments, like those of anyone making a similar case with the tools of reason, can only take one so far. It is literary writers like J. M. Coetzee, and not philosophers or critics, who ‘return the living, electric being to language’ and thus open readers to the possibility of ethical conversion.59

58 Derrida, in ‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’, suggests that ‘literary criticism is perhaps structurally philosophical’: Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (Routledge: 1992), p. 53. 59 An Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Research Fellowship from the HRC provided support for this research.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

7 Coetzee and Eros A Critique of Moral Philosophy Eileen John

Not because she has nothing to say about evil, the problem of evil . . . but because a limit has been reached, the limit of what can be achieved with a body of balanced, well-informed modern folk in a clean, well-lit lecture venue in a well-ordered, well-run European city in the dawn of the twenty-first century.

J. M. Coetzee enters deeply and critically into what you might call the philosopher’s plight. Are the methods and frameworks philosophers turn to in fact adequate for philosophical understanding? In reading Coetzee, I often feel ‘uneasy in my skin’ as a philosopher. The thoughts quoted above from ‘The Problem of Evil’ hit home, as I wonder if my desire to converse with others in an intellectually ‘clean, well-lit venue’ has some unhealthy consequences. In such an environment, do more tractable argumentative burdens inevitably take centre stage, with insufficient assessment of their priority? This chapter is an attempt to follow through on that experience. The two poles of the discussion will be the reality of moral reasons and the problematic power of eros. An idea that I take to be on offer in Coetzee’s fiction is that eros has a crucial role to play in moral life. This role is not easy to acknowledge, especially within the analytic philosophical mode of moral theorizing. It is common for moral theories to incorporate morally charged emotions such as guilt and shame, but the unruly phenomena of erotic desire seem at least unorthodox, if seeking a theory of morally responsible life. Nonetheless, I take Coetzee to be pressing a problem for moral philosophy that leads to an embrace of eros. This discussion is also motivated by a fairly unphilosophical question about Coetzee. What can be made of his works’ insistent attention to unwanted, humiliating, variously ill-fated erotic attractions, often between an older man and a younger woman (e.g. in Diary of a Bad Year, Slow Man, Disgrace, The Master of Petersburg, and Waiting for the Barbarians)?1 David Lurie laments, on his disgrace with Melanie Isaacs, that he is ‘On trial for his way of life. For unnatural acts: for broadcasting old seed, tired seed, seed that does not quicken, contra naturam’. 1 The biographer in Summertime prompts one of his interviewees: ‘Yet the theme of the older man and the younger woman keeps coming back in his fiction.’ J. M. Coetzee, Summertime (London: Vintage, 2010), p. 215.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

108

Eileen John

When Lurie continues, ‘Half of literature is about it: young women struggling to escape from under the weight of old men’,2 it seems Coetzee may be goading his reader to reply, ‘No, half of your literature is about it!’ But in fairness, the erotic impulse in Coetzee’s work is much more diversely directed than this paradigm suggests. Many characters, female and male, young and old, are moved in unexpected and possibly transformative directions, as in the eventual intimacy of Mrs Curren and Vercueil in Age of Iron, or the hint of attraction Lurie feels towards Melanie’s father.3 The theme of eros, and specifically the Platonic linkage of eros and educative transformation, are in play in any number of Coetzee’s works. My starting point is the early fictional work Dusklands, as it forcefully presses the problem for moral philosophy. I will read this work in terms offered by Thomas Nagel’s contemporaneous moral theory, which is both illuminating with respect to Dusklands and a striking exemplar of the problem. I will then turn to the much later ‘autrebiographical’ work Summertime, to explore the moral potential of eros.

MOR A LITY AN D B EING ON E A MO NG OTH ERS Coetzee’s Dusklands and Nagel’s moral theory were in formation in the late 1960s and early 1970s, during the US Vietnam War. In quite different forms, these writers convey a sense of passionate protest against the war, most obviously in Coetzee via Dusklands’ excruciating narrative of a US military propaganda researcher.4 Though Coetzee refers directly to Nagel in The Lives of Animals (and Elizabeth Costello)—in the fictional Costello’s reference to Nagel on the subjectivity of bats5—the Coetzee–Nagel connection of interest here lies less in relation to any actual influence than in their comparable yet divergent conceptions of moral life. Let me begin with a summary of Nagel’s central line of thought in The Possibility of Altruism (further articulated and revised in The View from Nowhere). Morality, Nagel says, is grounded in ‘the conception of oneself as merely a person

2

J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 1999), p. 190. See Ibid., p. 167. 4 Nagel’s 1972 essay ‘War and Massacre’, in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 53–74, begins: ‘From the apathetic reaction to atrocities committed in Vietnam by the United States and its allies, one may conclude that moral restrictions on the conduct of war command almost as little sympathy among the general public as they do among those charged with the formation of US military policy’ (p. 53). From Nagel’s The Possibility of Altruism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970): ‘We all have reason . . . to prevent [people] from being filled with shrapnel or coated with napalm’ (p. 133). William Calley, a US Army officer convicted in 1969 for the massacre at My Lai, is mentioned in Nagel’s later The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 124, 137. Coetzee’s 2009 Summertime lightly revisits in its semi-fictionalizing mode ‘the scandal’ of John Coetzee’s ‘expulsion from the United States’, his father ascribing it to ‘That terrible war’ (p. 131), a colleague saying that he ‘fell foul of the authorities there . . . a turning-point in his life’ (p. 227). 5 In Thomas Nagel’s 1974 essay ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (Oct. 1974): pp. 435–50. 3

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Coetzee and Eros

109

among others equally real’.6 To conceive of oneself and others in this way requires that ‘any type of thing which one can significantly assert of oneself—what one is thinking, feeling, or doing—must be significantly ascribable in the same sense to others’.7 Nagel argues from this relatively slender basis—awareness of oneself as one among others, to be understood on terms consistently applicable to those real others—to the view that we have objective reasons to act altruistically. We each face a requirement for intrapersonal coherence, a ‘need to avoid motivational dissociation between the personal and impersonal standpoints’.8 In order to view myself as having reasons to live one way or another, those reasons have to hold up as reasons for someone to live that way.9 If I do not achieve that dual self-understanding, I risk ‘solipsistic dissociation’ in which I cannot think or make judgements in the same terms about my reality and the reality governing lives viewed impersonally.10 With that dual perspective, I can recognize objective reasons, reasons that do not depend on the fact that I am the one occupying a specific position. In The View from Nowhere, Nagel retreats from some aspects of this account, but maintains the core of the argument.11 He asks, with respect to pain, whether the kind of reason people have to avoid pain for themselves can be plausibly combined with impersonal indifference to it. Here the argument from dissociation seems to me persuasive. If we assign impersonal value to pleasure and pain, then each person can think about his own suffering not just that he has reason to want it gone, but that it’s bad and should be got rid of.12

The refusal to take a person’s pain as objectively bad, and as providing me with at least prima facie reason to work against it, would leave me unable to claim the badness of my own pain. In thinking of my own suffering as a bad thing to be alleviated, I end up committed to the reason-giving-ness of the suffering of others. On pain of dissociation, I need to acknowledge that others generate reasons as I do. Turning to Coetzee, one may worry about emphasizing being just one person among others. Coetzee confronts us with the reality and moral relevance of nonhuman animals, beings not commonly categorized as persons. It does not seem promising to follow through on Nagel’s idea—that whatever we say about ourselves needs to be say-able about those sharing our moral reality—if these others include dogs, giraffes, bats, and so forth.13 I set this worry aside, somewhat problematically— seeking a ‘clean, well-lit’ focus—but also because doing justice to the morally relevant reality of other persons is so important in Coetzee’s work. It is worth trying to understand the specific challenges of sharing a world with human persons in morally adequate ways. For this purpose, Nagel’s simple, almost banal conception—I am one

6

7 Ibid., p. 101. 8 Ibid., p. vii. Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism, p. 14. 10 Ibid., p. 124. Ibid., p. 19. 11 See Nicholas Sturgeon, ‘Altruism, Solipsism and the Objectivity of Reasons’, Philosophical Review 83, no. 3 (1974): pp. 374–402, for a critique of Nagel’s position (and for an argument that, in fact, Nagel’s reasoning condemns all of us to dissociation). 12 Nagel, The View from Nowhere, p. 160. 13 This is the focus of Elizabeth Costello’s engagement with Nagel in J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 31–5. 9

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

110

Eileen John

person among others—strikes me as capturing the basic moral sense-making in Coetzee’s work. The pressure of other persons’ reality shows up for the reader as non-negotiable, in the midst of registering portrayals of its violation.14 Dusklands pairs, without explanation, the narratives of Eugene Dawn and Jacobus Coetzee. Dawn is a researcher in the US military’s ‘Mythography’ section, and, though specializing in psychological tactics, he ultimately favours ‘total airwar’.15 The eighteenth-century narrative of Jacobus Coetzee relates his travels with his servants into the territory of the Namaquas. A remark from Dawn suggests a way of conceiving of the pairing, one serving my purposes here: ‘I speak to the broken halves of all our selves and tell them to embrace, loving the worst in us equally with the best.’16 For a reader of Plato, this is likely to summon up Aristophanes’ myth in the Symposium, accounting for love as the result of our whole selves having been split in two by offended gods, love then being the quest to find one’s other half—a quest for wholeness but also sameness.17 We might think of Eugene Dawn and Jacobus Coetzee as mirroring halves who belong together. The challenging thought from Aristophanes, that love seeks ‘fit’ with another, rather than seeking the beautiful or the good, is perhaps evoked as well by Dawn’s call for loving the worst equally with the best.18 I will not say much about the thoughts and deeds that show them embracing the worst; to use a term of Jacobus Coetzee’s, their stories are replete with ‘savagery’.19 Solipsism as an experience and a condition to be enacted is a motif in both halves of Dusklands. Eugene Dawn has dreams in which he tries to embrace the Vietnamese whose torture he documents: ‘My fingers, expressive, full of meaning, full of love, close on their narrow shoulders, but close empty, as clutches have a way of doing in the empty dream-space of one’s head.’20 Similarly, Jacobus Coetzee reports on his travels in an increasingly contradictory and solipsistic mode. After his botched but ultimately devastating massacre, Jacobus Coetzee speculates about whether he may have missed the crucial reality of others. With regard to these four deaths and what others occurred, I will say the following, if any expiation explanation palinode be needed. 14 See Jonathan Lear on Señor C’s ‘metaphysical ache’, in Diary of a Bad Year, for ‘a living recognition of the reality of others’: Jonathan Lear, ‘Ethical Thought and the Problem of Communication’, in J. M. Coetzee and Ethics: Philosophical Perspectives on Literature, ed. Anton Leist and Peter Singer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), pp. 65–88; 86. 15 J. M. Coetzee, Dusklands (London: Vintage, 1998), pp. 28–9; Derek Attridge, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 14. 16 Dusklands, pp. 29–30. 17 Plato, Symposium, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 189c–193e. 18 Julia in Summertime says: ‘For real love you need two full human beings, and the two need to fit together, to fit into each other. . . . But the fact is, John wasn’t made for love, wasn’t constructed that way—wasn’t constructed to fit into or be fitted into’ (p. 81). 19 Dusklands, pp. 97–8. 20 Dusklands, p. 34. These passages, and Dusklands more generally, have been fruitfully read in terms of Hegel’s master–slave dialectic, or, as David Attwell argues, a master–‘savage’ dialectic: David Attwell, J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 48–55.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Coetzee and Eros

111

How do I know that Johannes Plaatje, or even Adonis, not to speak of the Hottentot dead, was not an immense world of delight closed off to my senses? May I not have killed something of inestimable value? . . . If the Hottentots comprise an immense world of delight, it is an impenetrable world, impenetrable to men like me, who must either skirt it, which is to evade our mission, or clear it out of the way. As for my servants . . . I know with certainty that their life held nothing but anxiety, resentment, and debauch. They died in a storm of terror, understanding nothing. . . . They died the day I cast them out of my head.21

The possibility that Jacobus has killed Blakean worlds of delight is rejected with certainty, while asserting that he has no access to the relevant evidence. The solipsistic position seems to ‘save the day’. If nothing outside his head is real, then the prospect of others’ delight and suffering, and of anguish and remorse on his part, can be dismissed.

TH E F RAILT Y O F MO RAL REASON S I hope the discussion so far shows the resonance between Nagel’s and Coetzee’s moral terms. However, I expect that it may also feel problematic to apply or match Nagel’s theory to Coetzee’s concerns. The ‘mismatch’ claim I want to press is that the burden of proof falls in different places in Nagel’s and Coetzee’s projects. I have presented Coetzee’s works (represented at this point only by Dusklands) as sharing with Nagel a kind of meta-ethical commitment to moral realism, to the meaningfulness, and truth or falsity, of moral claims (e.g. the Namaquas did not deserve to be killed, debasement of prisoners of war is morally wrong) and to the reality of moral reasons (i.e. we have moral reason not to act savagely). Nagel takes the latter in particular as the crucial thing to be proven—the objective reality of moral reasons needs philosophical defence. In the context of philosophical ethics, the status of moral reasons is definitely to-be-debated. I do not suppose that Coetzee would deny that philosophical argument is worth offering on this issue. But how far does that argument take us? Readers of Coetzee are likely to question what we have achieved even if we do ‘win’ the argument along Nagel’s (or other moral-realist) lines. In Coetzee’s works, the moral pressure of reality is indeed there, not to be worried away or shored up by premises and reasoning. The burden is rather to awaken us to how we evade and violate that reality and to understand our resources for reckoning with it. Nagel acknowledges that proving that morally objective reasons bear on us does not show that this reality has a morally effective impact: ‘This result stands even though we are often weak, cowardly, self-deceiving, and insensitive to the reality of other persons.’22 Further: ‘Even though altruistic 21 Dusklands, p. 106. Derek Attridge notes that this passage from the 1760 narrative, with its ‘immense world of delight’, alludes to Blake’s 1790 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell ( J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, p. 16). Coetzee also alludes to it in the foreword to Jonathan Balcombe’s Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 22 Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism, p. 124.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

112

Eileen John

motives depend not on love or on any other interpersonal sentiment, but on a presumably universal recognition of the reality of other persons, altruism is not remotely universal, for we continually block the effects of that recognition.’23 For a book with a suggestively upbeat title, The Possibility of Altruism ends on a rather despairing note: ‘The manner in which human beings have conducted themselves so far does not encourage optimism about the moral future of the species.’24 On the terms of the preceding philosophical argument, Nagel’s lack of optimism is puzzling. If the ground for moral reasons is so simple and accessible—notice that you are one person among others—how do people block it out? That we can name some of our failures to follow through on moral reality properly (weakness, cowardice, self-deception) does not explain why it is so easy to block the operation of reality and the reasons it gives us. A mystery remains at the end of a book like Nagel’s that seems acutely under-acknowledged.25 In his essay ‘War and Massacre’, Nagel directly addresses the problem that facts on the ground, such as ‘the day-to-day conduct’ of the Vietnam War, show people not responding decently to moral reasons.26 His goal there is to show the importance of ‘absolutist’ moral commitments, which hold ‘that certain acts cannot be justified no matter what the consequences’.27 Absolutism is needed to counter utilitarianism that seems in principle open to justifying such things as ‘the indiscriminate destructiveness of antipersonnel weapons, napalm, and aerial bombardment’.28 In such contexts, absolutist intuitions ‘are often the only barrier before the abyss of utilitarian apologetics for large-scale murder’.29 I think we can, unusually, feel the outrage driving the philosophical argument—the philosopher wants his reasoning to make effective contact with morally outrageous circumstances. The absolutist may indeed have the advantage over the utilitarian with respect to preventing some ‘moral deliberation’ from getting started. But in the context that Nagel is moved by, and that Coetzee evokes in Dusklands, the appeal to absolutism seems like a desperate move. Saying unwaveringly that large-scale murder is unjustifiable—that we have un-contestable reason not to do it—seems to draw a line in the sand that we have readily crossed many times. It is not that there is no point in being able to comprehend and justify moral judgements. I think that Nagel can be read to some extent as a partner with Coetzee, in trying to understand what it is to live in a morally indefensible way. The problem is to think that we could turn to moral reasons, and to confidence in their reality, to understand morally responsive and decent living. Nagel offers solipsism as the threat or the cost of moral indecency, as a psychological–epistemological–rational 23

24 Ibid., p. 146. Ibid., pp. 145–6. Here is philosophical contemporary Robert Nozick acknowledging the limits of his moral theorizing, which ‘does not take account of the searing events of this century: the destruction of European Jewry, the Soviet system of labor and penal camps . . . These events create a rift in the (moral) universe. It is not that the principles of traditional moral philosophy, as herein pursued, do not apply to these situations . . . Rather, those principles do not especially and saliently illuminate these events and conditions. . . . I am painfully aware that this chapter does not speak to that need.’ Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 402. 26 Nagel, ‘War and Massacre’, p. 57. 27 Ibid., pp. 57–8. 28 Ibid., p. 57. 29 Ibid., p. 56. 25

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Coetzee and Eros

113

impasse that we cannot live with or, more modestly, do not live with—Nagel affirms that ‘we are not solipsists’, though ‘the temptations of solipsistic dissociation are considerable’.30 Coetzee creates characters who in deep ways bear out Nagel’s claims, indeed showing solipsism as a cost, but who nonetheless live with it. As in the portrayal of Jacobus Coetzee, solipsism may even offer solace and an ill-examined justification for ‘dismissing’ others. One of the main concerns of Coetzee’s fiction is that even though the claims of others are real, they do not (or cannot) put up much or any resistance to violation. We might comfort ourselves that Coetzee’s characters, in their extremity, are over-the-top caricatures of solipsistic moral failure. But it seems that Nagel himself does not see real agents, in the evidence of his own time, as experiencing the needed resistance from reality. At this juncture, one response on behalf of philosophy is that this is not a philosophical problem anymore. Perhaps empirical psychologists and hands-on moral educators can understand what it would take for people to be adequately responsive to moral reasons. It is true that a set of philosophical ideas and arguments cannot take responsibility for making people live morally. But the challenge for philosophy posed by Coetzee is not practical in that sense. The challenge is whether a philosophical theory that aims to account at least for the intelligibility of moral life has the conceptual and explanatory resources to do so. The claim so far is that the resources of reasons, grounded in the reality of being one among others, are not enough. It is not just that people do not respond to moral reasons (the problem being to motivate them to respond), but that we do not yet understand what it would take for moral reality to have force. If we do not understand that, there is important unfinished business for reason-centred theories: what is the point of talking about reasons if they can be, in a way, so irrelevant? In the context of Coetzee’s fiction, that people have reason not to do certain things—that they should not massacre a peaceful village—seems plain enough but horribly inert. We need deeper understanding of what makes people responsive to moral reality. Let me acknowledge that philosophers by no means ignore the problem of moral motivation. It is a focus of intensive debate.31 I set this debate aside without adequate engagement, but with the broad-brush point that it too seems to assume a different

30

Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism, pp. 106, 124. The debate divides in part into ‘internalist’ and ‘externalist’ positions, disputing whether competent moral judgement incorporates motivation. The preceding discussion makes a roughly externalist point: moral reasons seem accessible to understanding but not motivating. For some influential contributions to this debate, see J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (New York: Penguin, 1977); Bernard Williams, ‘Internal and External Reasons’, in Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 101–13; Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Sigrún Svavarsdóttir, ‘Moral Cognitivism and Motivation’, Philosophical Review 108 (1999): pp. 161–219; and Russ Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003). See Connie S. Rosati, ‘Moral Motivation’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, winter 2016, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2016/ entries/moral-motivation/, for an up-to-date account of the debate, accessed 11 Oct. 2016. 31

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

114

Eileen John

burden of proof. The debate commonly takes the fact of moral motivation as its starting point and disputes how to situate it (‘inside’ or ‘outside’ competent moral judgement). Connie Rosati introduces her survey of this debate by noting ‘a widely shared assumption, one which forms part of the backdrop for debates about the nature of moral motivation, namely, that moral motivation is a strikingly regular and reliable phenomenon’.32 Without denying that human behaviour shows a striking amount of morally decent motivation, I will say that it sounds hopeless as a background assumption when you lift your head from reading Coetzee. If and when people achieve reliable moral motivation, there will be an interesting story to tell about the conditions, practices, experiences, and self-understandings that sustain it. Coetzee draws us into that story, prior to a conception of people as reliably morally motivated.33

EROS AND PHILOSO PHICAL ASCENT How might eros, as conceived in Coetzee’s work, be relevant to making moral life intelligible? This can sound unpromising, precisely because eros as commonly understood is not subordinate to or regulated by moral reasons. That common understanding seems right; if eros does support moral responsiveness, it will not be because it is itself a morally regulated phenomenon. For the moment, let me just say that the promise of it, the way in which appealing to eros might not simply be a non sequitur in the Nagel–Coetzee conversation, is that eros has a capacity to awaken us to the reality of others. My textual and philosophical route into this claim focuses on some passages that I take to allude to Plato.34 In a passage from Dusklands quoted earlier, Jacobus Coetzee raises the possibility that an ‘expiation explanation palinode’ is needed for his actions.35 The notion of a palinode is famous in philosophy for its place in Plato’s Phaedrus.36 There Socrates gives a speech he refers to as a palinode, intended 32 Section 1 of Rosati, ‘Moral Motivation’ (italics in original). Rosati also explicitly notes that on this assumption the phenomena of missing moral motivation should accordingly stand out as problematic: ‘Of course, the less puzzling and more mundane moral motivation comes to seem, the more puzzling failures of moral motivation become. If we are to explain moral motivation, we will need to understand not only how moral judgments so regularly succeed in motivating, but how they can fail to motivate, sometimes rather spectacularly’ (introductory section of ‘Moral Motivation’). 33 Margaret Urban Walker, ‘Ineluctable Feelings and Moral Recognition’, in Moral Contexts (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), pp. 141–64, casts a number of philosophical arguments as all too hopeful ‘about the availability of what is apparently a difficult achievement: the conception of simple common humanness with a uniform moral meaning’ (p. 148). ‘There is reason to think . . . that the process . . . in which people are seen in their simple, fully comparable, and morally fundamental humanness is not a simple process’ (p. 146). 34 Stephen Mulhall, The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), examines more fully Coetzee’s engagement with Plato, and specifically Plato’s critique of literature, with poetry obstructing human efforts to ‘live a good life through a lucid grasp of reality—the task to which philosophy distinctively devotes itself ’ (p. 2). 35 Dusklands, p. 106. 36 Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Christopher Rowe (London: Penguin, 2005), 242c–243d.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Coetzee and Eros

115

to retract and improve on a previous speech on eros that he is ashamed of.37 I think you could read the versions of Jacobus Coetzee’s narrative as ‘anti-palinodic’, as the later versions become increasingly distorted. But I am more interested in what I see as a palinodic relation between Dusklands and Summertime. Summertime mostly consists of five fictional interviews with people who knew the late author John Coetzee, focusing on the period in which his book Dusklands was written and published. The near absence and silence of female characters in the early work, and its suffocating immersion in the hideous projects of Eugene Dawn and Jacobus Coetzee, are replaced by brisk, candid, shifting, and often extremely funny interviews with four women and one man in Summertime. The interviewees recall John Coetzee’s middling to unsatisfactory performances as lover, son, cook, manual labourer, dancer, cousin, friend, and teacher. Some of the humour of Summertime is at the expense of Dusklands. Julia, one of John Coetzee’s lovers from the period, gives a rather hilarious account of flipping through the proof copy: ‘Someone complaining about his wife. Someone travelling by ox-cart. “What is it?” I said. “Is it fiction?”’38 Julia also broaches a critique of the imaginative labour behind Dusklands, saying she suspects ‘it is a lot easier to make up bad characters— contemptible characters—than good ones’.39 The Platonic antecedent for the later work seems to be Plato’s Symposium, with its relatively comic and sociable sensibility, its series of different speakers and ‘takes’ on love, and its mystical female figure Diotima, who teaches Socrates about love. As reported by Socrates, Diotima conceives of eros as lack: eros ‘needs and lacks beauty’.40 Adriana in Summertime, an unrequited love of John Coetzee’s, reports having thought to herself: ‘Among the many things this man lacks, the many many things, one is a tutor to give him lessons in love.’41 Diotima’s account of eros is, broadly, that eros is a beauty-seeking, moving force that can take us all the way from narrowly physical, individual erotic attractions to love for virtue. Here are some of Diotima’s suggestive ideas and imagery: eros occupies a ‘middle ground’ between the divine and the human. An intermediary is needed because divine and human beings cannot meet directly; ‘skill in this area is what makes a person spiritual.’42 What we do under the influence of eros calls for 37 Several passages in Dusklands may summon up the palinode’s charioteer-and-winged-horses myth of the soul (Phaedrus, 246a–257a). See Dusklands, pp. 32, 38, 77, 81; Summertime, p. 183; and Jonathan Lear on Phaedrus and Diary of a Bad Year (‘Ethical Thought and the Problem of Communication’, p. 70). 38 Summertime, p. 55. 39 Ibid., p. 56. See Plato, The Republic, trans. D. Lee (London: Penguin, 1987), 604e–605a. 40 Plato, Symposium, 201b. 41 Summertime, p. 172 (italics in original). The Childhood of Jesus also dwells on eros-as-lack, offering both defence and trenchant criticism: ‘This endless dissatisfaction, this yearning for the somethingmore that is missing, is a way of thinking we are well rid of, in my opinion. Nothing is missing.’ J. M. Coetzee, The Childhood of Jesus (London: Vintage, 2013), p. 75. I thank Rafe McGregor for steering me to this. 42 Plato, Symposium, 202e–203a. Lesson 7, ‘Eros’, in Elizabeth Costello concerns ‘the intercourse of gods and mortals . . . What intrigues her is less the metaphysics than the mechanics, the practicalities of congress across a gap in being’ (p. 184). Envying the urgency of mortal eros, the gods ‘specialize in humankind because of what we have and they lack’ (p. 189).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

116

Eileen John

the vocabulary of pregnancy and birth, which in Diotima’s discourse downplays literal procreation, serving rather as a metaphor for seeking and producing what is attractive in ever more universal, atemporal, virtuous, and less bodily ways (e.g. just laws and institutions).43 Though we begin with attraction to an individual beautiful body, eventually we long to ‘give birth in that medium to beautiful reasoning’, love being generally for ‘birth and procreation in a beautiful medium’.44 Eros gives access to a ‘ladder’ that leads the lover up to ‘that final intellectual endeavour’, ‘the sight of beauty itself, in its perfect, immaculate purity—not beauty tainted by human flesh and colouring and all that mortal rubbish’.45 Diotima’s view is that eros is not just desire in the ordinary sense, taking an ordinary desire to be a moving force explained by what I am and what I know or believe (for example, my desire to catch the next bus because I am late for work). If my current state constitutes, and explains the action of, my desires, then eros is a somewhat more mysterious thing. With erotic desire (bodily and beyond), supposedly, I am open to influence, I am pulled or drawn towards what I am not and do not yet know. I have a hint of something whose properties I have not fully experienced and am open to change and generative activity in light of this potential. I do not have knowledgeable control over what I am getting into, with an erotically attractive other. Diotima uses the ‘middle ground’ claim to say, in part, that eros is a desire for more than bodily existence, for at least a conscious, appreciative relation to what I am not. More abstractly, the idea is that eros has a mediating status between explanation (human bodies bumping into each other as causally related things) and justification (divine intellects pursuing what is known to be worth pursuing). As erotic beings, we are not quite doing either of those things, but let our pleasures guide us in a hopeful spirit (‘maybe we will get somewhere better than where we are now’). Diotima’s claims can seem far too glib. The ladder image asks us to envision eros steadily, rung by rung, getting us closer to loving eternal beauty and virtue (aligned or merged at the top of the ladder). She offers eros as a coherent mechanism for getting us to know and be motivated by objectively real value—eros leads us towards the dazzling power of incontestable reasons. Maybe many of us go up the ladder so slowly that we never get very far, but still, that is the direction in which the ladder goes. However, some of the moves from rung to rung, such as the very first ones, leaving behind the beauty of this body for the beauty of bodies in general, or leaving behind bodies for the beauty of souls, are not transparent. Are those transitions intelligible? Would eros point us in a single direction?46

43 See Lear on the Symposium and pregnancy in relation to Diary of a Bad Year (‘Ethical Thought and the Problem of Communication’, pp. 72–4). 44 Plato, Symposium, 210a, 206e. 45 Ibid., 210a–211e. Simón in The Childhood of Jesus, after making a plea for ‘embracing inferior copies’ on the ‘ascent towards the good and the true and the beautiful’, tells his friend to ‘[a]sk yourself where we would be if there were no such things as ladders’ (The Childhood of Jesus, pp. 167–8). 46 In the Phaedrus, a more variegated vision is offered, with different kinds of souls being moved towards different kinds of satisfaction (248a–253c). See Part III of Martha Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) for

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Coetzee and Eros

117

Note as well that Diotima’s story has a special application to philosophy. The ascent up the ladder is a story of philosophical progress, reaching a vision of universal truth and value. This idea—that philosophy is at heart an erotic activity, in which we are moved by a lack of and need for beauty—is both a well-known Platonic formula and a difficult thought.47 Is eros lurking in the careful engagement with concepts, distinctions, and arguments familiar to most working philosophers? I take it that Diotima’s claim is that there is an erotic element in the very ‘birth of reasoning’, driving the movement and progress of understanding. This seems to me one of the ideas that draws Coetzee to Plato and that helps explain the specifically philosophical provocation in Coetzee’s writing. The example of a philosophical issue that I am discussing (the frailty of moral reasons) is at one level just a particular issue on which, I suggest, Coetzee steers moral philosophers towards eros as a resource. At another level, this is one strand of the far bigger question of what it takes to become fully aware of and adequately responsive to reality. That question does not ultimately single out those identified or self-identified as philosophers. We all face a burden of figuring out how to be responsive to the real. But I think it is particularly hard for avowedly philosophical inquirers to digest this claim, if they do not already think that erotic attraction is the deep ‘method’, as it were, of their work.

EROS AND THE REALITY OF OTHERS Although there is a comic lightness of spirit in Summertime, the idea that eros matters to teaching and learning seems to be one of its earnest concerns. There is an implicit suggestion that John Coetzee loved and learned from the interviewees. He participates in two teacher–pupil relations—as poetry tutor for teenager Maria Regina, and then, infatuated with Maria Regina’s mother Adriana, as a student in Adriana’s dance class. Adriana is implacably suspicious of his relationship with her daughter and refuses to teach him to dance. Here John Coetzee obtusely defends his pedagogical ideas to Adriana, alluding to Diotima’s ascent: What I call my philosophy of teaching is in fact a philosophy of learning. It comes out of Plato, modified. Before true learning can occur, I believe, there must be in the student’s heart a certain yearning for the truth, a certain fire. The true student burns to know. In the teacher she recognizes, or apprehends, the one who has come closer than herself to the truth. So much does she desire the truth embodied in the teacher that she is prepared to burn her old self up to attain it. For his part, the teacher recognizes and

extensive discussion of ‘ladders’ of erotic ascent, with a critique of Plato’s ladder at pp. 496–500. Nussbaum is concerned throughout with the reclamation of erotic love within ethical life. 47 The difficulty I have in mind is not the actual problem of philosophers treating pedagogical relations as routes into sexual relations (though that issue is not irrelevant to this discussion as a whole); rather, Diotima’s story of philosophical progress as erotic can be hard to recognize in one’s ordinary philosophizing.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

118

Eileen John

encourages the fire in the student, and responds to it by burning with an intenser light. Thus together the two of them rise to a higher realm. So to speak.

Adriana comments: ‘That does not sound like philosophy to me, Mr Coetzee.’48 In the stand-off between Adriana and John Coetzee, Adriana probably gets the punchier lines and wins the battle in shutting out her would-be lover. But for the reader their dispute is genuinely confusing and difficult to resolve. As far as the fictional construction of reality goes, Adriana seems to be both wrong and wise. Coetzee the tutor is not intent on seducing Maria Regina, but actually wants to light a fire of enthusiasm for poetry in her. Her mother thus seems frustratingly unable to trust her daughter to pursue her own passions. But Adriana also seems right in that John Coetzee’s model of teaching and learning seems irredeemably risky (as the ‘So to speak’ perhaps hints). Can the learner know there is ‘truth embodied in a teacher’? How can the learner tell that what the teacher embodies is worth burning up one’s old self for? The shared conflagration model seems ripe for grossly exploitative power trips and destructive infatuations, as well as genuinely precious mutual transformation. Meanwhile, with respect to John Coetzee’s efforts to woo Adriana, it made sense for her to reject him, as he sparked nothing in her and seemed to misunderstand her. Yet it seems that he was not just humiliatingly infatuated with the wrong person. He apprehended in her something that he lacked—his desire to learn from her ease and power as a dancer was not humiliating in a deeper sense. The point I want to make with this passage is that it is part of a critical, wary embrace and revision of Diotima’s message. The ideas are ‘out of Plato, modified’ in various ways. First, there is no guarantee that eros will produce a mutual ascent, but it does have immense transformative power. It is a mistake, ultimately, to deny and frustrate its workings. But there is no stable ladder; there is a risky drive at work in us that can go terribly wrong. Vulnerable people can be ‘burnt up’ in the course of someone else’s attempted erotic ascent.49 And, furthermore, eros is not simply a vehicle for increasing intellectual endeavour; bodily transformation and relation, as in dance and sex, show up in Coetzee as high, not to-be-transcended erotic achievements.50 Now, with this conception of eros in mind, how could appealing to eros help with the problem of moral reasons? One passage that opens up this possibility is from the earlier Dusklands. Jacobus Coetzee, while being nursed back to health by the Namaquas, has a powerful response to the music and dance at a village celebration:

48

Summertime, p. 163. Ido Geiger identifies this riskiness pointedly in his discussion of ‘the terrible proximity of love and rape’ as a theme in Coetzee: Ido Geiger, ‘Writing the Lives of Animals’, in J. M. Coetzee and Ethics: Philosophical Perspectives on Literature, ed. Leist and Singer, pp. 145–69; 159. He takes Coetzee to highlight the proximity and undecidability of good and evil more than I do; I think that what is evil is often clear in Coetzee, but nonetheless the impulses that can move us towards good forms of love can fail us as well. 50 Adriana’s critique of John Coetzee’s dancing is deep: ‘Dance is incarnation. In dance it is not the puppet-master in the head that leads and the body that follows, it is the body itself that leads, the body with its soul, its body-soul. Because the body knows! It knows!’ (Summertime, p. 199). 49

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Coetzee and Eros

119

the involutedness of the posture of the men, attuned behind their closed eyelids to quite private elaborations of melody and rhythm, the knowing irony of the women playing the tiny movements of their hands and feet against the massive stillness of their haunches, filled me with new anxiety, sensual terror. . . . The dance prettily suggested this circling chase [of doves]; but besides depicting the chase it also brought out what lay within it, two modes of sexuality, one priestly and ecstatic, the other luxurious and urbane. Nothing would have relieved me more than for the rhythms to simplify themselves and the dancers to drop their pantomime and cavort in an honest sexual frenzy culminating in mass coitus.51

The depth and articulation of this response is, for the reader as well as the character, a rare escape from Jacobus Coetzee’s habitual dismissal of his human companions. The crucial idea is that the experience of Namaqua music and dance should fill someone like him with anxiety and terror. It is an intimation of eros, both in himself, as he is drawn into the celebration and feels its complex allure, and in the dancers themselves. It gives Jacobus Coetzee access to what he does not want to know, that they are erotic beings, moved by complex meaning and desire, such that, if he really knew them, there would be no ‘relief ’ from their complexity. A passage from the beginning of Boyhood, Coetzee’s first ‘autrebiography’, is also relevant here, setting the issue in a very different human context. The boy has seen his mother riding her bicycle, looking ‘young and fresh and mysterious’, but her bicycle-riding is a matter of controversy: Soon afterward the bicycle disappears. No one says a word, but he knows she has been defeated, put in her place, and knows that he must bear part of the blame. . . . The memory of his mother on her bicycle does not leave him. She pedals away up Poplar Avenue, escaping from him, escaping towards her own desire. He does not want her to go. He does not want her to have a desire of her own.52

The child here, understandably, cannot take pleasure in his mother as a desirer. It is not easily within the reach of a child, who needs secure attention, to find this attractive in a parent. But I hope it otherwise seems right that experiencing others as desiring things, as having sources of pleasure and change that one does not understand or share, is or can be attractive. Adriana is attractive to John Coetzee in part because she dances, and this involves appreciating her as moving (literally and figuratively) in directions that matter to her. Jacobus Coetzee starts to get this kind of awareness of the Namaquas, but is afraid to absorb it. Eros shows up in this picture twice. The lover is erotically attracted to another as a being who is also moved by eros. The further thought is that this kind of experience and conception of others is essential to experiencing others’ full reality.53 51

Dusklands, p. 86. J. M. Coetzee, Boyhood (London: Vintage, 1997), pp. 3–4. 53 My point here has some connections to Samantha Vice’s view that Coetzee presses for an ideal uniting ‘truth and love’, in which ‘a true and unbiased vision is allied to a deep interest in particular individuals’: Samantha Vice, ‘Truth and Love Together at Last’, in J. M. Coetzee and Ethics: Philosophical Perspectives on Literature, ed. Leist and Singer, pp. 293–315, 295. In Coetzee’s novels, ‘the ethical test [is] to love and trust in the face of opacity and indifference and against all reason’ (p. 307). However, this trusting love, which Vice argues persuasively is an ideal present in Coetzee’s 52

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

120

Eileen John

If I do not have this awareness of others, I fail to grant them the kind of ‘moving space’ they occupy. Failure to experience people as being alluringly in erotic motion does not seem to be itself a moral failure, but I think it can be viewed as a protomoral failure. Not appreciating and being stimulated by another’s passions is a step in the direction of not honouring that other’s claim to a good life. And, though taking pleasure in others’ erotic potential is not identical to having moral respect for them (e.g. on Kantian terms, respecting others as ends and not means), it is also not irrelevant to respecting others in that way. It is a way of experiencing them as not ‘sitting still’ for one’s use. What Coetzee offers as most capable of puncturing Jacobus Coetzee’s defensive solipsism is erotic attraction and experience of others as erotic. The obvious parity of myself as one among others may ground the truth of moral claims, but I think Coetzee proposes that another kind of experience is needed to awaken me effectively to sharing reality, and wanting to share reality, with others. To further illustrate, let me bring in Foe as another work in which the erotic impulse seems to have a crucial but difficult role in moral transformation. Foe is not transparent with respect to its fictional reality, but one governing narrative thread is Susan Barton’s effort to tell a story, apparently her story as a castaway on an island with Friday and Cruso. Over the course of recounting her effort, she shifts her sense of what the story needs to do and puts Friday, and how he came to lose his tongue, at the centre: ‘The shadow whose lack you feel is there: it is the loss of Friday’s tongue. . . . The true story will not be heard till by art we have found a means of giving voice to Friday.’54 In the story she begins to tell anew at the end, she is no longer an innocent inquirer after the fact. I will sum up her change simply by saying that Friday has become real to her, and this has radically transformed the story she needs and wants to tell. What brings about this change? From the reader’s point of view, it is terribly long in coming. She and Friday live in close company for some time, depending on each other practically, with Barton taking only small, equivocal steps towards acknowledging Friday as a fully real and morally demanding companion. A pivotal event is that Friday finds a robe and wig and, wearing them, becomes absorbed in a spinning kind of dance. The robes have set him dancing, which I had never seen him do before. . . . If the sun is shining he does his dance in a patch of sunlight, holding out his arms and spinning in a circle, his eyes shut, hour after hour . . . In the grip of the dancing he is not himself. He is beyond human reach.55

Barton eventually answers a question about Friday (has he been castrated?) through seeing him naked as he spins. ‘The whirling robe was a scarlet bell settled upon Friday’s shoulders and enclosing him; Friday was the dark pillar at its centre. What work, seems already benevolent. I think Coetzee points to the need for an attraction to others that can grab us with no presumption of benevolent concern. Eros is also not an experience of opacity or of being against reason. The other is not fully opaque—we have a hint of their erotic life, and though eros is not itself a matter of justified action, it might turn into the stuff of reasons and knowledgeable pursuit of good. 54 J. M. Coetzee, Foe (London: Penguin, 1986), pp. 117–18. 55 Ibid., p. 92.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Coetzee and Eros

121

had been hidden from me was revealed. I saw; or, I should say, my eyes were open to what was present to them.’56 Barton herself adopts Friday’s spinning dance at a low moment in their travels together and it restores her: what I had seen in my trance . . . had been a message . . . to tell me there were other lives open to me than this one in which I trudged with Friday . . . As long as we two are cast in each other’s company, I thought, perhaps it is best that we dance and spin and transport ourselves.57

Friday’s dance is initially something like the boy’s mother bicycling away from him, as it shows Barton that Friday has drives and pleasures that can effectively take him away from her. Unlike the boy, she can be attracted by the intensity and majesty of his transports. They trigger a new desire in her to converse with him (which she attempts in various ways).58 Barton does not recount what she saw under his flying robes, and her growing desire to converse with him and know his story is not portrayed as a standard sexual attraction. But I think it is clear that the doubled erotic movement is at work: as she sees he is the centre of his own erotic motion, she becomes increasingly absorbed in him. The morally consequential result is that she becomes unable to treat him as more dismissable, less real, than herself. Foe complicates this transformation in at least two ways. One is that Barton’s growing desire to tell Friday’s story does not move, as far as Coetzee’s reader can see, in a steadily morally salutary direction. She persistently worries about her role as a storyteller and the desires to control and entertain that seem built into that activity. Her appreciation of another’s absorption in things she does not understand is in some tension with her own storytelling ambitions. Coetzee is not simply celebrating the erotic impulse within storytelling, and certainly not giving it a moral ‘free pass’. The ‘storytelling’ role seems to have metaphorical expansiveness: anyone who wants to respond to an alluring other by incorporating the other into her own activity seems at risk of taking charge of the form and point of the incorporating response. The second complication emerges from the trickiness of who counts as real in Foe. One can read this as a tale of one consciousness, populating itself with others for purposes of adventure and conversation. Read in this way, Foe returns us to the question of solipsism. I think we can see Coetzee here introducing an erotic element into one’s relation to oneself, again with powerful moral potential. Hannah Arendt, in a discussion of thinking, connects these ideas around the claim that, as conscious beings, we are ‘two-in-one’. There is an ‘intercourse between me and myself (in which we examine what we say and what we do)’.59 In this ‘soundless dialogue’, being two-in-one meant simply that if you want to think you must see to it that the two who carry on the thinking dialogue be in good shape, that the partners be friends. It is better 56

57 Ibid., p. 104. Ibid., p. 119. For example, by playing flutes: ‘Is conversation not simply a species of music in which first the one takes up the refrain and then the other? . . . Are not music and conversation like love? . . . is it not true that something is passed between [lovers], back and forth, and they come away refreshed and healed for a while of their loneliness?’ (Foe, pp. 96–7). 59 Hannah Arendt, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture’, Social Research 38, no. 3 (1971): p. 444. 58

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

122

Eileen John

for you to suffer than to do wrong because you can remain the friend of the sufferer; who would want to be the friend of and have to live together with a murderer? Not even a murderer.60

Barton’s restless pursuit of Friday’s story, whether Friday be a real other or part of her own two-in-one, can be read in Arendt’s terms as an effort to like who she is living with in her own consciousness. Coetzee can then be seen as further revising what the threat of solipsism is. Perhaps the deepest threat is not having incoherent perspectives on ourselves and a consequent lapse of reasons, but being stuck in the closest possible, unenjoyable intimacy. Arendt herself is adamant that the thinker trying to enjoy her ‘soundless dialogue’ is not thereby doing good: ‘Thinking as such does society little good, much less than the thirst for knowledge…It does not create values, it will not find out, once and for all, what “the good” is.’61 Arendt sees the erotics of thinking as eroding entrenched habits and obliviousness, but not as directly morally constructive. I have been suggesting that Coetzee’s works do not resist the constructive potential of eros in the same way. They accept its dangerousness, but also show the motion of attraction and appreciation as able to transform our sense of what is real and what we want to live with. This discussion leaves many questions for further discussion. What are the prospects and problems on the path from finding others alluring in their own erotic movement to finding them to be real and morally compelling? The question of why eros is a morally unreliable force, why it is a risky route into the reality of others, is especially important, and is unresolved here. Giving eros this role means granting that moral life grows out of the experience of morally unregulated forces of attraction and passion. It may sound philosophically unsatisfying to set moral life on this kind of ‘moving’ basis, but this is the kind of challenge Coetzee’s work offers. Philosophers’ assumptions about the most pressing questions and the form that satisfying answers to them can take are themselves vitally questioned in his work.62

60

61 Ibid., p. 444. Ibid., p. 442. Thanks to all participants in the Coetzee and Philosophy workshop, and especially to its organizers and this volume’s editors, Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm, for generous help. Thanks also to Michael Bell, Christina Britzolakis, Diarmuid Costello, Ulrike Heuer, Matthew Kieran, Rafe MacGregor, Emma Mason, Aaron Meskin, Matthew Rumbold, and Judith Suissa. 62

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

PART III REALITY, LANGUAGE, AND SUBJECTIVITY

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

8 Coetzee’s Quest for Reality Alice Crary

VARIETIES OF LITERARY R EALISM J. M. Coetzee’s novelistic output is aptly described as a powerful ‘quest for reality’. His novels are characterized by a consistent concern with striking features of the world and of our lives in it. Many of the novels are designed to get readers to register the awfulness of particular forms of political upheaval by underlining vulnerabilities that we humans have as distinctive kinds of animals. The books invite us to regard human cognitive development as essentially involving the growth of affect, and they also ask us to acknowledge that it is an implication of this understanding of the expansion of mind that, far from immunizing us against accidents of bodily existence, our rational natures leave us exposed to such accidents and hence in the condition of animals. This image of our cognitive capacities is, moreover, depicted as inseparable from a distinctive construal of moral responsibility. A common motif is that, in any situation, we may need to fill out affectively in order to bring features of our lives clearly into view. So it is invariably possible that we will have to develop beyond our current selves, grasping at patterns that aren’t yet fully in focus and putting behind us forms of life and personal ties in which those new patterns are not at home. What emerges is a noteworthy conception of moral responsibility that plays an organizing role within the arresting picture of reality that Coetzee pursues in his novels. To say that Coetzee’s novelistic oeuvre is a reality-oriented enterprise is not to associate it with the genre, or set of stylistic specifications, that is often placed under the heading of realism. Introduced in the nineteenth century for literary projects that deal with the affairs of common as opposed to socially distinguished characters, and that deal with these affairs in a colloquial manner, the label ‘realism’ is today frequently applied to novels that inherit prominent stylistic procedures of their nineteenth-century predecessors (e.g. omniscient narrative and the rich use of descriptive detail to create an elaborate appearance of social reality).1 Setting aside 1 For a classic account of the origins of the idea of realism as a novelistic genre, see Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London: Vintage Books, 1956), especially chapter 1 (‘Realism and the Novel Form’), pp. 9–34. For a recent publication that uses ‘realism’ as a term for stylistic conventions inherited from the nineteenth century, see Zadie Smith’s ‘Two Directions for the Novel’ in her Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (New York: Penguin Press, 2009),

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

126

Alice Crary

for a bit the question of whether talk of realism might helpfully be reclaimed for another purpose, a cursory examination of Coetzee’s work suffices to show that he has little interest in fidelity to the relevant procedures. Although some of his narratives are set within recognizable historical contexts, even these works break from ‘realism’ understood as a genre concept (e.g. by abstaining from omniscient narrative strategies and making sparse use of descriptive details). Additionally, many of his novels are formally farther from genre-based realism (e.g. those that make significant use of meta-fictional gestures, incorporate manifest inconsistencies in their accounts of their fictional worlds, and traffic in allegories of various kinds). It is fair to say that Coetzee has no particular love for the constraints of such realism— and that he exhibits a formal restlessness that represents a rebuke to any fixed set of stylistic constraints. While Coetzee’s formal daring thus places him at odds with the sorts of narrative conventions distinctive of the genre (or class of genres) that has been placed under the heading of ‘realism’, it doesn’t follow that his formal gestures aren’t integral to his efforts to shed light on how things really are. A good case can be made for thinking that Coetzee employs his signature stylistic devices in ways that internally inform these reality-directed efforts, and that his novels owe a great deal of their intensity and interest to the thoughtfulness with which he does so. It is difficult to do justice to these topics without wading at least a short distance into the domain of philosophy. A helpful way to open a discussion of how Coetzee combines his formal concerns with a commitment to confronting reality is by drawing attention to an influential philosophical line of reasoning that seems to close off the possibility that the capacity of a text to convey an understanding of worldly things might be an essential function of its form. At the heart of this line of reasoning is the following picture of our cognitive predicament. Here, elements of our subjective makeups such as attitudes are presumed to have an essential tendency to block our view of the world. So we are only entitled to our confidence that we have brought worldly affairs into focus if we step back and survey things in a manner that abstracts from affective and other aspects of subjectivity. Consider how this picture seems to speak against allowing that the use of formal techniques might contribute internally to conveying genuine understanding. The techniques or devices in question include things like ambiguity, rhythm, repetition, page layout, and patterns of imagery, as well as particular temporal strategies, descriptive methods, and narrative structures. The use of these devices colours our experience as readers, directing our attention and shaping our sense of importance, and are hence rightly understood as resources for engaging us affectively—or, alternately, as expressive resources. Granted a picture of our situation as knowers on which our affective endowments appear to veer necessarily towards distorting genuine understanding, it appears that the expressive qualities of a text, while perhaps capable of moving us in ways that contribute externally to the pp. 72–96. See also James Wood’s critical survey of the work of theorists who speak of realism exclusively in this genre-bound sense, in ‘Truth, Convention and Realism’ in his How Fiction Works (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), pp. 223–48.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Coetzee’s Quest for Reality

127

growth of understanding, cannot make an internal contribution to our grasp of reality.2 So we might speak of scepticism about the cognitive power of the expressive. Or, bearing in mind that an expressive dimension is a mark of literary discourse, we might also speak of scepticism about the cognitive power of literature. Such scepticism figures prominently in ongoing conversations in literarytheoretical circles, showing up in different guises. It takes what is arguably its most straightforward form in debates about literary questions within AngloAmerican analytic philosophy. A fair number of parties to analytic debates about these questions are happy to bluntly declare that literature qua literature cannot immediately inform our understanding of the world or, in the words of two quite representative thinkers, Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, that literature is ‘not “truth-telling” in any straightforward sense’.3 The species of scepticism about the cognitive power of literary discourse that gets expressed in analytic settings is typically of a merely local variety that co-exists with a non-sceptical view of other non-literary forms of discourse. The analytic thinkers who give voice to this strain of scepticism generally maintain that there are non-literary forms of discourse that invite wholly dispassionate modes of thought—modes of thought that therefore count as cognitively unblemished.4 These thinkers set out to challenge the cognitive credentials of literary discourse in part because they want to impress on us the superior credentials of the forms of discourse that they take to be in the business of fostering these unobstructed modes of thought. The sceptical view of the cognitive power of literature that they advocate is in this respect of a merely local variety.5 This is neither the only nor even the most common guise in which scepticism about the cognitive power of literature figures in literary-theoretical conversations. There is a more widespread type of such scepticism that informs the work of many theorists influenced by poststructuralism. Poststructuralist theorists by and large converge with the sorts of sceptically inclined analytic thinkers just discussed in assuming that reality (or ‘reality’) is such that all of our attitudes—including those that literature as literature cultivates—have an irredeemable tendency to block mental access to it. Still in step with their analytic counterparts, these theorists mostly go on to conclude that literary discourse is not as such in the business of 2 To allow that the expressive qualities of a text might contribute externally to understanding is to allow that these qualities might get us to notice things that we had previously failed to register but that are indifferently available to thought and in principle conveyable by other (plainer) means. 3 Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 440. 4 These thinkers don’t generally deny that literary works can contain passages (e.g. descriptions of persons, actions, and traits of character, arguments or fragments of arguments, etc.) that invite cognitively untarnished thought. Their point is not that literature cannot contain such passages, but rather that qua literature it cannot. For discussion, see Alice Crary, ‘Ethics and Literature’, in The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, ed. Hugh LaFolette (London: Wiley Blackwell, 2013). 5 A good list of analytic publications that defend versions of this local scepticism might include Larmarque and Olsen, Truth, Fiction and Literature; Onora O’Neill, ‘The Power of Example’, in Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 165–86; Richard A. Posner, ‘Against Ethical Criticism’, Philosophy and Literature 21, no. 1 (1997): pp. 1–27; and D. D. Raphael, ‘Can Literature Be Moral Philosophy?’, New Literary History 15, no. 1 (1983): pp. 1–12.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

128

Alice Crary

putting us in touch with reality or, in Roland Barthes’s words, that ‘what goes on in a narrative is, from the referential (real) point of view, strictly speaking nothing’.6 But this alignment between moments in analytic and poststructuralist traditions is a limited one. Those on the poststructuralist side generally hold not only that every step of thought we take is necessarily informed by our sense of the importance of similarities linking it to previous steps, but also that there can therefore be no such thing as a wholly dispassionate mode of thought. This means that for them there can be no question of downgrading the cognitive status of literary forms of discourse in favour of non-literary forms that promote such hygienic thinking. These theorists do not deal in a merely local type of scepticism about the cognitive power of literature. They ground their doubts about literature’s value as a route to understanding in a more generalized scepticism on which all discourse is in what they see as the condition of literature, a condition that involves being cut off from ‘reality’ full stop.7 Despite its divergence from the local scepticism about the cognitive power of literature championed by some analytic philosophers, this generalized scepticism shares with its local cousin a fundamental premise. Both sceptical projects depend for whatever interest they have on an assumption to the effect that elements of our affective makeups veer necessarily towards occluding our view of reality. Yet this assumption is not sacrosanct. It is foreign to some significant traditions in literary studies. Particularly noteworthy in this connection is a loose body of scholarship distinguished by what might be called a ‘non-sceptical’ conception of literature’s cognitive potential. The various thinkers who contribute to this rough corpus demonstrate their hostility to the assumption that affective endowments invariably tend to obstruct understanding by allowing that stylistic techniques that direct our affective responses can, in virtue of doing so, light up features of reality that aren’t independently accessible. To mention one prominent twentieth-century critic who fits this description, Lionel Trilling holds that elements of a novel’s style that give us a feel for the mood or manners of a social setting can thereby promote what he calls—to now attribute the current chapter’s titular phrase—its ‘quest for reality’.8 Or, to mention another prominent twentieth-century literary figure who can also be described in these terms, E. M. Forster repeatedly suggests that literary techniques that appeal to our hearts can position us to grasp neutrally unavailable

6 See Roland Barthes, ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives’, trans. Lionel Duisit, New Literary History 6, no. 2 (1975) pp. 237–72; 271. 7 Classic poststructuralist contributions to the articulation of this generalized scepticism include Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974); Jacques Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’, in Limited, Inc. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), pp. 1–19; Jacques Derrida, ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’, in Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 207–72; and Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class: The Authority of Interpretative Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). 8 Lionel Trilling, ‘Manners, Morals and the Novel’, The Kenyon Review 10, no. 1 (1948): pp. 11–27; 17. Trilling gives a more expansive defence of his non-sceptical view of the cognitive power of literature in Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Coetzee’s Quest for Reality

129

aspects of a world of ‘richness and subtlety’.9 The sort of non-sceptical view of the cognitive power of literature that gets spelled out in the writings of these thinkers— as well as in the writings of some of their like-minded contemporary peers—is a view on which the formal or expressive qualities of a work of literature are capable of contributing internally to its ability to shed light on reality.10 This view equips us to take seriously—and to bring to bear on, among other literary works, Coetzee’s novels—the idea of an internal relation between reliance on particular formal procedures and the pursuit of reality. Given that Coetzee’s literary authorship is distinguished not merely by the striking nature of some of his individual formal devices but by the range of these devices he employs, it’s noteworthy that it is possible to find, within the writings of thinkers sympathetic to non-sceptical views of the cognitive power of literature, a strategy for celebrating such formal flexibility. The core of this strategy is the recognition that stylistic devices that serve, at a given time and place, to shift our sense of importance, bringing into view previously undetected features of the world, may become familiar and tired and cease to have any notable effect. Stylistic convention thus, as the theorist James Wood quips, ‘has a way of becoming, by repetition, more and more conventional’.11 So, it is incumbent on literary authors to be open to the possibility that they may need new stylistic tools and, where their tools have worn down (or where new problems call for new tools), to be prepared to—as Virginia Woolf urges—‘keep moving’.12 This suggestion about a need for openness to stylistic innovation is, in the work of the theorists and critics under consideration, prompted by the non-sceptical thought that such openness is required for literature to retain ‘maximum contact with . . . contemporary reality’.13 9 The quoted phrase is from E. M. Forster, ‘Notes on the English Character’, in Abinger Harvest (London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1964), pp. 3–15. For a detailed account of Forster’s nonsceptical view of the cognitive power of literature, see Alice Crary, Beyond Moral Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 10 For defences of such non-sceptical views within contemporary analytic philosophy, see, e.g. Alice Crary, ‘Does the Study of Literature Belong in Moral Philosophy? Some Reflections in the Light of Ryle’s Thought’, Philosophical Investigations 23, no. 4 (2000): pp. 315–50; Cora Diamond, ‘Anything But Argument?’, in The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 275–301; Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Nora Hämäläinen, Literature and Moral Theory (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015); Edward Harcourt, ‘Truth and the “Work” of Literary Fiction’, British Journal of Aesthetics 50, no. 1 (2010): pp. 93–7. 11 James Wood, ‘Truth, Convention, Realism’ pp. 223–48; 236. James Wood makes this quip while mounting a spirited defence of the non-sceptical view that the conventional qualities of a work can contribute internally to its ability to convey genuine understanding of reality. He notes that in claiming that, with use and time, literary conventions die, he is generalizing a familiar observation about how, with use and time, metaphors die. 12 Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, iv: 1925–1928, ed. Andrew McNeille (London: The Hogarth Press, 1984), pp. 157–65; 157. Woolf is doubtful about the usefulness of saying that literary works are oriented towards ‘reality’, but this is not because she harbours sceptical reservations. It is because she suspects that this makes the critical reception of literature seem more routine than it is. She prefers to say that the literary author’s task is to keep ahold of ‘life or spirit, truth or reality’ (p. 160). 13 M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 11.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

130

Alice Crary

This thought provides an opening for revisiting the question of how the term ‘realism’ is best used in reference to literature. We might well use this term for literary pursuits that, instead of adhering to a set of antecedently given literary conventions or genre constraints, accommodate this kind of formal pliancy in the interest of exposing aspects of how things really are. But this is a primarily terminological issue. Without regard to what vocabulary we opt to use, it remains the case that a non-sceptical account of ways in which stylistic plasticity and a commitment to the pursuit of reality can go hand in hand provides a fitting backdrop against which to consider Coetzee’s literary achievement.14

T H E DR I V E T O W AR D S RE A L I T Y I N DISGRACE AND W A IT IN G FO R THE B AR B AR IANS For a straightforward example of how Coetzee uses his stylistic practice to further his push towards reality, consider Disgrace. Disgrace’s central character, David Lurie, is a white, middle-aged academic in newly post-apartheid South Africa whose research explores the writings of poets such as Wordsworth who, as Lurie sees it, believe that cognitive development essentially involves the growth of the heart. Despite his scholarly views, Lurie resists experiences that challenge him emotionally, telling himself that he is too old to change,15 and this posture is represented as cutting him off from a good understanding of a couple of major episodes in his life. Early in the novel, he is charged with sexual harassment for a sexual relationship with a young coloured woman in one of his classes. Not long afterwards, he is in a house on the Eastern Cape with his grown daughter Lucy when Lucy is attacked and raped by two black men and a black boy. Lurie doesn’t have a good understanding of what happened, or of where his own responsibility lies, in either case. He only starts to approach a slightly better comprehension of his social world when events in his life put pressure on some of his most deep-seated attitudes, producing the kind of emotional change that he himself had been inclined to resist. Lurie then begins, very imperfectly, to register the fact of his own bodily exposure, and to recognize the importance of similarities between his life and the lives of other human beings, as well as of animals. At the same time, he starts to register that his past emotional fixity was a mark of intellectual limitation. He now haltingly exhibits the tractability of feeling to allow himself to be pulled beyond the sphere of thought he previously inhabited, and he tacitly acknowledges challenges of thought that he had earlier been unable to recognize or meet. In addition to thus making a thematic issue of this conception of our intellectual and moral condition, Disgrace exemplifies it in formal terms. The novel’s narrative 14 Generalizing these reflections beyond literature to the arts more generally, we could say that some influential twentieth-century theorists of art—such as Stanley Cavell and Michael Fried—take the kind of genre-contesting, formal experimentation in question (viz., formal experimentation internal to the pursuit of reality) as a mark of aesthetic modernism. 15 J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (New York: Penguin, 1999), pp. 49, 66, 72, 77, 172, 209, 216.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Coetzee’s Quest for Reality

131

takes the form of a present-tense, third-person account of Lurie’s thoughts and actions. Focalization through Lurie invites readers to share in his impressions as he goes through his various (largely self-inflicted) tribulations, finds himself overwhelmed by his own physical frailty, and ultimately registers morally salient resemblances between human life and the lives of animals that he had previously denied. This narrative strategy positions us imaginatively to experience a selftransformation that, in opening to a new vision of the world, is capable of uprooting those who take part in it from old ideas, habits, and social ties. It is in this way that Disgrace formally grapples with the features of reality, those that make up its distinctive image of our intellectual situation, that are dealt with thematically within its story. Something similar can be said about Waiting for the Barbarians, a novel that Coetzee published nearly two decades before Disgrace. The novel is set in a fictional colonial empire, and its central character is the magistrate of a remote city where many years prior to the narrative’s start an entire indigenous population, that of the story’s so-called ‘barbarians’, was displaced. The magistrate is easy-going and indolent, and he has never exerted himself to comprehend either the harms done by the continued functioning of the empire’s repressive institutions or the extent to which he himself benefits from and perpetuates these institutions. When, prompted by rumours of a new ‘barbarian’ attack, representatives of the empire’s civil guard arrive at the magistrate’s outpost and begin torturing and killing ‘barbarian’ prisoners, the magistrate is sincerely horrified. But in his efforts to resist he reinforces the structure of the oppressive practices he wants to challenge. He focuses his beneficent attention on a young ‘barbarian’ woman who has been left blind by the newly arrived imperial agents. Although moved by her plight, he winds up causing her pain and humiliating her, playing a role in her life that, as he himself reflects, is in some respects analogous to that of her torturers. The magistrate’s— culpably ill-considered—efforts on the young woman’s behalf enrage the colonel who is leading the imperial delegation, and this colonel has the magistrate imprisoned and tortured. During the period of his imprisonment, he begins, partially and imperfectly, to appreciate some vulnerabilities he shares with others as well as some political structures that exploit these vulnerabilities. Within the narrative the shift in perspective occasioned by his suffering is depicted as being in significant part responsible for these improvements in his grasp of the social world around him. Waiting for the Barbarians is thus like Disgrace in descriptively presenting a conception of cognitive development on which new sensitivities may be necessary for the growth of mind. Waiting for the Barbarians is also like Disgrace in being preoccupied with this conception at the level not only of its descriptive themes but of its formal structure. Not that there aren’t conspicuous differences between the formal methods of these two novels. Waiting for the Barbarians differs from Disgrace in that it is set in an invented world (as opposed to a recognizable real-world time and place) and in that it is narrated in the first person (not the third) by its magistrate anti-hero. Yet there are notable parallels in how the two narratives work. Disgrace uses a third-person, present-tense narrative that focalizes through Lurie, putting

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

132

Alice Crary

readers in the position of seeing through Lurie’s eyes, and Waiting for the Barbarians uses a first-person, present-tense narrative, similarly, to encourage identification with its narrator. Within Waiting for the Barbarians, we are called upon imaginatively to join with the magistrate, both initially in downplaying the moral and political significance of the fact that he is an official representative of the empire, and also later in registering the awfulness of the pain and degradation he suffers and in gradually looking at the city around him in a new way. We are encouraged imaginatively to participate in a change in evaluative perspective that brings into focus previously unavailable aspects of the social world. That is what it comes to to say that, like Disgrace, Waiting for the Barbarians explores a distinctive conception of cognitive and moral development, both descriptively and in its formal structure. These reflections have implications for how we should approach the fact that Waiting for the Barbarians can be read as a political allegory. Read in this manner, the novel invites comparison with atrocities of contemporaneous apartheid South Africa as well as with those of other racist, colonial, and post-colonial powers. Yet it would be wrong to assume that we can do justice to it by offering a merely theoretical mapping of aspects of its fictive world onto aspects of the real world. As Derek Attridge argues in an insightful discussion, a good account of even those features of the novel that seem most clearly to call for allegorical interpretation presupposes a sensitivity to perspectives revealed by experiencing what its narrative structure sets us up to undergo.16 This kind of intertwining of formal and descriptive elements is a mark of the intense delving into reality of Coetzee’s novels more generally. Admittedly, as we saw, many theorists tacitly assume that there are antecedent philosophical grounds for denying that formal gestures which engage us can as such contribute directly to an undistorted grasp of reality—and for accordingly embracing some version of a sceptical view of the cognitive power of literature. Yet there are reasons even beyond those discussed thus far for thinking that Coetzee is hostile to such scepticism. It’s not merely that he writes novels that call on us to understand them in non-sceptical terms; some of his novels also draw attention to philosophical resources that could be used to mount a defence of the kind of non-sceptical view of the cognitive power of literature that the novels are presented as enacting. A PH IL O S O P H I C A L R E A D I N G OF THE C HILDHOOD OF JESUS Consider in this connection The Childhood of Jesus. This novel features a particularly striking treatment of the conception of moral and intellectual development that also figures elsewhere in Coetzee’s oeuvre. At issue is a conception on which affective endowments are internal to all cognitive capacities, and on which it is invariably possible that we will require new routes of feeling in order to bring 16 See Derek Attridge, ‘Against Allegory’, in J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (London/Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 32–64.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Coetzee’s Quest for Reality

133

particular features of our lives clearly into focus. The Childhood of Jesus contains an involved—simultaneously descriptive and formal—treatment of challenges we thus confront as beings who live with the ineradicable prospect of a call to self-transcendence. Further, the context for its engagement with the idea that it is part of the reality of our lives that thinking exposes us to a demand to work on ourselves is a narrative that investigates lines of reasoning Coetzee would need to pursue if he wanted to mount a philosophical defence of his own reality-directed novelistic practice. The Childhood of Jesus is set in a mythical society that as far as possible excludes thinking that involves self-transformation. Every person is an immigrant of a fantastic sort, having travelled by boat to the land in question, and having in the process been ‘washed clean’ of her or his memories.17 New arrivals spend weeks or months in camps, where they are assigned names and ages, and where they are supposed to acquire an at least rudimentary grasp of Spanish (the local language) before being referred to a Centro de Reubicacíon—or Relocation Center—that assists with arrangements for employment and permanent housing. Because the people who come through these institutions are largely bereft of memories, and because the society they thereby enter—Novilla—is a young one,18 there is no question of a historical perspective that would reveal past social changes and suggest the possibility of a transformed and potentially more satisfactory future order. Any desire or intuition that speaks for a different (and potentially superior) image of social life is taken to be a vestige of a past from which an individual has failed to free herself, a meaningless remnant that needs to be disregarded and ultimately discarded. Purged of disruptive affect, Novillan society is made up of relationships and institutional arrangements that are abstract or universal as opposed to personal.19 It lacks irony as well as the kind of doubleness that is at play in talk about a distinction between reality and appearance,20 and it cannot sanction thinking that aspires to move us beyond appearance to a higher reality. The novel’s main character is a middle-aged man who resists incorporation into Novillan society. Together with a young boy, he has arrived at a nearby camp, where he was assigned the name ‘Simón’ and the age of 45, and the boy was assigned the name ‘David’ and the age of 5. Simón has trouble fitting into Novillan society because he is attached to the idea that his desires have, over time, shaped the person he is, informing his understanding. So he can’t bring himself to give up either ‘the feel of residence in . . . a body soaked in its past’21 or the passions and appetites internal to this way of experiencing himself. He dislikes Novillan food, which is bland and heavy on bread, crackers, and bean paste, and he longs for ‘beefsteak with mashed potatoes and gravy’.22 He is also dismissive of local attitudes 17 J. M. Coetzee, The Childhood of Jesus (London: Harvill Secker, 2013), pp. 20, 21, 62, 55, 65, 77, 80, 85, 106, 114, 143, and 208. 18 The novel doesn’t feature any pregnancies or characters who were born in the main local city, Novilla, which is Spanish for a cow who has yet to calve. 19 The Childhood of Jesus; see esp. p. 57. 20 Ibid., see pp. 41–2 and 64. See also pp. 122 and 207. 21 Ibid., p. 143. 22 Ibid., p. 29; see also p. 122.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

134

Alice Crary

to sex, which treat it as an inconvenient urge to be dealt with as neatly and hygienically as possible, and unsatisfied with the tepid intercourse he has with a neighbour, yearning instead for intense sexual contact capable of transforming a relationship. At one point, Simón accompanies a comrade of his named Eugenio to a community centre called the Institute where Novilla’s adults go after work for free classes. Simón spends a few minutes in a philosophy seminar and finds the class discussing the problem of universals (e.g. the problem of what unifies all chairs as chairs despite individual differences) and ‘solving’ the problem by introducing abstract essences (e.g. the idea of ‘chairness’).23 Because Simón believes that appearances can reveal themselves to be misleading, he has no patience with abstract essences or other metaphysical constructs that drain the world of ambiguity. He tells Eugenio that he hankers after not this kind of philosophy but, rather, a philosophy ‘that shakes one’ and ‘changes one’s life’.24 The project that preoccupies Simón when he and David first get to Novilla is emblematic of this bent towards non-conformity. Simón is determined to reunite David with his mother. Simón explains to officials that he is not a relative of David’s and that he assumed responsibility for the child because David was separated from his mother on the boat on ‘the way over’.25 David knows neither his mother’s name (which would have been changed if she had come to Novilla) nor what she looks like, so it is unclear what Simón is doing when he sets about looking for her.26 The reasonable Novillan course would be for him to produce a ‘mother’ for David by marrying. But Simón insists on searching for ‘David’s true mother’.27 Flouting the local injunction to allow himself to be ‘washed clean’ of memories, he allows himself to be guided by an ‘intuition’ that is a hangover from the past, saying that he trusts that at the right moment it will be clear to him that some woman before him is in reality the mother of the boy. And this is what in fact happens. Simón finds a woman—Inés—whom he identifies as David’s mother and who accepts the identification. After delivering David to Inés, Simón gradually takes on a new project that likewise challenges his efforts at social integration. He becomes preoccupied with figuring out where, if anywhere, David fits in in Novilla. The boy increasingly exhibits a waywardness about learning that admits of different interpretations. David is clearly smart and capable of grasping rules and concepts. When he and Simón are new arrivals, Simón’s supervisor at work teaches David to play chess, and within two weeks David is able to beat Eugenio, the smartest of Simón’s colleagues, at a lightening round.28 Nevertheless, as the time approaches for him to start school, David refuses to count or read as others do, and Simón feels pressured to figure out whether David’s behaviour shows mere unruliness that should be corrected, or whether it is instead an expression of a spark of genius that gives the 23

24 Ibid., p. 238. Ibid., pp. 119–20 and 120. David—supposedly—had an explanatory letter from his mother, but it was lost. On David’s telling, the letter fell in the sea and was eaten by fish (see The Childhood of Jesus, pp. 27 and 222). 26 Ibid., pp. 27–8. 27 Ibid., pp. 98 and 104. 28 Ibid., p. 43. 25

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Coetzee’s Quest for Reality

135

child access to a clearer vision of reality. David’s teacher and the other school officials who weigh in don’t take the latter possibility seriously. They believe David has a problem with authority and, indeed, one traceable to what they see as the sort of unwillingness to accept reality that Simón and Inés manifest.29 When the school system rules that David should board at a special school in Punto Arenas, a nearby town, Simón is confronted with a question about whether to insist, on David’s behalf, on the kind of transformative thought that Novillan schools and Novillan society exclude. Simón’s question depends for its interest on a vision of our lives as reasoning beings on which we inevitably face the possibility that, in order to progress cognitively, we may need to rework our sensibilities, thereby transcending our current selves. Given that the idea of self-transcendence is sometimes associated with religious experience, it would not be unreasonable to speak in this connection of a religious dimension of thought. The Childhood of Jesus encourages this terminological move by integrating into its treatment of relevant challenges of thought a set of references to the Christian story of Jesus. There is the book’s title, and there is the fact that when Simón follows his intuition about David’s true mother—thereby disrespecting Novillan mores—he is identifying a virgin birth.30 There is also the fact that David, the resulting Christ-figure, is Christ-like in presenting himself as ‘the truth’31 and in putting people around him in the position of needing to choose between living in society as it now exists or following him. A case might be made for thinking that The Childhood of Jesus is not alone among Coetzee’s novels in inviting us to hear the idea that thinking may require us to remake ourselves in a religious register. We could, for instance, elaborate a proposal that Attridge makes, in a commentary on Disgrace, to the effect that the kind of emotional responsiveness David Lurie manages only late in life qualifies as openness to ‘grace’.32 But without opening a larger discussion of this topic in reference to Coetzee’s novels, it is fair to say that The Childhood of Jesus encourages us to take central demands of thought as having a religious aspect. At the same time, given that ‘religion’ is sometimes used as a term for pursuits that evade reality in favour of some supernatural alternative, it is important to stress that the point of this talk of a ‘religious’ dimension is to underline a demand thinking imposes when it is taken to be a reality-oriented enterprise.33 Bearing this last observation in mind, we can say that The Childhood of Jesus can be read as a religious allegory. But just as it is wrong to take the allegorical suggestions of Waiting for the Barbarians as licence to treat that novel as a formally undistinguished exercise, it is wrong to take the allegorical suggestions of The Childhood of Jesus as licence to treat it as inviting a plain mapping of elements of its mythical world onto elements of ours. Like other novels of Coetzee’s, The Childhood of Jesus has a narrative structure that complements its descriptive themes.

29 32 33

30 See ibid., pp. 91, 97, and 102–3. See ibid., p. 207. See Attridge, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, pp. 177–9. I am grateful to Gregg Horowitz for discussion of this point.

31

See ibid., p. 225.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

136

Alice Crary

Far from being a merely theoretical study of how thinking presents difficulties that can be described as religious, the book uses a range of literary devices to get us to imaginatively confront these difficulties. The Childhood of Jesus resembles Disgrace in having a narrative in the thirdperson present that stays close to the experience of its central character, and the narrative invites us to imaginatively participate in Simón’s responses to Novillan life. Simón’s initial months are something of an emotional rollercoaster. At first the disorientation he suffers as he tries to find housing, work, and access to food is compounded by the unpleasant discovery that people around him are determined to suppress any strong desires. Nevertheless, when, after mere weeks, he finds a job and an apartment and starts to feel settled, his distaste gives way partly to relief and gratitude. Then, after he has handed David over to Inés, his personal circumstances take a new downturn. He misses the boy, and he is not only homeless—having given up his apartment to Inés—but also estranged from his closest Novillan friend, a woman persuaded that it was irresponsible of him to give David up. Simón does not have any doubts about whether Inés is David’s mother, but his discovery of her is not accompanied by any transfiguration of his understanding of the social world, or of David’s place in it, that would help him to make sense of what he has done. David remains for him a spiritually undistinguished, if also truly beloved, individual.34 The idea of David’s normality is brought home dramatically to Simón one afternoon when he is called to his old apartment to deal with a blocked toilet. The plumbing is choked up with excrement and menstrual products, and, as Simón fishes with his arm in the filthy water, he is conscious of the messy materiality of the apartments’ inhabitants. The impression of David’s ordinariness makes it hard for Simón to believe that the boy’s obstreperousness about learning is anything other than the refusal of a bright child to do as they are told. Despite flirting with the idea that David sees the world in a higher way, Simón is unable to bring the alleged alternative vision into focus. When, on one occasion, Simón instructs David that ‘889 is bigger [than 888] because 889 comes after 888’, David replies, ‘How do you know? You have never been there.’35 David claims to have visited ‘all the numbers’,36 insisting that there are gaps between numbers into which we are in danger of falling.37 Confronted by David’s arithmetic idiosyncrasy, Simón doesn’t relinquish his belief in the possibility of transformative modes of thought. But he also doesn’t see David as having realized this possibility. Simón wrestles with similar issues when he is teaching David to read. The text Simón uses is a copy of An Illustrated Don Quixote for Children. Like the real-world work on which it is modelled, this Novillan book tells a story in which the romantic view of the world favoured by a character named Quixote is played off against the alternative, hardheaded view favoured by a character named Sancho. Also like its real-world counterpart, the book invites its readers to think about how to draw the

34 See The Childhood of Jesus, p. 73. Far from regarding Inés as spiritual, Simón is struck by her ‘solidness’. 35 Ibid., p. 150. 36 Ibid., p. 150. 37 Ibid., pp. 226 and 249.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Coetzee’s Quest for Reality

137

distinction between appearance and reality.38 When reading to David, Simón suggests that the book’s author is asking readers to regard Sancho’s way of looking at things as correct. David angrily rejects this interpretation.39 When David talks about the book, he affirms Quixote’s perspective. He presents himself as reading the book in his ‘own way’ and using his ‘own language’, and as in this way arriving at a private understanding of who Quixote is and what his world is like.40 Simón finds this talk of an esoteric vision of Don Quixote maddening. He has no patience with the idea that David may have accessed a new vision of the world by means of a private language. Simón explains himself in these terms: ‘Language has to mean something to me as well as to you, otherwise it doesn’t count as language.’41 Because Simón is sceptical about the very idea of private language, there is for him no question of crediting David with a privileged private image of how things are. On the contrary, Simón veers towards accepting the school system’s view that David’s linguistic non-conformity is an expression of mere unruliness. Simón’s struggle with the question of whether David is a smart but headstrong boy who should be integrated into Novillan schools—or whether instead David has a privileged vision of the world and should be protected from pressures to conform—continues until the end of the novel. Soon after he and Inés are instructed to send David to the school at Punto Arenas, Simón has an accident at work. During a subsequent hospitalization, he has a waking vision in which David calls out to him from a chariot drawn by white horses. Simón resists the resulting temptation to believe in David by telling himself that he was on a dream-inducing opiate painkiller at the time.42 This attitude infuriates Inés who lashes out: ‘You don’t really believe in the child. You don’t know what it means to believe.’43 By the time Simón is discharged from the hospital, David has run away from Punto Arenas, and Inés is making plans to leave Novilla to prevent him from being sent back. Simón doesn’t decide to join their adventure until, at the moment of their planned departure, Inés’ brother refuses to help them flee. When the novel ends, Simón has joined Inés and David on their journey to a new life. This puts him in a position analogous to the one he was in when the story started. Just as at the outset he was allowing himself to be guided by a naked intuition about David’s true mother, now he is allowing himself to be guided by an impulse into which he has no insight, this time one about David’s mental contact with a higher order of things. By inviting us to enter into Simón’s Novillan experience, in the various ways just discussed, The Childhood of Jesus formally exemplifies the conception of cognitive development—also explored in Coetzee’s other novels—that it describes (and also encourages us to classify as ‘religious’). Initially we are asked to partake in Simón’s feelings of alienation as a newcomer in Novilla, when his craving for passion and 38 Simón finds this book in the library of his apartment complex. Given that he longs for a philosophy that accommodates a reality/appearance distinction, this is quite a find. 39 The Childhood of Jesus, pp. 153–4. 40 For David’s claim to be reading in his ‘own way’, see ibid., p. 165. For his claim to have his ‘own language’, see pp. 186–7. And for his claim to have special knowledge of who Quixote is, see p. 162. 41 Ibid., p. 186. 42 Ibid., pp. 237–8. 43 Ibid., p. 238.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

138

Alice Crary

intense experience is treated as a form of personal sloppiness that he should overcome. In leading us to explore his responses, the novel positions us to recognize forms of callousness that Novillans fail to register. It positions us to recognize limitations of Novillan institutions (and their real-world counterparts) that exclude modes of thought with a transformative power that is essentially a function of new evaluative perspectives. It thus impresses on us the possibility of having our sensibilities engaged in a manner that stretches us beyond ourselves, bringing into view things previously inaccessible. To accommodate this possibility is to acknowledge that, in order to grow mentally, we may need to let ourselves grow emotionally in ways that, from where we currently stand, do not admit of a satisfactory justification. The Childhood of Jesus is structured to give us a powerful sense of what it is like to be thus pulled to think or act without reason. The main challenge that Simón faces in later portions of the story is deciding whether to believe in David as a source of a higher image of reality. The only ‘evidence’ Simón has for this belief is the collection of things that David says about numbers and private language. Since David’s claims, taken at face value, are confused, Simón must proceed in the absence of reasons.44 In urging us to imaginatively follow Simón in believing in David, the novel asks us to leap without any clear sense of where we are going and, in doing so, to experience what it depicts as the ‘religious’ moment of thought in its starkest and most terrifying aspect. The Childhood of Jesus’s simultaneously formal and descriptive treatment of this dimension of thought is in these respects singular. There is another respect in which The Childhood of Jesus is singular. We need an image of thought on which it has what is here treated as a ‘religious’ dimension in order to make room for a non-sceptical view of the cognitive power of literature (i.e. the view that this novel, like others of Coetzee’s, is presented as actualizing). So, it is noteworthy that this novel draws attention to considerations that could be used in a philosophical defence of the pertinent image of thought. There are various references to philosophy within The Childhood of Jesus. The novel can be read as a literary riff on the cave in Plato’s allegory, with the citizens of Novilla in the role of people who are so captivated by the shadowy images projected onto the cave’s back wall that they are unwilling to try to turn around and pursue a less obstructed view of things. Because the novel touches on a cluster of themes from Wittgenstein’s later writings, locating them within an intellectual landscape congenial to his thought, it can also be read as an engagement with aspects of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. At the heart of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is a view of language that accommodates the transformative modes of thought central to Coetzee’s novel. Wittgenstein sometimes talks about natural languages in terms of operations with concepts or rules, and, given that David’s speedy mastery of the rules of chess serves as an emblem of his quickness of mind, it is noteworthy that Wittgenstein 44 To say that the things David says are confused when taken at face value leaves open the possibility that, like riddles, they might admit of interpretations on which their seemingly paradoxical character disappears.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Coetzee’s Quest for Reality

139

sometimes uses chess as an object of comparison for all linguistic practices.45 A concept- or rule-oriented character is not, however, what is distinctive about Wittgenstein’s vision of language. Wittgenstein understands conceptual mastery as inseparable from the possession of an appreciation of or sense for the significance of similarities linking a concept’s different uses.46 Granted this understanding, it is invariably possible that a development of a person’s sensibility might equip her to recognize features of the world that were previously inaccessible to her and, by the same token, that such a development might be internal to the kind of transformative thought that preoccupies Simón throughout The Childhood of Jesus. One of the hallmarks of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is a willingness to bring this philosophically provocative understanding of concepts to bear on those areas of thought to which it seems most foreign. In the portions of the Philosophical Investigations that are referred to as the ‘rule-following sections’ (roughly §§143–202), Wittgenstein discusses the understanding in reference to practices of producing simple mathematical series. He rejects views on which extending such a series is like internalizing a mental mechanism that generates correct behaviour in a causal manner that doesn’t essentially draw on any sensitivities or modes of appreciation. He contests the idea that learning to count is like hitching oneself to a car on a mechanical rail that is ‘laid to infinity’ and having it simply pull us along.47 His opposing thought is that we should see our ability to take successive steps as essentially informed by our sense of what speaks for the steps in question. This thought of Wittgenstein’s makes room for a transformative approach to even the simplest arithmetic operations. This doesn’t mean that Wittgenstein is sceptical about the objective authority of, say, our practices of counting.48 He wants us to recognize that we necessarily draw on modes of affective response in developing mathematical series, but he doesn’t suggest that the responses of the members of a community fix what counts as right in a manner that would imply that standards of rightness are a mere reflection of communal agreement. His point is that sensitivities are internal to all rational discursive capacities and are therefore necessarily at play when we are, for instance, extending a mathematical series. This point only seems inseparable from scepticism about objective rightness granted the assumption of an ideally dispassionate standpoint from which to determine that our sensitivities cannot help but distort our grasp of things, and Wittgenstein attacks this assumption, among other places, where it now seems to many philosophers to be most appealing—namely, in connection with perceptual thought. He attempts to show that we necessarily draw on sensitivities in getting the world perceptually into focus and that it is therefore confused to represent perception as affording an Archimedean point from which to survey the relationship between language and 45 See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. P. Hacker and J. Schulte, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. Hacker, and J. Schulte, 4th edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), pp. 197, 199–200, 205, 337, 563, and 567. 46 See ibid., §570. 47 The inset phrase is from ibid., §218. 48 The classic version of such a sceptical reading is Saul Kripke in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

140

Alice Crary

world.49 In light of these portions of Wittgenstein’s philosophical project, it is wrong to take his efforts to get us to recognize that our sensitivities internally inform our ability to develop mathematical series as an attack on the objective authority of math. Wittgenstein combines a view of basic mathematical series on which they in principle admit transformative changes with the view that mathematics is not only authoritative but also among the least mutable of our discursive practices. In a couple of passages, he anticipates Simón’s attitudes towards numerical heterodoxy, suggesting that a child’s ability to follow and produce elementary mathematical series is a touchstone of social integration. Wittgenstein’s bluntest and most shocking early formulation of this idea, which he later tempers, is in The Blue Book: ‘If [after instruction] a child does not respond to [a] suggestive gesture [inviting her to continue the series of natural numbers], it is separated from the others and treated as a lunatic.’50 Now we have before us passages—of the sorts arguably gestured at in The Childhood of Jesus—in which Wittgenstein attacks the idea that there are a priori obstacles to allowing that modes of thought that necessarily draw on sensitivities may as such directly contribute to illuminating reality. When Wittgenstein rejects this idea, he is developing a conception of thinking on which it has the transformative potential at issue in Coetzee’s novels, and he is thereby effectively making room for the sort of non-sceptical view of the cognitive power of literature capable of illuminating Coetzee’s reality-oriented novelistic practice. That is what it comes to to say that, in sounding what are arguably Wittgensteinian themes, The Childhood of Jesus draws attention to resources for a philosophical defence of its own, and Coetzee’s other novels’, ‘passionate pursuit of the Real’.51 We could gloss the idea, just discussed in reference to Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus, that literature as literature can directly contribute to an objective understanding of reality as the idea that literature as such can be in the business of the sort of objective or universal truth that is philosophy’s touchstone. A corollary of this idea is that philosophical discourse can have an essentially literary dimension. One place to see this is in convergences between Wittgenstein’s philosophical procedures and the formal strategies of The Childhood of Jesus and Coetzee’s other novels. Wittgenstein conceives philosophical problems as problems that crop up when language goes ‘on holiday’52 and a speaker winds up in a position in which, despite any insistence on her part that she is employing concepts in the same way that she uses them elsewhere, she loses track of what she is saying. Granted that, for Wittgenstein, conceptual mastery necessarily presupposes a sense of the importance of similarities among applications of a concept, it follows that for him there can be no question of an effective philosophical intervention that doesn’t address the 49 For discussion of relevant portions of Wittgenstein’s work, see Crary, Inside Ethics, chapters 2 and 3. 50 Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the ‘Philosophical Investigations’ (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), p. 93. For a tempered formulation, see Philosophical Investigations, §185. 51 The cited phrase is from Czesław Miłosz, ‘A Quarrel with Classicism’, in The Witness of Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 61–75, 66. 52 See Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §38.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Coetzee’s Quest for Reality

141

relevant speaker’s sensibility. A constructive response has got to lead the speaker to the recognition that her use of a particular concept (or set of concepts) doesn’t represent a smooth and natural extension of her use of it in other contexts and that, because she herself is unclear what she wants to say, she is willing to relinquish her own words.53 Because Wittgenstein is not offering theoretical explanations of how language functions but trying to foster the appreciation that specific combinations of words do (or don’t) express things that we ourselves want to say, it is fair to depict him as formally exemplifying his concern with transformative modes of thought. There is in this respect a parallel with The Childhood of Jesus and a number of additional novels of Coetzee’s that formally exemplify their descriptive preoccupation with transformative modes of thought. For an illustration of these aspects of Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophical method, we can turn to the sections of the Investigations that question the cogency of a very particular idea of a ‘private language’. These passages have a special pertinence to a discussion of The Childhood of Jesus since within the story David repeatedly talks about having his own language. The idea of ‘private language’ that exercises Wittgenstein is that of a ‘language’ that is such that ‘another person cannot understand [it]’,54 and, in the passages of the Investigations in which he grapples with this idea, he is concerned with how this idea is suggested by certain philosophical accounts of thought about sensations. He is critical of those who believe that, within such thought, the mind makes contact with sensory content that is given in a manner not structured by public or shareable concepts and that accordingly seems to constitute a relevantly private realm of intelligibility. His ambition is to get us to see that, insofar as we incline towards this position, we ourselves place irreconcilable demands on what a ‘private language’ is like. On the one hand, we presumably take non-inferential thought about sensations to be rationally significant in the sense of being capable of justifying beliefs. On the other hand, insofar as we conceive the inputs to such thought as merely nonconceptually delivered, we are obliged to regard such inputs as in themselves free from normative organization. This is problematic because it’s not clear how inner experience can lack normative structure and still provide rational support for beliefs. What Wittgenstein wants us to acknowledge is that, if we persist in speaking of a ‘private language’ here, we are unclear what we ourselves are talking about. This brief glimpse of Wittgenstein’s philosophical procedures reveals a formal concern with his own view of language that invites comparison with The Childhood of Jesus’s formal engagement with the conception of thought that preoccupies Simón throughout its story. The sort of non-sceptical view of the cognitive power of literature that Coetzee explores in this and other novels in this way goes hand in hand with the recognition that literary methods can contribute directly to philosophical investigations, and the view thus equips us to register a rapprochement between the respective enterprises of literature and philosophy.

53 See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Big Typescript, TS 213, ed. and trans. C. Grant Luckhardt and Maximilian A. E. Aue (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), esp. the section entitled ‘Philosophy’, pp. 299–318. 54 For the inset quote, see Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 243.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

142

Alice Crary

Viewed from the literary side, the import of this rapprochement is that literature can as such be philosophical in that it can as such be truth- or reality-oriented. If we did want to reclaim talk of ‘realism’ in connection with this observation about the philosophical promise of literature, we would, as indicated above, need to emphasize that the kind of realism in question isn’t a matter of respect for a genre or circumscribed set of formal devices. Here, ‘realism’ requires a willingness to experiment with new as well as existing conventions, and to do so with an eye to finding techniques that aren’t stale and that, at a given time and place, can contribute immediately to probing into reality. Partly in virtue of its formal thoughtfulness and pliancy, Coetzee’s novelistic output is an exemplary exercise in this kind of literary realism.55

55 The idea for this chapter arose from a course I co-taught with Martin Stone at the New School for Social Research in 2011, and I am indebted to Martin for many productive conversations about relevant topics. I presented earlier versions of the chapter at events at St John’s College (Oxford), University College Dublin’s School of Philosophy, the Washington Square Hotel in New York, Charles University’s Institute of Philosophy (in Prague), and Columbia Teachers College. I am grateful for the helpful feedback I received on these occasions. I would especially like to thank Derek Attridge, Marina Barabas, Sophie Grace Chappell, David Cockburn, Piergiorgio Donatelli, Lisabeth During, Hallvard Lillehammer, Patrick Hayes, Lars Hertzberg, Gregg Horowitz, Tom Huhn, Sandra Laugier, Megan Laverty, Alison McIntyre, Áine Mahon, Sarin Marchetti, Stephen Mulhall, Lynette Reid, Alison Ross, and Jan Wilm.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

9 Beyond Realism Coetzee’s Post-Secular Imagination Martin Woessner

Whether it denotes a literary genre or some kind of moral, personal, or political worldview, realism, for J. M. Coetzee, has always been somewhat suspect. ‘I am attached to the notion of fantasy,’ he declared recently to the clinical psychologist Arabella Kurtz, with whom he corresponded for some time about all matter of subjects related to the arts of fiction-writing and psychotherapy.1 In an earlier letter to Kurtz, Coetzee even admitted to being, by profession, ‘a trader in fictions’ who does not ‘have much respect for reality’: ‘I think of myself as using rather than reflecting reality in my fiction,’ he explained. ‘If the world of my fictions is a recognizable world, that is because (I say to myself) it is easier to use the world at hand than to make up a new one.’2 Coetzee’s misgivings about realism stretch back to the earliest years of his career as a writer. In a small notebook that he filled with ideas and observations in the months after finishing and publishing his first book, Dusklands, in 1974, Coetzee jotted down the following koan-like insight: ‘Fiction is about what is possible. That’s what’s wrong with realism.’3 Less than a decade later, in a 1982 talk delivered to the Philosophy Society of the University of Cape Town entitled Realism and the Novel, he went even further. Coetzee suggested that the rise of realism represented little more than the victory of a narrow, bourgeois ideology, ‘a middle class version of the world’: ‘Escapism is a word invented by the middle class’, he argued, ‘to damn books liked by people who do not like middle class reality.’4 Given these views, it is no surprise that Coetzee’s early fiction—from Dusklands and In the Heart of the Country (1977) all the way up to Foe (1986)— kept its distance from realism, using metafictional techniques that were formally inventive and ironic, resulting in a detached or distant style.

1 J. M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz, The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy (London: Harvill Secker, 2015), p. 156. 2 Ibid., p. 69. 3 Harry Ransom Center (HRC), J. M. Coetzee Papers, Container 33, Folder 3. The journal entry is dated 24/10/74, about six months after the publication of Dusklands. 4 HRC, J. M. Coetzee Papers, Container 114, Folder 12.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

144

Martin Woessner

Over time, though, Coetzee’s attitude towards realism underwent a significant transformation. In 1996 he told his University of Chicago students that literary realism—from Don Quixote (1609) to Madame Bovary (1856) and beyond—does more than just demystify the world according to some ‘narrow, bourgeois ideology’; it also documents a ‘yearning for transcendence’ that resists precisely such demystification.5 This is not unlike Marx’s famous summation of religion as, on the one hand, the ‘opium of the people’, but also, on the other, ‘the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions’.6 The escape provided by the drug might be illusory, but the need for it—that yearning for transcendence—is very real indeed, and not easily dismissed. This change of outlook can be traced in the fiction Coetzee has written since the late 1980s. In novels ranging from the ‘dull realism’—as he himself called it—of Age of Iron (1990) and Disgrace (1999) through the more questionably realist novels Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Slow Man (2005) all the way up to the seemingly anti-realist The Childhood of Jesus (2013) and The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), Coetzee has worked through rather than simply rejected realism.7 As both a novelist and an academic, then, Coetzee has probed the novel’s complex and complicated relation to realism—historically, formally, but also, we might say, philosophically, even ethically. He has been particularly interested in the origins of the novel as a form, for whether it is traced back to Don Quixote or Robinson Crusoe (1719) the novel has been, from the very beginning, precariously poised on the borderlines of the real and the fantastical. Still today, it remains unclear if novels are meant to reconcile us to the real, or rescue us from it, to point us towards transcendence. This chapter suggests that Coetzee’s ongoing engagement with the question of realism is deeply connected to his growing interest in what might best be described as post-secular themes. These themes include notions of redemption, salvation, and grace, which have taken centre stage in late works such as the Jesus novels, the titles of which seem to telegraph their theological preoccupations. Insofar as the problem of realism has pushed Coetzee to consider realms beyond or behind ‘the real’—into the realms, we might say, of hearts and souls and oppressed creatures—Coetzee’s fiction compares with recent post-secular thought, which grudgingly admits that the Enlightenment’s pursuit of the rational disenchantment of the world has not proven to be an unqualified success. As Jürgen Habermas put it not so long ago, in his ‘Notes on a Post-Secular Society’: ‘Particularly with regard to vulnerable social relations, religious traditions possess the power to convincingly articulate moral sensitivities and solidaristic intuitions’—something worth protecting, perhaps, in these uncertain times.8 In our rationalized, disenchanted ‘real’ world—a world that

5

HRC, J. M. Coetzee Papers, Container 114, Folder 10. Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, ed. and trans. Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 131. 7 The remark about ‘dull realism’ is from Coetzee’s private notebooks, and is quoted in David Attwell, J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face to Face with Time (New York: Viking, 2015), p. 187. 8 Jürgen Habermas, ‘Notes on a Post-Secular Society’, signandsight.com, 18 June 2008, http:// www.signandsight.com/features/1714.html, accessed 28 Nov. 2016. 6

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Beyond Realism

145

is in certain ways satirized in The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus—the novel may continue to be thought of as a resource for precisely such ‘moral sensitivities’ and ‘solidaristic intuitions’, not because it safeguards truths once held fast by religious faith, but because, in its devotion to the endless possibilities of the imagination, it sets them free. Coetzee’s novels are not post-secular in the sense that they call for an end to secularism. More humbly, they seek only to loosen its grip on our thinking; they attempt to keep open a space—the space of the imagination, we might say, the space of the possible—that a strict secularism, like an equally strict religious fundamentalism, threatens to shut down. It is in this sense, most of all, that Coetzee’s novels illustrate and substantiate the claim of the American pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty, who famously suggested that ‘bookish youngsters in search of redemption nowadays look first to novels, plays, and poems’, rather than to religion.9 THE ‘ TEMPTAT IO N TO REALISM ’ In philosophical circles today, realism has been making something of a comeback. Talk of a ‘new realism’, of a ‘speculative’ or even ‘weird realism’, is ubiquitous.10 It pervades even ethics. More often than not, moral philosophy devotes itself to what it takes to be the real—to statements of fact, to arguments, reasons, judgements, and decisions, which favour the actual over and above the merely possible. Indeed, the discourse of ‘moral realism’ is founded upon the belief that ‘moral facts’ exist— that they are, in fact, real entities in the world.11 When it gives its full attention to the realm of possibility—to that which might be, not just that which is— contemporary moral philosophy treats it as little more than something that is potentially actual, as, in other words, a subspecies of the real. Realism reigns.12 This current state of affairs in philosophy seems to be evidence of what Gianni Vattimo once described as a ‘widespread desire for realism’, or, rather, a ‘temptation to realism’—a temptation Coetzee was alerted to by Vattimo directly, when the Italian philosopher gave a talk about the subject at the University of Cape Town in September 2000.13 Vattimo’s lecture protested realism’s reign in contemporary philosophical discourse. Coetzee was invited to offer a comment in response to it. 9 Richard Rorty, ‘Philosophy as a Transitional Genre’, Philosophical Papers, iv: Philosophy as Cultural Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 94. 10 See, for example, Markus Gabriel, Why the World Does Not Exist, trans. Gregory S. Moss (Malden, MA: Polity, 2015) and Fields of Sense: A New Realist Ontology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), as well as Graham Harman, Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures (Washington: Zero Books, 2010). 11 See, for example, Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, ed., Essays on Moral Realism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). 12 See, for instance, Derek Parfit, ‘On What There Is’, in On What Matters, ii, ed. and intro. Samuel Scheffler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 719–49. 13 Gianni Vattimo, Of Reality: The Purposes of Philosophy, trans. Robert T. Valgenti (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), p. 13. A copy of Coetzee’s response to Vattimo’s remarks, ‘Gianni Vattimo—Temptations of Realism: Comments on Paper Presented at UCT September 4, 2000’, is now housed in the newly instituted Vattimo Archive at the Pompeau Fabra University in Barcelona. I thank Santiago Zabala for sharing the document with me.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

146

Martin Woessner

While he confessed to being ‘involved’ with ‘certain low-level questions about realism and the real’ in his own work, Coetzee also insisted that his interest could not pretend to be philosophical in its own right. He was a novelist first and foremost, and his was but ‘a magpie interest in stealing what I can from the mansions of philosophy for the adornment of my own constructions’.14 This remark may be too modest by half, but it does underscore the fact that, whatever we are to make of them, Coetzee’s forays into the domain of realism are always undertaken in the service of his fiction. His allegiance to fantasy is never in doubt. It should come as no surprise, then, that his novels always seem to point beyond or behind realism, even and especially when they seem to make concessions to it, such as when they are written in what appears to be an identifiably realist style. In this regard, Coetzee’s novels represent a challenge to moral philosophy—and to moral realism most especially—more than a contribution to it, precisely because they, as fictions, privilege the possible over and above the real, and because they exemplify what Coetzee in his 1987 Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech called ‘the willed act of the imagination’.15 When moral philosophers today speak of the ‘sympathetic imagination’, a notion that can be traced back to Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), they tend to emphasize the first term while slighting the second. They work out elaborate theories detailing the mechanics of sympathetic identification—how it operates but also who or what is deserving of it—but they devote few resources to discussing what, exactly, imagination is, or to how it works. When it makes concessions to the imagination, when it invents fictions of its own—such as thought experiments about evil demons or brains in vats or runaway trolleys— moral philosophy always does so in the service of reality, and of a constraining kind at that.16 Coetzee reverses this dynamic and puts reality at the service of the imagined scenario, reason in the service of fantasy. He works towards sympathetic imagination via the second term rather than the first. Like Richard Rorty, who famously argued that, philosophically speaking, imagination was prior to reason— ‘imagination creates the games that reason proceeds to play’, is how he put it— Coetzee seems to be suggesting that our ethical existence suffers when it is starved not just of sympathy, but of imaginative stimulation as well.17 ‘Gianni Vattimo—Temptations of Realism’, p. 1. J. M. Coetzee, ‘Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech’, in Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 98. There are exceptions to this trend in moral philosophy, of course. Most of them are rather recent and many of them are tied up, in some way, with Coetzee’s work. See, for example, Stephen Mulhall’s The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). The touchstone for a literary ethics remains the work of Iris Murdoch, whose decision to devote most of her life to novel writing is indicative, I think, of her preference for fiction over philosophy. See my ‘Angst Across the Channel: Existentialism in Britain’, in Situating Existentialism, ed. Jonathan Judaken and Robert Bernasconi (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), pp. 145–79. 16 See, for instance, David Edmonds, Would You Kill the Fat Man? The Trolley Problem and What Your Answer Tells Us about Right and Wrong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). 17 Richard Rorty, ‘Pragmatism and Romanticism’, Philosophical Papers, iv: Philosophy as Cultural Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007): p. 115. 14 15

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Beyond Realism

147

RESISTING THE REAL In an attempt to awaken the kind of sympathetic imagination necessary for ethical life, Coetzee consistently privileges the possible over and above the real, and has suggested that fiction, as fiction, serves a fundamentally ethical purpose in precisely this regard. It works in resistance to regimented, calculative thought, the kind of thought that governs the world depicted in The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus, where everything has its place and every question has a preformulated answer, where submission to ‘the force of the real’ is the law of the land.18 There seems to be no need for fantasy in such an environment, since it is viewed by just about every character except Simón, the novel’s out-of-place protagonist, as little more than the remnant of a bygone, possibly less enlightened era. But Coetzee, who has described story telling as ‘an archaic way of thinking, non-analytic’, appears to suggest otherwise. He continues to say that ‘[i]t’s the sort of thinking I do best’.19 Rather than demystification and rationalization, ethics, at least as Coetzee conceives it in this ‘archaic’ and ‘non-analytic’ way, requires imagination most of all. Or, to put it a little differently, Coetzee’s writings suggest that we would all be better off, ethically speaking, if we were more, not less open to fantasy—Don Quixote rather than metaphysics as a guide to morals, we might say.20 The Childhood of Jesus, a book that draws heavily upon Don Quixote, makes this case for the ethical priority of imagination most explicitly. But where there is salvation there is also potential danger. In addition to celebrating fantasy, The Childhood of Jesus also explores the possible pitfalls of any unbridled faith in imagination. Specifically, it calls into question the legacy, inherited chiefly from Romanticism, that, in Rorty’s words, ‘capitalized and deified Imagination’ the way that ‘the Enlightenment capitalized and deified Reason’.21 As a critic, Coetzee has noted, and criticized, the ways in which Romantic conceptions of Imagination have slipped into solipsistic egotisms, most notably in the dubious literary legacies of settler colonialism, which often projected a white, male, colonial self onto a supposedly blank and unpopulated landscape, as was the case in South Africa. To be of any ethical value at all, Coetzee has suggested, imagination must work in a different, more humble manner. In opposition to a ‘capitalized and deified Imagination’ there must be a lower-case imagination, a ‘listening imagination’, as Coetzee has described it, that is open to others, rather than in denial of them.22 The 18

J. M. Coetzee, The Childhood of Jesus (London: Harvill Secker, 2013), p. 117. J. C. Kannemeyer, J. M. Coetzee: A Life in Writing, trans. Michiel Heyns (Melbourne: Scribe, 2012), p. 472. 20 With this a number of philosophers—from Stanley Cavell to Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum—are beginning to agree. And surveys and studies have shown that the reading of literary fiction correlates with increased levels of community activity and volunteer work. See, for instance, the 2004 National Endowment for the Arts report, Reading at Risk, available at https://www.arts.gov/sites/ default/files/ReadingAtRisk.pdf. 21 Rorty, ‘Pragmatism and Romanticism’, p. 109. 22 J. M. Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 9. 19

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

148

Martin Woessner

protagonist of Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning novel Disgrace (1999), David Lurie, learns this lesson when he begins to see the world not through the eyes of a selfaggrandizing poet, such as Lord Byron, but through the eyes of those people, those creatures, who are all around him, unheard, hidden in plain sight. As he reassessed the role that imagination plays in the legacy of literary realism, Coetzee returned again and again to the example of Cervantes. One particularly important moment in this process came in his 1987 Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech. Here, Coetzee spoke of how, going all the way back to Don Quixote, the novel had always displayed a somewhat adversarial relation not simply to realism, but to reality itself. The topic was on his mind, perhaps, because he was then offering a course at Johns Hopkins—in 1986 and then again in 1989—titled ‘Studies in Realism’. In his acceptance speech, Coetzee noted that the story of Don Quixote may end with ‘the capitulation of the imagination to reality’, but the book in which this story unfolds, the ‘subtle and enigmatic’ book that Cervantes wrote, itself attests to the persistence of imagination, even and especially when it rubs up against the imperatives of verisimilitude.23 In Coetzee’s estimation, Don Quixote was a testament to the independence of fiction. Nevertheless, he acknowledged that there were times and places in which literary autonomy, no matter how subtle or how clever, could hardly survive the crushing weight of the real. Apartheid-era South Africa, for example, with ‘its callousness and its brutalities, its hungers and its rages, its greed and its lies’, was one of those times and places. The reality of the day ‘overwhelms and swamps every act of the imagination’, which is why ‘South African literature is’, he thought, ‘a literature in bondage’.24 Its imagination was stunted by the shackles of horrific real-world cruelty. Still, Coetzee continued to compose novels: a quixotic endeavour amidst so much callousness and brutality, perhaps, but nonetheless emblematic of his belief that story-telling is valuable in and of itself, regardless of the demands of reality or ideology.25 By the mid-1990s, within a decade of the Jerusalem Prize Speech, Coetzee no longer saw literary realism as a threat to the fictional imagination. Instead, he began to view it more as one of the tools, one of the imaginative tricks, that literature uses to tackle a problem—maybe even the fundamental problem of the contemporary world—left unresolved by philosophical discourse, namely our continuing disenchantment with the disenchanting thrust of modernity.26 As an ‘archaic way of thinking’, fiction holds onto something we are in danger of losing in the totally administered world, and for this reason more than any other, perhaps, it may be worth holding onto, however retrograde it seems to be by the standards of

23

24 Ibid., pp. 99, 98. Doubling the Point, p. 99. In fact, this would be the primary point of contention between him and Nadine Gordimer. See Coetzee’s ‘The Novel Today’, Upstream 6, no. 1 (summer 1988): pp. 2–5. 26 Coetzee’s friend and colleague at the University of Chicago, philosopher Robert B. Pippin, published a book around this time that tackled precisely this issue from the other direction. In Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), Pippin attempted to chart our ongoing disenchantment with the disenchanting impulse of modernity through a philosophical argument about Western art and literature. 25

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Beyond Realism

149

modern, secular society. It was around this time that Coetzee began imagining the undeniably quixotic character of Elizabeth Costello, who herself followed on the heels of two no less quixotic predecessors, namely Age of Iron’s Elizabeth Curren and Disgrace’s David Lurie—realistic characters in Coetzee’s most conventionally realist literary works, but characters who were, like Don Quixote, noticeably out of step with their respective times and places.27 They, too, tilted at windmills as they struggled to adapt to the real world around them. In 1996, the year when Elizabeth Costello first appeared—in a story titled, naturally, ‘What is Realism?’, which was read as the Ben Belitt Lecture at Bennington College in Vermont—Coetzee taught his course on ‘Realism and the Novel’ in the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought.28 In his opening remarks to the seminar, Coetzee referenced the rift that had grown between the academic discussion of literature and ‘the world in which ordinary writers and readers and book reviewers move’.29 As he put it: ‘Universities ought to be supplying a language in which people can criticize, evaluate, interpret, and appreciate books. This is not, by and large, happening.’ Realism, he thought, was a case in point. In the academy, realism was viewed primarily as a historical phenomenon, a relic of a previous literary era long since dead and gone. But most contemporary fiction, Coetzee pointed out to his students, was still written—and consumed—under the auspices of realism. Academic literary theory may have relegated realism to the dustbin of artistic expression, but beyond the confines of the university campus it lived on. It thrived, in fact, and he should have known this, because he was writing it himself at the time. This split, or rift, between academic and popular understandings of literary realism could be explained in any number of ways. One could document the evolution of academic literary theory, which during the second half of the twentieth century became ever more specialized and compartmentalized, ever more removed from the realities of the publishing world. One could also take a ‘big data’ approach and explain via what Franco Moretti recently has termed ‘distant reading’ the popular afterlife of seemingly outdated genres through sheer numbers: books written, books sold, books consumed.30 In his University of Chicago seminar Coetzee avoided both of these sociological approaches. The reasons for the persistence of realism, he argued, were to be found within the realist canon itself. Something within realism, in other words, was what made it resilient. In keeping with the ‘great books’ tradition made famous by the University of Chicago, and by the Committee on Social Thought in particular, Coetzee chose to 27 One of the best cases made for the persistence of the quixotic in Coetzee’s oeuvre is made by Patrick Hayes in his J. M. Coetzee and the Novel: Writing and Politics after Beckett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 28 This title was later shortened simply to ‘Realism’ when it was included as the opening ‘Lesson’ of the book Elizabeth Costello. 29 HRC, J. M. Coetzee Papers, Container 114, Folder 10. 30 Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (New York: Verso, 2013). To be fair, Coetzee’s seminar predated this trend by at least a few years, but his own early attempts at computer-aided and computer-generated criticism, which he later dismissed as a ‘wrong turning’ and a ‘false trail’ in his work, were in keeping with its ethos. See Doubling the Point, p. 22.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

150

Martin Woessner

guide his students in the ‘Realism in the Novel’ seminar through a selection of classic works, each of which had some distinct relation to realism: the syllabus included Don Quixote, Fathers and Sons (1862), Madame Bovary, and Ulysses (1922). Coetzee’s second lecture for the course was devoted to Don Quixote, and it suggested that literary realism’s curious—and divisive—legacy could be located in the fundamental paradox, the aporia, of the genre itself.31 In Coetzee’s estimation, one of the master themes of realism is disenchantment or disillusionment or demystification. Since the essence of fiction has to be fantasy, it is a theme which is in a sense counter to the movement of fiction itself, and engenders profound ambivalences in its authors (see the end of DQ itself).32

Novels, in other words, are imagined enchantments, so when they take as their subject the inescapable necessity of realist disenchantment they seem to undermine themselves. The realist novel is, in this sense, a performative contradiction. It does precisely what it warns against doing; it spins a web of fantasy that nevertheless preaches the virtues of leaving fantasy behind. But should we heed the fantasy or the preaching? Should we marvel at the imaginative ideal, or submit to the imperatives of the real? Is the lesson of Don Quixote that only a fool mistakes windmills for giants, or is it that the inability to imagine windmills as giants empties the world of all its redeeming charms and pleasures—all of its magic? To be quixotic is to be foolishly idealistic, of course, but as Coetzee explained to Arabella Kurtz, with reference to Don Quixote: ‘The world turns out to be a more lively, more entertaining place when at least some of us live out our ideals (while the rest of us are content to watch).’33 Don Quixote preaches disenchantment, but as an enchantment itself, it persists—the novel persists, novels persist. The death of the novel has been pronounced regularly throughout its history, only to be met, time and again, with its repeated resurrection. In the third lecture of his ‘Realism and the Novel’ seminar, Coetzee argued that Don Quixote is a ‘book in which the philosophical question of realism is approached in a fictional medium. In other words, fiction does not yield to philosophy by saying that philosophical questions can only be approached in the discourse of philosophy.’34 Again and again, fiction proclaims its independence in a way that forces us to pause and acknowledge it on its own terms, thus reiterating precisely that independence. Stanley Cavell, who once suggested that literature and philosophy were both after ‘the same prize’, would find in Coetzee a worthy competitor in this regard.35 31 In fact, as Coetzee’s biographer has pointed out, Coetzee’s interest in Don Quixote dates back to his student days. See Kannemeyer, J. M. Coetzee: A Life in Writing, p. 102. 32 HRC, J. M. Coetzee Papers, Container 14, Folder 10. 33 Coetzee and Kurtz, The Good Story, p. 77. 34 HRC, J. M. Coetzee Papers, Container 114, Folder 12. Coetzee was well aware of the fact that philosophy nevertheless drew from the well that was Don Quixote. His lecture notes reference Ortega y Gasset’s famous reading of the novel. For more on the relationship of Quixote to philosophy, see Eduardo Mendieta, ‘Existentialisms in the Hispanic and Latin American Worlds: El Quixote and Its Existential Children’, in Situating Existentialism, pp. 180–210. 35 Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (London/Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 12. The quote comes from the Mrs. William Beckman Lectures, which Cavell presented at Berkeley in 1983.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Beyond Realism

151

In Coetzee’s account, novels supply us with something that we have a hard time giving up, something that philosophy fails to provide. The way in which ‘storytellers’ turn ‘fictional beings’ into ‘real beings’, he has said, only somewhat sardonically, seems to be a practice ‘of some importance to human societies’.36 But what is it that we get from novels, exactly? The persistent resurrection of the novel over and against the demystifying powers of rationalization and secularization may give us a clue. Fiction keeps traces of transcendental, spiritual discourse alive by transforming them into imaginary things, but imaginary things that, as fictions, nevertheless enjoy an existence in the real world. In this regard, fiction helps us figure out how to live, not so much by offering up mirror images of the real, but by offering glimpses of the seemingly (im)possible. In the evolutionary schema of Richard Rorty, the novel slowly replaced the religious sermon and the philosophical treatise as a ‘central vehicle of moral instruction’ not because it has the most accurate answers to the question ‘How to live?’, but because it has the most imaginative and inventive responses to it.37 Novels keep us thinking, talking, and exploring. To use Rortyan parlance, we might say that the novel is a conversation-starter rather than, like religion or certain kinds of philosophy, a conversation-stopper.38 It is more interested in entertaining possibilities than in being right. But religion and philosophy will not fall by the wayside without a fight. In recent years, both have redoubled their efforts to persuade the public of their continued relevance, which is precisely why contemporary philosophy has taken up theological themes as of late, inaugurating a post-secular discussion that aims to sidestep the standoff between a resurgent, often fundamentalist-leaning theism in one corner, and an increasingly combative secularism in the other. In response to this standoff, some philosophers have proposed a neither/nor kind of secularism. They have, for example, attempted to extract from theology a rational, philosophical core that might be enlisted to aid the efforts of moral philosophy. Books such as Religion without God, by the late Ronald Dworkin, and Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos are good examples of the trend.39 But Coetzee’s works have more in common with a slightly different vein of post-secular thought, one that is more both/and rather than neither/nor. It is one defended by that proponent of hermeneutics and ‘weak thought’ with whom Coetzee briefly shared the stage in Cape Town, namely Vattimo. Unlike Dworkin and Nagel, Vattimo does not call for the translation of religious discourse into the language of philosophical realism. On the contrary, Vattimo calls for an ‘ethical dissolution of reality’, by which he means the bracketing of statusquo-enforcing descriptions of the so-called objective, real world—descriptions 36 J. M. Coetzee, ‘Fictional Beings’, Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 10, no. 2 (June 2003): p. 134. 37 Rorty, ‘Philosophy as a Transitional Genre’, p. 94. 38 Richard Rorty, ‘Religion As Conversation-stopper’, in Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin, 1999), pp. 168–74. 39 Ronald Dworkin, Religion without God (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013) and Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

152

Martin Woessner

which, according to him, only serve to perpetuate inequality, injustice, and cruelty by making them seem perfectly ‘natural’ or ‘necessary’.40 Vattimo sees in philosophical realism a certain kind of complacency, a failure to imagine a different, more peaceful, more equitable, more democratic world of our own construction. Instead of reconciling us to reality, then, Vattimo thinks that Christianity, and the ‘Christian ideal of charity’, especially, can call it into question.41 It reminds us, as Vattimo argues, that reality is not some fixed absolute, but rather an indeterminate point of reference amidst a sea of competing descriptions and interpretations. It shows us—to quote a line from Nietzsche that Vattimo particularly likes and Coetzee knows well—‘How the “true world” became a fable’.42

IMAGINING T HE POSSIBLE When read against the backdrop of Coetzee’s career-long engagement with realism, the Bennington College lecture in which Elizabeth Costello first appears seems like another brief on behalf of the imaginative powers of fictional possibility over and against the demystifying pretensions of realistic verisimilitude. It pits the fable against abstract, philosophical argument. It is the first instance in what would later become the book that bears her name in which Costello speaks out on behalf of the ‘sympathetic imagination’, the ability, as the character of her son puts it in the story, to take ‘us out of ourselves, into other lives’.43 Sympathetic imagination hinges on the talent—her son calls it a gift of ‘grace’—to represent what Costello in ‘What is Realism?’ calls the ‘embeddedness’ of life, the fullness and context-rich world of a lived existence. This idea of ‘embeddedness’ became the cornerstone of two more works Costello delivered via Coetzee’s ventriloquism a year later— fictional lectures that also made their way into the book Elizabeth Costello.44 Those pieces—‘The Philosophers and the Animals’ and ‘The Poets and the Animals’, respectively—were presented as the Tanner Lectures at Princeton. In them, Costello addresses the topic of animal suffering, and she wonders, aloud and in public, whether it was the philosophers or the poets who might help us to find a way to mitigate if not eliminate such suffering.

40

41 Ibid., p. 116. Vattimo, Of Reality, pp. 113–18. Ibid., p. 114. The quotation is a section title in Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols: Or How to Philosophise with a Hammer (London: T. Fisher Urwin, 1899). Writing of Musil’s The Confusions of Young Törless, Coetzee has raised the question of whether ‘our real, rational everyday world has no real, rational foundation’. See J. M. Coetzee, Inner Workings: Literary Essays, 2002–2005, intro. Derek Attridge (New York: Viking, 2007), p. 39. 43 J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (London: Secker & Warburg, 2003), p. 23. Whether or not realism is necessary to achieve this is an open question in the narrative, as Costello’s son quizzes her: ‘Why literary history? And why such a grim chapter in literary history? Realism: no one in this place wanted to hear about realism’ (p. 31). 44 Ibid., p. 32, and J. M. Coetzee, ‘As a Woman Grows Older’, New York Review of Books (15 Jan. 2004): pp. 11–14. 42

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Beyond Realism

153

Here, presented as the voice of Elizabeth Costello, though read in his own voice, Coetzee’s ideas about the problem of realism, which until now had been relegated to his notebooks, seminars, and speeches, were presented as fables, as story-like ‘lessons’. The ‘lessons’ explored whether it was rational arguments rooted in reality or fable-like fictions embedded in empathy that helped us to extend our moral sensibilities—not just to other human beings, but also to other living creatures, including the livestock we raise, usually in horrifying conditions, for no other purpose than eventual slaughter and consumption. Was it, Costello asked, the philosopher’s ability to construct and dissect rational arguments, or the poet’s ability to imagine a seemingly alien life form in all its embeddedness that taught us to recognize, confront, and hopefully call an end to such a cruel and spiritually damaging practice? Elizabeth Costello makes a strong case for the primacy of fantasy. Like her predecessors in the long history of the novel, she grants no quarter to philosophy, preferring to tackle epistemological and ethical issues on her own, imaginary terms rather than those of pre-existing philosophical debate. Taking on René Descartes, specifically, Costello speaks on behalf of imaginative possibility rather than rational certainty, feeling rather than knowing: ‘To thinking, cogitation’, she proclaims, ‘I oppose fullness, embodiedness, the sensation of being—not a consciousness of yourself as a kind of ghostly machine thinking thoughts, but on the contrary the sensation—a heavily affective sensation—of being a body with limbs that have extension in space, being alive to the world’.45

As a ‘fictional being’ herself, the speaker of these words is not really embodied, of course, but we nevertheless imagine her so, and the fact that we do as much is precisely Coetzee’s point. Costello says what Coetzee wants her to say, but her very existence—a ghostly existence, to be sure—shows it, too. What gives us a sense, then, of this fullness, this embodiedness, even when we know full well that it is pure fantasy, nothing more than a fable? Here is where Costello’s pleas on behalf of the ‘sympathetic imagination’ echo Coetzee’s faith— and I use the word deliberately—in the powers of fiction. In the same way that Costello sees ‘no bounds to the sympathetic imagination’, Coetzee came to see in the paradox of literary realism, as he told his Committee on Social Thought students not long beforehand, that ‘yearning for transcendence’, which cannot be eclipsed by the powers of the real. It is in the fantasy of novels that a transcendental realm survives in the modern, secular world. Characters such as Elizabeth Costello, or Don Quixote, or Emma Bovary rail against the realism that ostensibly governs their worlds, and in doing so they demonstrate to us the persistence of imagination in the face of crushing real-world injustices.46 But these characters can serve as inspirational figures in the fight against reality only if and when readers come to inhabit their fictional worlds. Imagination works both ways in this regard, requiring not just the creativity of the author but also an 45 46

Elizabeth Costello, p. 78. Elizabeth Costello, p. 80. HRC, J. M. Coetzee Papers, Container 114, Folder 10.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

154

Martin Woessner

affective response on the part of readers—an active, ‘living reading’, as Coetzee has called it, as opposed to a distanced or ‘dead reading’.47 ‘Living reading’, the kind of reading which swallows our attention whole, may very well be a ‘mysterious affair’, but we can be certain that it requires imagination, for it ‘involves finding one’s way into the voice that speaks from the page, the voice of the Other, and inhabiting that voice, so that you speak to yourself (your self) from outside yourself ’. It is akin, as Coetzee puts it, to inhabiting ‘a phantasm’.48 As a writer of fiction, Elizabeth Costello thinks of herself as somebody who can inhabit phantasms—who can, as she puts it, ‘think my way into the existence of a being who has never existed’. Referencing Thomas Nagel’s famous essay ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, she argues that she can get inside ‘the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with whom I share the substrate life’.49 In his own words, Coetzee has spoken of fiction-writing in similar terms, as ‘imagining the unimaginable’, which is a key component of the ‘moral capacity’ of ‘sympathetic projection’, the ‘rare’ ability to understand another’s life from the inside.50 It is via sympathetic projection that we, as readers, come to know the protagonist of Age of Iron, an epistolary novel recognizably set in the waning days of the apartheid regime in South Africa. Elizabeth Curren, a character who was invented almost a decade before Elizabeth Costello came into being, is dying from cancer and we, as readers, enter into her thoughts by way of the letters she is composing to her daughter, who lives overseas, in the United States. Our sympathetic identification with Curren’s plight is made possible by a listening imagination that eavesdrops on her correspondence, which simultaneously documents the vicious realities of apartheid brutality and her own inner turmoil about her impending death. The narrative form of the epistolary novel, as Lynn Hunt has argued, allows us to witness, and identify with, ‘the unfolding of an “inner self ”’, but in this instance we observe something more like an unravelling of self.51 Caught between the crushing weight of the violent world outside her door and the reality of death awaiting her inside it, Curren’s thoughts turn towards transcendence: I do not want to die in the state I am in, in a state of ugliness. I want to be saved. How shall I be saved? By doing what I do not want to do. That is the first step: that I know. I must love, first of all, the unlovable.52

This realization does not rescue Curren; in fact, it pushes her headlong into crisis. It forces her to confront, unflinchingly, the political reality of her day and age, even if that reality, like the cancer growing inside her, will show her no mercy. Similar themes can be found in Disgrace, which was composed after Age of Iron and alongside the early Elizabeth Costello lessons. Here, too, we are introduced to a character who seeks salvation, who must also learn to love despite himself and 47

48 Ibid. Coetzee and Kurtz, The Good Story, p. 179. Elizabeth Costello, p. 80. See Thomas Nagel, ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, The Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (Oct. 1974): pp. 435–50. 50 Doubling the Point, p. 68. 51 Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights (New York: Norton, 2007), p. 45. 52 J. M. Coetzee, Age of Iron (New York: Penguin, 1990), p. 136. 49

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Beyond Realism

155

amidst the cruel realities of the world, realities to which he, an educated white man living in post-apartheid South Africa, is no innocent bystander. Still, David Lurie’s brush with transcendence comes about in a more roundabout fashion than Elizabeth Curren’s. It arrives not via a confrontation with his own mortality, but with that of other creatures. His awakening—if we can call it that—occurs when he begins caring for unwanted and abandoned dogs who are about to be euthanized. From Bev Shaw, who runs the veterinary clinic where the procedures take place, he learns ‘to concentrate all his attention on the animal they are killing, giving it what he no longer has difficulty calling by its proper name: love’.53 The dogs become Christ-like, sacrificial lambs—‘Bearing him in his arms like a lamb, he re-enters the surgery’—whose deaths force Lurie to contemplate not just the state of his soul, but also the suffering souls of other people, other creatures as well.54 There is no redemption to be found in these entirely mundane, routine deaths; but they do point beyond the world to something transcendent. Disgrace has been called a ‘post-secular novel’ because it both invites and resists religious interpretation.55 Like Age of Iron before it, the novel is less of a sermon and more of a testament; it is a testament, most of all, to the persistence of yearnings for transcendence. In Derek Attridge’s opinion, Disgrace is a work suffused with ideas about souls and salvation and—most importantly—grace.56 But it takes its cues from literature as much as from theology, suggesting a possible overlapping interest—on the part of both fiction and religious belief—in realms beyond the real. Imagination and faith intermingle in this regard. When seen from this vantage point, imagination seems very much like a gift of grace, but grace also starts to look like a gift of the imagination. Disgrace, as Mike Marais argues, portrays imagination in precisely this way, as something mysterious and non-calculable.57 It is not a tool or a skill, but a radical openness to inspiration—to being moved by the spirit. It might be that we have to imagine grace, in other words, before we can be ready to receive it. The novel might thus represent a site where, via the workings of the imagination, the gift of grace can be kept alive in the contemporary world. It is no accident, as Attridge has noted, that ‘Coetzee has often turned to religious discourse’ in his attempt to find a language that ‘escapes the terminology of the administered society’.58 Disgrace certainly refuses to accept the status quo of the modern world, with all of its violence, brutality, and moral blindness. Jan Wilm has rightly reminded us that Coetzee’s fiction consistently ‘urges us to rethink worlds’; and in this regard Disgrace seems to hold out hope not just for another world, but a better one.59 It will have to be imagined before it can be made to appear, though. 53

54 Ibid., p. 220. J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (New York: Penguin, 1999), p. 219. Alyda Faber, ‘The Post-Secular Poetics and Ethics of Exposure in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace’, Literature and Theology 23, no. 3 (Sept. 2009): p. 303. 56 See Derek Attridge, ‘Age of Bronze, State of Grace’, in J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 162–91. 57 Mike Marais, ‘ “Disgrace” and the Task of the Imagination’, Journal of Modern Literature 29, no. 2 (winter 2006): pp. 75–93. 58 Attridge, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, p. 180. 59 Jan Wilm, The Slow Philosophy of J. M. Coetzee (London/New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), p. 67. 55

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Martin Woessner

156

No novel will save us, of course—‘I wish someone, some saviour’, the character Simón proclaims at one point in The Childhood of Jesus, ‘would descend from the skies and wave a magic wand and say, Behold, read this book and all your questions will be answered’—but some of them might remind us that we are not, and never have been, entirely alone in our yearnings for another world, for transcendence.60 On the surface, The Childhood of Jesus seems to be a modern, only slightly secular parable, which does just this. It asks if transcendence, or redemption, can be found in a totally administered world. Although any connection it has to realism, or to the real world, is tenuous at best, it is nevertheless the byproduct of Coetzee’s confrontation with realism, and its numerous allusions to Don Quixote suggest as much. Coetzee’s most recent works may have shed the trappings of realism, but they have not abandoned the ‘yearning for transcendence’ that Coetzee locates in the tradition of the novel. If anything, they have underscored it. Like many of Coetzee’s previous novels, The Childhood of Jesus stands as a testament to the profound powers of literary fantasy, a testament embodied by the ‘lively imagination’ of a seemingly normal child, David.61 Buried in the story of David and his adoptive father Simón is a brief on behalf of the indispensability of imagination not just for philosophy and ethics, but also, and perhaps most of all, for faith and redemption, for what we might even venture to call, in pre- or post-secular parlance, the salvation of souls—a topic with which Elizabeth Curren, David Lurie, and Elizabeth Costello were preoccupied, and one that recurs again and again in Coetzee’s autobiographical fictions, everything from Boyhood (1997), Youth (2002), and Summertime (2009) to Diary of a Bad Year (2007), in which Coetzee turns himself into a rather quixotic character named John Coetzee, or J.C.62 Despite its title, The Childhood of Jesus keeps its distance from organized religion, and from what might be easily recognized as religious discourse. It derives far more inspiration from literature than from theology. The fact that Don Quixote is invoked at the crux of the narrative is surely not accidental, nor is the fact that Simón initially reads the book in a demystifying way while the Jesus-like David— who is, like many children blessed with a ‘lively imagination’, a troublesome student at school—appreciates it almost exclusively for its fabulous escapism. These characters represent two different responses to literary realism: one that emphasizes its demystifying thrust, another that appreciates its fantastical escapism. Over the course of the novel these roles are reversed, as Simón, eager to steer his adoptive son away from the dangers of the ‘real world’, represented by the devil-like figure of one señor Daga, eventually helps David to see the magic that he had formerly denied: That is what you should be like. Like Don Quixote. Don Quixote rescued maidens. He protected the poor from the rich and powerful. Take him as your model, not señor Daga. Protect the poor, save the oppressed. And honour your mother.

60 62

The Childhood of Jesus, p. 239. Elizabeth Costello, p. 89.

61

Ibid., p. 224, 249.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Beyond Realism

157

To which the boy replies: ‘No! My mother must honour me! Anyway, señor Daga says Don Quixote is old-fashioned. He says no one rides a horse anymore.’63 It was precisely this kind of demystifying thinking that, in his teaching and public speaking from the late 1980s onwards, Coetzee consistently called into question. Traditional novels may be old-fashioned, but they, like the old workhorse El Rey—an allusion to Don Quixote’s steed Rocinante—who dies not long after David befriends him at the docks where Simón works, are not ‘dead’. Against David’s teary pronouncement that El Rey is dead, Simón invokes a fantasy: ‘No, he is not. El Rey lives. You know that . . . somewhere El Rey is waiting for you to come. If you will search you will be sure to find him.’64 And with that the roles of father and son are reversed, faith in fantasy overturns the rule of the real. Don Quixote lives on. The Childhood of Jesus plays out, in fable-like form, many of the debates about realism, imagination, and ‘the yearning for transcendence’ that Coetzee has waded through during the course of his career. The Schooldays of Jesus, which picks up and continues its story, though in a slightly different register, does the same, as its talk of ‘transcendental numbers’ suggests.65 This time around, Davíd has found a school that suits him, an Academy of Dancing that teaches its students to call down those ‘transcendental numbers’ from the heavens, through the marriage of music and movement. Simón, the perpetual doubter, is suspicious of the curriculum, but the idea that its transcendental bent may be on to something nags at him: He, Simón, thinks of himself as a sane, rational person who offers the boy a sane, rational education of why things are the way they are. But are the needs of a child’s soul better served by his dry little homilies than by the fantastic fare offered at the Academy?66

In a reversal similar to the one in The Childhood of Jesus, the father once again comes to learn from the child. Schooldays closes with Simón enrolling in the newly reopened Academy, trying to learn for himself—in dancing shoes that are much too small for him, in children’s shoes, really—how to call down those transcendental numbers from the heavens. The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus do away with the tropes and tricks of the realist novel. Their sparse, ‘stripped-down’ worlds might very well reflect the emergence of a distinct ‘late style’ in Coetzee’s oeuvre, one marked by an impatience with, if not also a suspicion of, ‘the seductive powers of art’.67 They do not, however, exchange fantasy for a demystified reality or any kind of orthodox faith. They may have Jesus in their titles, but the patron saints of these books are Cervantes (in Childhood) and Fyodor Dostoevsky and Robert Musil (in Schooldays).

63

64 Ibid. The Childhood of Jesus, p. 246. J. M. Coetzee, The Schooldays of Jesus (London: Harvill Secker, 2016), pp. 67–8. 66 Ibid., p. 207. 67 These remarks on late style, which relate to the work of Tolstoy and Bach, appear in Coetzee’s correspondence with Paul Auster, Here and Now: Letters, 2008–2011 (New York: Viking, 2013), p. 88. 65

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

158

Martin Woessner R AD I C A L H O P E

If literary imagination is a kind of saving grace, then saving grace must also be akin to literary imagination. Maybe it is not just that fiction or poetry will help us to save our souls in what has become a soulless world; perhaps it is equally the case that fiction and poetry might also rescue the very idea of salvation. One way to read the Jesus novels is to see them as post-secular parables or fables, which suggest that the radicalism of Jesus is a radicalism possessed by children, but not exclusive to them—namely, the radicalism of fantasy. Imagination is what grants us the ability to see and feel otherwise, to think differently, to relate to others in new and unexpected ways. It represents a kind of ‘radical hope’ in new possibilities, something Coetzee’s University of Chicago colleague and friend, Jonathan Lear, has found in certain Native American traditions that developed ‘imaginative tools’—a kind of ‘imaginative excellence’, even—in response to the widespread threat of ‘cultural devastation’.68 This is a radicalism that resists, though it does not escape, the weight of the real. In a world of reason and logic, where everything is anticipated and allocated, as it is in Novilla or Estrella, the fictional settings of Coetzee’s Jesus novels, imagination disrupts the status quo—not by challenging it per se, but by imagining alternatives, by refusing to substitute the possible for the real. It keeps hope alive. Unlike the work of his colleagues in moral philosophy, then, which so often attempts to rescue from religion, or from literature, some insight or idea that can be deployed in rational debate in the ‘real world’, Coetzee’s later novels give voice to the ‘yearning for transcendence’ that resists reality. In doing so, they call that ‘real world’ into question. They remind us that the concept of ‘reality’—as Lear, channelling Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bernard Williams, once argued—‘only makes sense within the context of a form of life’; and forms of life can always be reimagined.69 They also remind us that the rich ‘embeddedness’—as Elizabeth Costello calls it—of a form of life usually exceeds the narrow discourses of philosophical reflection and moral deliberation. We are ‘still very ignorant of the relation between our reflective beliefs’, as Lear puts it, ‘and the rest of our beliefs and values’.70 To be alive is to be much more than a moral abacus. When she confronted them with the ‘realities’ of animal suffering, Elizabeth Costello asked her audiences not to make a calculated moral decision about the ethics of eating meat, but to listen and to imagine sympathetically—to ‘open your heart and listen to what your heart says’.71 In The Childhood of Jesus, Simón thinks something similar about himself: ‘If he is going to be judged, let it be on the movements of his heart rather than

68 Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 78, 117. 69 Jonathan Lear, ‘Ethics, Mathematics, and Relativism’, in Essays on Moral Realism, ed. Geoffrey Sayre-McCord (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 79. This essay first appeared in Mind 92, no. 365 (1983): pp. 38–60. 70 Lear, ‘Ethics, Mathematics, and Relativism’, p. 93. 71 Elizabeth Costello, p. 82.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Beyond Realism

159

the clarity of his thought. Or his logic.’72 What Coetzee has said in his own words, in response to questions about his vegetarianism, is: ‘I can’t produce a rationale for my behavior, but I’m also suspicious of making reason the measure of all conduct.’73 Reason can regulate or rationalize our behaviour, but it cannot redeem it. For that we need access to the secrets of the heart, the mystery of grace, and the ‘yearning for transcendence’ that makes us who we are and makes us act the way we do. In search of such things, we might turn, as Rorty suggested, to fiction, which privileges the (im)possible over and above the rational, over and above the real. The limitless possibilities of the novel might help us to see that the thing most desperately in need of redemption today is the yearning for redemption itself.74

72

73 Kannemeyer, J. M. Coetzee: A Life in Writing, p. 591. The Childhood of Jesus, p. 139. For helpful feedback and commentary on earlier versions of this chapter, I would like to thank the participants of the Literature and Philosophy: Responding to J. M. Coetzee symposium held at St John’s College, Oxford University in 2015. I am especially grateful to the symposium’s organizers, Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm, who were generous hosts and correspondents. Arne De Boever, Kevin McCabe, and Roy Scranton deserve thanks for humouring me, once again, and for trying to steer me in the right direction. Lastly, and most importantly, this chapter is dedicated to Margarete Schwall, and to the memory of Bertold Schwall, who provided the desk on which it was written, as well as so very much more. 74

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

10 Coetzee’s Critique of Language Peter D. McDonald

Whichever way you look at it, this is not a promising topic for a volume of essays intended to revisit the ancient quarrel between literature and philosophy.

L IT . P H I L O R P H I L . L I T ? Seen from the side of philosophy, this chapter strays into very obscure territory. The main phrase in my title evokes a largely forgotten philosophical work from the turn of the last century: Fritz Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (1901–2). At best, this monumental three-volume study, which has never been translated into English, is remembered in philosophical circles because of a brief, categorically negative aside in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922). Defining his own early attempt to establish a secure ground for knowledge by stripping ordinary language of its opacities, Wittgenstein declared in C. K. Ogden’s translation: ‘All philosophy is “Critique of Language” (but not at all in Mauthner’s sense).’1 To date, the only monograph in English focusing on Mauthner’s contribution to philosophy is Gershon Weiler’s Mauthner’s Critique of Language (1970), though Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin also discuss it in some detail in Wittgenstein’s Vienna (1973). As Weiler, Janik, and Toulmin all point out, after his earlier critical aside, Wittgenstein went on to engage in a far more positive, if wholly implicit, dialogue with Mauthner in the Philosophical Investigations (1953). The Kritik found more favour among twentieth-century writers than it did among philosophers. It had a significant impact on the Dadaist movement as well as on Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), a definitive influence on Beckett, and it did not escape Borges’s wide and eclectic learning. Since Mauthner himself was as much a writer as he was a philosopher—he produced just under thirty stories and novels— he has also fared better among literary scholars, particularly within German studies. Two English-language monographs are especially notable: Elizabeth Bredeck’s Metaphors of Knowledge (1992) and Katherine Arens’s Empire in Decline: Fritz Mauthner’s Critique of Wilhelminian Germany (2001). In French, Jacques Le Rider’s intellectual biography Fritz Mauthner (2012) is equally noteworthy. 1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Kegan Paul, 1933), p. 63.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Coetzee’s Critique of Language

161

Seen from the side of literature—or, at least, from J. M. Coetzee’s corner of the vast labyrinthine world of letters—the prospects for this topic are no less unpromising. Though Coetzee has long known about Mauthner through the interest Beckett had in him, he has read neither the Kritik nor any of Mauthner’s other works.2 Yet this may not be as discouraging as it looks. After all, Beckett, who was the subject of Coetzee’s doctoral thesis in the late 1960s, can be counted among his major literary interlocutors. And since Watt (1953)—the most Mauthneresque of Beckett’s early works—has always had a special appeal for Coetzee, it might even be possible to claim Mauthner as an influence by adoption, though I do not see much mileage in this line of argument.3 Meagre pickings, then: on the one hand, an obscure figure representing philosophy, who is even questionably philosophical, and, on the other, a connection to Coetzee that is tenuous to say the least. To make matters worse, since Coetzee has made a career out of being questionably literary, he is as awkward a representative of literature as Mauthner is of philosophy. So, when seen in terms of the co-ordinating conjunction this volume sets out to address, what we have are two unlikely ‘representatives’—and an equally unlikely pairing—each of whom hovers uncertainly in a space somewhere between literature and philosophy, troubling any clear sense of what might properly be said to belong to one or to the other, or, indeed, of what the linkage itself might yield. Yet, to my mind, it is precisely these uncertainties that make the question of Coetzee’s indirect links to Mauthner worth posing. What appears, on the face of it, to look like a speculative excursion into the remoter corners of intellectual history may in the end cast new light not just on the ancient quarrel but on the shaky and in any case always debatable disciplinary foundations of the modern university.

MAUTHN ER’ S C RI TI Q UE OF L AN G UA G E To begin with, having Mauthner in the picture makes it possible to identify a significant, but perhaps otherwise easily missed, pattern among Coetzee’s many literary interests and elective affinities. Formulated in the terms of a rather highminded version of Trivial Pursuit, the question is this: what do Aharon Appelfeld, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Franz Kafka, Sándor Márai, Robert Musil, Rainer Maria Rilke, Joseph Roth, Bruno Schulz, and Italo Svevo have in common? The first answer: like Mauthner, they were all born into the Austrian, later the AustroHungarian, Empire, in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The second answer: unlike Mauthner, they have all either had a traceable influence on Coetzee’s fictions or have attracted his attention as a scholar-critic; in most cases, they have done both.

2

J. M. Coetzee, personal correspondence, 22 Jan. 2014. Linda Ben-Zvi, ‘Samuel Beckett, Fritz Mauthner, and the Limits of Language’, PMLA 95, no. 2 (1980): pp. 183–200; Jennie Skerl, ‘Fritz Mauthner’s “Critique of Language” in Samuel Beckett’s “Watt” ’, Contemporary Literature 15, no. 4 (1974): pp. 474–87. See also C. J. Ackerley and S. E. Gontarski, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 2004), pp. 358–60. 3

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

162

Peter D. McDonald

We could add Paul Celan to this list were it not for the fact that he arrived on the scene a little too late: the region of Romania into which he was born in 1920 had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until two years earlier. The first answer looks like a mere historical curiosity, but, as Coetzee repeatedly notes in his critical essays, this particular constellation of writers shared more than the accident of their origins.4 They were all also shaped by the precarious, generally middle-class imperial world into which they were born. The same can be said for Mauthner. Recalling his experience of growing up in the 1850s and 1860s in the ethnically diverse, multilingual city of Prague, then part of Habsburg Austria, he commented: ‘I cannot understand how a Jew born in a Slavonic land of the Austrian Empire could not be drawn to the study of language.’5 For one thing, he grew up speaking three languages, each of which formed part of an intricately differentiated social milieu: ‘German as the language of civil servants, of Bildung, poetry, and polite society; Czech as the language of the peasants and servant girls, and as the historical language of the glorious kingdom of Bohemia; a little Hebrew as the sacred language of the Old Testament and as the basis of Mauscheldeutsch [a version of Yiddish].’6 What made a specifically critical attitude to language ultimately unavoidable for Mauthner was the dismay he felt at witnessing the transformative effect a militantly monolingual Czech nationalism had on this diverse world. As he observed in a late essay, ‘Mother Tongue and Fatherland’ (1920), this fed his lasting hostility not just to ‘language purifiers’, but to ethnolinguistic nationalists of all kinds—the anti-Semitism he witnessed in Berlin in the late 1870s only reinforced this conviction.7 ‘The state, even the approximately pure nation-state, does not really have a mother tongue as the means of understanding for its people’, he wrote, ‘for that mother tongue is not thinkable without dialect coloration’—hence his claim that the Czech nationalists’ supposedly pure ‘mother tongue’ was ‘forged’.8 All the state could lay claim to was the makeshift ‘language of agreement’ that evolved, not through speech, but as a consequence of writing and then printing—and for Mauthner this meant German. He also argued that the nationalist’s way of thinking about language constituted an incitement to violence because it endorsed a falsely homogenous idea of the ‘fatherland’ which ‘led our people only a few years later to the imperialism that endangered the world’.9 He had in mind the events that triggered the First World War. In his critical essays, Coetzee dwelt on the same historical details, emphasizing the multilingualism and

4 Coetzee discusses these writers in Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1992), Stranger Shores: Literary Essays, 1986–1999 (London: Secker & Warburg, 2001), and Inner Workings: Literary Essays, 2002–2005 (London: Harvill Secker, 2007). 5 Elizabeth Bredeck, Metaphors of Knowledge (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), p. 17. This is Bredeck’s translation from Mauthner’s autobiography Prager Jugendjahre: Erinnerungen (Munich: Müller, 1918). 6 Bredeck, Metaphors of Knowledge, p. 17. 7 For a detailed account of Mauthner’s complex relationship to Germany, see Jacques Le Rider, Fritz Mauthner (Paris: Bartillat, 2012), pp. 47–120. 8 Katherine Arens, Empire in Decline: Fritz Mauthner’s Critique of Wilhelminian Germany (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), pp. 78–80. 9 Ibid, p. 78.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Coetzee’s Critique of Language

163

ethnic diversity of the imperial monarchy his Austro-Hungarian writers shared with Mauthner, the complex Jewishness many also had in common with him, and the nationalist tensions that eventually erupted in 1914, plunging Europe into war. In Mauthner’s case, these formative experiences did more than shape his sensibility. They prompted the extreme linguistic scepticism he went on to develop in his philosophical writings which centred on the question of language and knowledge. The opening sentences of the Kritik set the scene: “In the beginning was the word.” With the word men stand at the threshold of the knowledge of the world and they remain standing there if they stay attached to the word.10

In formulating this uncompromisingly sceptical position, Mauthner owed much to what Charles Taylor has recently called the ‘expressive constitutive’ theory of language associated with German Romanticism, notably with the figures of Hamann, Herder, and Humboldt, in contrast to the earlier ‘designative-instrumental’ conception of the Enlightenment tradition which Taylor identifies with Hobbes, Locke, and Condillac.11 Like his Prussian precursors, Mauthner rejected the idea that language was a relatively neutral, if often defective, instrument for thought, arguing that ‘we can only think what we can express in language’ and that each language catalogues the world in its own way.12 Unlike his Prussian predecessors, however, he did not believe this was because languages are unique ‘organisms’ incarnating the mystical ‘spirit’ of the ‘people’ (Volk). He dismissed this kind of organicist-idealism as ‘word-superstition’ of the highest order. Rather, as he saw it, each language constituted a particular historically evolving, rule-based ‘social game’ (Gesellschaftspiel ) that ‘becomes more compelling as more and more players submit to it’, thereby strengthening its special way of cataloguing the world, or what he called its ‘poetics of the fable convenue or of knowing’.13 On the same conventionalist assumptions, and, again like his Prussian precursors, he rejected the idea that any language is superior to another. For him, the relativity underpinning the ‘expressive constitutive’ tradition put pay to hierarchy, leaving only difference. ‘When we would hear that most languages do not know the notion of gender, that, e.g. the Eskimos divide things into living and dead objects’, he wrote, ‘we would have to admire the linguistic imagination of the Eskimos and consider our own sex-focussed fantasy barbarian.’14 At the same time, Mauthner set himself apart from his Prussian forebears by pursuing the deterministic implications of their relativistic thesis with a singular relentlessness. This can be seen most clearly via a comparison with Humboldt. On

10 Gershon Weiler, Mauthner’s Critique of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 272. See also Fritz Mauthner, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, 3 vols. (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1912–13), i, p. 1. 11 Charles Taylor, The Language Animal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), p. 48. 12 Weiler, Mauthner’s Critique of Language, p. 34. See also Mauthner, Kritik, iii, p. 358. 13 Bredeck, Metaphors of Knowledge, pp. 64–6. See also Mauthner, Kritik, i, p. 25. 14 Dirk Van Hulle, ‘Textual Awareness’, PhD thesis, University of Antwerp, 1999, p. 221. See also Mauthner, Kritik, iii, p. 28.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

164

Peter D. McDonald

the basis of statements like the following, Humboldt is frequently taken to exemplify the determinism that is seen to be a hallmark of the Romantic tradition: Man lives primarily with objects, indeed, since feeling and acting in him depend on his presentations, he actually does so exclusively, as language presents them to him. By the same act whereby he spins language out of himself, he spins himself into it, and every language draws about the people [Volk] that possess it a circle whence it is possible to exit only by stepping over at once into the circle of another one.15

Yet, for all his relativism, Humboldt always understood languages to be unbounded circles, the expressive potential of which is endlessly extendable. ‘The nature of man has intimations of a region that transcends language, and is actually constricted by language’, he went on to argue, ‘but that language in turn is the only means of exploring and fertilizing this region.’16 This often overlooked aspect of his thinking goes some way towards explaining the special value he accorded literature, and poetry above all: it is through its literature that a language develops ‘its character’—and hence the ‘spirit of a people’ (der Geiste eines Volks)—opening it ‘to the pure evolution of thought and to free expression’.17 By contrast, Mauthner saw language as a despotic ‘social force’ that has a deforming hold over the individual’s innermost thoughts (‘not I think; it thinks me’) and a determinative influence on the ‘fable convenue’ the linguistic community takes to be its ‘knowledge of the world’.18 In his view, it could neither be re-engineered, as the early Wittgenstein believed, nor transcended, as Humboldt argued. It could only be destroyed—hence the motto on his book plate: ‘Whoever does not recognise and break the tyranny of language, is not free.’19

COETZEE A ND LINGUISTIC RELATIV I TY Coetzee may not have been ‘a Jew born in a Slavonic land of the Austrian Empire’, but like Mauthner, and, indeed, like the constellation of Austro-Hungarian writers who feature in his critical essays, he had good biographical, even existential, reasons for developing his own critical attitude to language. Having been born into a bilingual (Afrikaans/English) family in Cape Town in 1940, he understood and felt alienated by the strongly deterministic racialized ethnolinguistic assumptions at the heart of Afrikaner nationalism which underpinned the apartheid state after 1948, and he retained a lasting sense of unease about English, the other language of empire which he went on to choose as his literary medium. Until 1996, English and Afrikaans were the only two designated state languages in South Africa. The postapartheid Constitution, by contrast, recognizes an additional nine languages as official, ranging from isiNdebele to isiZulu, and pledges to promote a further 15 Wilhelm von Humboldt, On Language, trans. Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 60. 16 Ibid., p. 157. 17 Ibid., p. 151. 18 Bredeck, Metaphors of Knowledge, p. 67. See also Mauthner, Kritik, i, p. 42. 19 Fritz Mauthner, ‘Ex Libris’, http://www.archive.org/stream/fritzmauthner_01_reel01#page/ n305/mode/1up, accessed 10 June 2016. The original reads: ‘Wer nicht der Sprache Tyrannei/ Erkennet und bricht, der ist nicht frei.’

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Coetzee’s Critique of Language

165

fifteen, including the indigenous Khoi, Nama, and San languages as well as Arabic, Hindi, Hebrew, and German. The circumstances Coetzee and Mauthner confronted were, of course, very different, and if I were contributing to a volume about the not-so-ancient quarrel between cultural and political history, I would at this point give a more detailed account of their disparate social, political, ethnic, and linguistic worlds. Given the aims of this volume, however, I shall focus on the way they responded to their circumstances, and, more particularly, on the consequences of what it might mean for the ancient quarrel between literature and philosophy to think of Coetzee’s own literary project as a ‘Critique of Language’ in something like Mauthner’s sense. Before I turn to the fictions, however, I want to consider a key essay Coetzee wrote in his guise as an academic linguist in the early 1980s, ‘Isaac Newton and the Ideal of a Transparent Scientific Language’, which first appeared in the Journal of Literary Semantics in 1982. The essay shows him articulating his own sense of the intellectual genealogy he and Mauthner shared in a quasi-philosophical mode comparable to the Kritik. The essay begins with an account of Humboldt’s version of the linguistic relativity thesis—the thesis, as Coetzee put it, ‘that one thinks in forms limited and determined by the forms of one’s native language’.20 Characteristically, given his attentiveness to history, he noted that this emerged at a time—the 1830s— when ‘the expansion and consolidation of the European colonial empires was beginning to reveal the staggering diversity of the tongues of mankind’, a period that happened also to coincide with ‘the blooming-time of European nationalism’. This conjunction meant Humboldt’s thesis cut two ways. If it lent linguistic credibility to the nationalist cause, it also ‘jolted European ethnocentrism and the classically inherited conception of language as a transparent medium of thought’— Taylor’s ‘designative-instrumental’ conception. As a trained linguist, Coetzee was well-versed in the tradition Humboldt inherited from Hamann and Herder, particularly as it was developed by Edward Sapir at the turn of the twentieth century and then by Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1930s. He was also well aware that by the early 1980s the ‘von Humboldt-Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’, as he called it, had ‘had a rough time at the hands of philosophers and linguists’.21 Nonetheless, taking Whorf ’s comments on Newton as his starting point, he chose to revisit the central issues Humboldt opened up, focusing on Newton’s attempt to find a nonmathematical way of writing about gravity in ordinary English and Latin. He cited Whorf ’s claim that ‘Newtonian space, time and matter’ are ‘recepts from culture and language’, not ‘intuitions’.22 Whorf took the term ‘recept’—a technical neologism meaning ‘idea or mental image’ as opposed to a directly or intuitively apprehended ‘percept’—from George Romanes’s Mental Evolution in Man (1888). With this in mind, Coetzee formulated his own central question as follows: Do we find in Newton’s English and Latin the seamless continuity that Whorf predicts between syntax and logic and world view, or, on the contrary, are there signs of a

20 J. M. Coetzee, ‘Isaac Newton and the Ideal of a Transparent Scientific Language’, in Doubling the Point, p. 181. 21 Ibid., p. 182. 22 Ibid., pp. 183–4.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

166

Peter D. McDonald

wrestling to make the thought fit into the language, to make the language express the thought, signs perhaps even of an incapacity of language to express certain thoughts, or thought unable to think itself out because of the limitations of its medium?23

As his wording suggests, he approached this question not as a philosopher, nor, indeed, as an academic linguist pure and simple, but as a philosophically inclined linguist with a specifically literary interest in rhetoric and translation. Unsurprisingly, given the conspicuous weighting of his own syntax, the analysis he offered controverted what he took to be the strongly deterministic implications of the ‘von Humboldt-Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’. Yet he did not reject all its basic tenets. If he showed there was no ‘seamless continuity’ between ‘syntax and logic and world view’ in Newton’s writings, he also demonstrated that Newton’s own ‘ideal of a transparent scientific language’, which Coetzee, like Mauthner, traced back to Aristotle, was an impossible fantasy. Seen in Taylor’s terms, Newton shared the ‘tropophobic’ tendency within the ‘instrumental-designative’ tradition, exemplified by the ban Hobbes and Locke placed on metaphor.24 On Coetzee’s analysis, however, we see Newton ‘wrestling’ with and ultimately failing to escape metaphor at both the semantic and the syntactic levels. He remains in thrall, on the one hand, to the ‘animistic content of key verbs like attract’, and, on the other, to ‘the meaning superadded by Subject-Verb order’ which ‘imposes a temporal-causal order over a syntactic order’.25 As he noted, this did more than expose the particular challenges Newton faced trying to write about gravity in ordinary English and Latin. It undermined the Enlightenment ‘ideal of Bishop Sprat and the Royal Society of Newton’s day’, which he called ‘no-nonsense “mathematical plainness”’, and cast doubt on the longstanding philosophical quest to develop a logical, rigorously referential language that might achieve an ‘unambiguous one-for-one mapping of reality’—recall Wittgenstein’s ambitions in the Tractatus. This was no bad thing, Coetzee suggested, because we may ‘properly ask whether a metaphorfree language in which anything significant or new can be said is attainable’.26 Coetzee nonetheless accepted what had by the early 1980s become the prevailing orthodoxy regarding the ‘von Humboldt-Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’—namely, that it was essentially and strongly determinist. That this was itself a caricature, as both Taylor and James Underhill emphasize in their recent reassessments of Humboldt and his legacy, puts a different gloss on Coetzee’s analysis.27 Seen in the context of Humboldt’s claims about the open-endedness of language, the endlessly extendable expressive capacity Coetzee passed over, his Newton emerges less as a counter to the supposed determinism of the relativistic tradition than as an exemplar of Humboldtian creativity, caught as he is in ‘a real struggle’ with the ‘limitations of his medium’, a struggle, ‘carried out in awareness of the issues involved, to bridge the gap between the nonreferential symbolism of mathematics and a language too 23

24 Taylor, The Language Animal, p. 158. Ibid., p. 184. ‘Isaac Newton and the Ideal of a Transparent Scientific Language’, p. 192. 26 Ibid, p. 193. 27 See Taylor, The Language Animal; and James W. Underhill, Humboldt, Worldview and Language (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009). 25

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Coetzee’s Critique of Language

167

protean to be tied down to single, pure meanings’.28 Crucially, however, for all his Humboldtian desires to transcend the English and Latin of his day, Newton is ultimately a failure for Coetzee, albeit, as his comments on the value of metaphor imply, a failure of a significant, creative, and honourable kind, a Don Quixote of the seventeenth-century scientific world, as it were. On the question of language and thought, then, the essay shows Coetzee recognizing the utopian force of what Humboldt called ‘intimations of a region that transcends language’. At the same time, in a more uncompromisingly Mauthneresque spirit, it shows him questioning the possibility of ever finally arriving there. When it comes to the related but distinct question of language and knowledge, Coetzee was closer to Mauthner. Asked in the interview accompanying the republished version of the essay in Doubling the Point (1992) whether or not it ‘endorses a linguistic idealism, that it upholds the view that reality and history are purely constructs of language’, he replied: ‘In certain particularly dubious moods I wonder whether we know at all how the universe “really” behaves: is our image, our representation of what happens in the universe perhaps not of the same order of privacy as our mathematics?’ ‘Is this idealism?’ Coetzee then asked, before answering: ‘Probably. It is certainly scepticism.’29 This sounds like a clearly worked-out philosophical position akin to Mauthner’s, but, since ‘moods’ are not exactly reasoned arguments, we should be cautious about making too much of this, especially as we turn to the fictions. MAUTHNERESQUE LITERARY FORAYS One way of thinking about the relationship between literature and philosophy— perhaps even the most natural way—would be to treat the fictions as if they were simply essays in another mode, using them as further evidence for analysing Coetzee’s place in intellectual history. Given the tendency for academic literary critics to privilege literary history, to focus on Coetzee’s relationship to Beckett, say, or to Kafka, it might even be construed as a salutary move to approach the fictions via Mauthner and the history of philosophy not only as a much-needed corrective to the scholastic biases of criticism, but as a further justification for developing dialogues across disciplines in volumes such as this. As it happens, the clearest example of Coetzee’s indirect links as a writer to Mauthner invites precisely this kind of approach. The postscript to Elizabeth Costello (2003), which is entitled ‘Letter of Elizabeth, Lady Chandos’, is based on Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Ein Brief (‘Lord Chandos Letter to Lord Bacon’, 1902), a short fiction Mauthner commissioned for a series called Invented Conversations and Letters that appeared in Der Tag, the Berlin daily on which he served as literary editor. Making the connection to Hofmannsthal explicit, Coetzee begins his own version of the letter with an epigraph from the original in which Lord Chandos describes the moments of rapture that have led to his own extreme scepticism about language—Coetzee’s 28 29

‘Isaac Newton and the Ideal of a Transparent Scientific Language’, p. 194. Interview with J. M. Coetzee in Doubling the Point, pp. 145–6.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

168

Peter D. McDonald

feminized version is written by a historical avatar of his main author-figure, the contemporary Australian novelist Elizabeth Costello. The first sentence reads: ‘At such moments even a negligible creature, a dog, a rat, a beetle, a stunted apple tree, a cart track winding over a hill, a mossy stone, counts more for me than a night of bliss with the most beautiful, most devoted mistress.’30 Mauthner read Ein Brief as a straightforward literary articulation of the Kritik. He even went so far as to demand formal acknowledgement of the fact, but, having ‘more or less politely denied’ any indebtedness, as Arens notes, Hofmannsthal refused.31 In Coetzee’s version, it is Lady Chandos who writes to Francis Bacon describing her doubts about language which centre on her frustration at not being able to escape the chains of metaphor: ‘I yield myself to the figures, do you see, Sir, how I am taken over?, the rush I call it when I do not call it my rapture, the rush and the rapture are not the same, but in ways that I despair of explaining though they are clear to my eye, my eye I call it.’32 Casting Bacon, another founding figure of the ‘instrumentaldesignative’ tradition, as a saviour who sets his words in place ‘as a mason builds a wall with bricks’, and speaking for herself and her husband, she ends: ‘Drowning, we write out of our separate fates. Save us.’33 Based on the genealogies of intellectual history, we could make a case for reading Coetzee’s first three fictions in this way too, since they all turn on an essentially philosophical question, the impetus for which derives from the Humboldtian tradition: is it possible to transcend the ‘constitutive-expressive’ language you take to be your own? Like the Newton essay, the answers these fictions yield are ambivalent. Dusklands (1974), for instance, is darkly Mauthneresque. The two central protagonists, Eugene Dawn, a late twentieth-century American expert on psychological warfare, and Jacobus Coetzee, an eighteenth-century Dutch colonial explorer, are shown to be solipsistically enclosed in their respective languages, a condition expressed not only in their habit of coining disparaging names for outsiders but in their murderous resolve to exterminate them—for Dawn it is the ‘Viet Cong’, for the fictional Coetzee the ‘Hottentots’. The answer proposed by In the Heart of the Country (1977) is more Humboldtian insofar as its main protagonist, the isolated colonial daughter Magda, attempts often desperately, even madly, to escape the prison-house of her ‘father tongue’, Afrikaans, and the racialized feudal order it encodes. Like Coetzee’s Newton, she fails to do so, but she does not abandon her Humboldtian intimations. She ends up ‘forming stones into letters twelve feet high’ spelling out ‘messages to my saviours’—not Lord Bacon but the ‘sky-men’ in their ‘flying machines’—first in a garbled Esperanto-like Spanish, which she hopes might be ‘the true language of the heart’, before finally ‘descending to ideographs’.34 The old imperial Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), who has an antiquarian interest in ancient scripts—he spends his nights ‘waiting for spirits from the byways of history to speak to him’—shares Magda’s Humboldtian 30 31 33 34

J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (London: Secker & Warburg, 2003), p. 226. 32 Elizabeth Costello, p. 229. Arens, Empire in Decline, p. 135. Ibid., p. 230. J. M. Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1977), pp. 132–3.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Coetzee’s Critique of Language

169

desire for transcendence.35 In his case, however, this becomes entangled with his more wayward erotic impulses when he encounters a young Barbarian girl who has fallen victim to the Empire’s torturers. Like Magda, he fails to reach out to her, though, unlike Magda, he does not seek solace in a wild attempt to create a universal writing system. The narrative ends with him returning disconsolately to ‘the decipherment of the archaic writing on poplar slips’, thinking ‘there has been something staring me in the face, and still I do not see it’.36 So far, perhaps so good. What these accounts ignore, of course, is the simple fact that the fictions right before our own eyes are intricately crafted literary works, not quasi-philosophical essays in disguise, albeit ones that interfere with any generalized ideas we might have about what is peculiarly ‘literary’ or ‘philosophical’—recall Lady Chandos’s anxieties about naming: ‘my eye I call it.’ Seen in the context of Elizabeth Costello as a whole, for instance, her letter appears as a pseudodocumentary historical postscript to a series of eight contemporary lecture-like ‘Lessons’ in which Costello, a novelist speaking in her own voice as a public figure, gives her opinions on various ethical, philosophical, and cultural issues, ranging from ‘Realism’ and ‘The Lives of Animals’ to ‘The Novel in Africa’ and ‘The Problem of Evil’. These are all set in a present-tense narrative relayed by a knowingly selfconscious third-person narrator. By contrast, Dusklands, Country, and Barbarians are all first-person narratives, again told mostly in the present tense. Nonetheless, like Costello, they play fast and loose with non-fictional modes of writing, including diaries, journals, and scholarly commentaries, and they all display a degree of selfconsciousness about the procedures of fiction and, as importantly, about the English language as a literary medium. In different ways, all three reflect Coetzee’s early strategies of foreignization, including various forms of pseudo-translation, which became one of his signature devices as a pioneer of what the literary critic Rebecca Walkowitz calls the ‘born-translated novel’.37 ‘The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee’, the second part of Dusklands, for example, begins with a mock ‘Translator’s Preface’ explaining that the English text we are about to read is a translated compilation of the original eighteenth-century Dutch narrative and an Afrikaans commentary from an early twentieth-century scholarly edition that includes questionable transcriptions from the Nama language. What readers of Coetzee’s fictions in their original English editions encounter, in other words, is not a series of sceptical reflections in a generalizing philosophical mode focusing on language as such, but a collection of variously crafted artefacts of literary writing, each of which affords a unique experience of the English language as a specific, culturally freighted linguistic medium and, indeed, mainly sound-based writing system—again, think of the confounding 35

J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (Johannsburg: Ravan Press, 1980), p. 16. Ibid., pp. 154–5. 37 Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Born Translated (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), p. 4. Given Coetzee’s testy engagement with the history of the novel, especially in its European form, it would, in his case, be more accurate to say ‘born-translated fiction’. Walkowtiz focuses on the later fictions, notably Elizabeth Costello (2003), Slow Man (2005), Diary of a Bad Year (2007), Summertime (2009), and Childhood of Jesus (2013), but, as she notes, the question of translation was with Coetzee from the start (p. 57). 36

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

170

Peter D. McDonald

phonetic and orthographic play in ‘my eye I call it’. The question is: do these literaryphilosophical or philosophico-literary experiences amount to a ‘Critique of English’ in something like Mauthner’s sense?

B E Y O N D F L A U B E R T : DISGRACE Since each fiction asks and answers this question in its own way, I shall limit myself to one illustrative case. I have chosen Disgrace (1999) partly because it is among the most conventionally novelistic of Coetzee’s fictions, and partly because the central protagonist, the disgraced South African academic, David Lurie, is in some respects another Humboldtian figure. A former professor of literature with a special interest in the English Romantic poets, we find him at the outset earning his living as a disgruntled ‘adjunct professor of communications’ at the newly modernized, postHumboldtian ‘Cape Technical University’ where education is about vocational training, rather than humanistic Bildung—the departments of ‘Classics and Modern Languages’ have been ‘closed down as part of the great rationalization’.38 Among other things, the new technocratic order represents the triumph of the Lockean conception of language: ‘Human society has created language in order that we may communicate our thoughts, feelings and intentions to each other’, the Communications 101 course handbook announces.39 For Lurie, however, ‘the origins of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul’.40 In his own critique of the Lockean tradition, Humboldt insisted that ‘the production of language is an inner need of mankind; not merely an external vehicle for the maintenance of communication, but an indispensable one which lies in human nature’, and that ‘man, as an animal species, is a singing creature, though one who joins thoughts to tones’.41 At another later point, though now in a more accommodating mood, Lurie, who appears to speak no African languages, thinks ‘he would not mind hearing Petrus’s story’—that is, the life story of the isiXhosa-speaking farm labourer who becomes a landowner under the post-apartheid dispensation—‘but preferably not reduced to English’ which Lurie believes has become ‘an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa’.42 Again, this recalls Humboldt who, in keeping with his open-ended relativism, always advocated learning other languages, since ‘every language contains the whole conceptual fabric and mode of presentation of a portion of mankind’—or, in other words, ‘a characteristic world-view’ (Weltansicht).43 Lurie does not specify which language he thinks would be more fitting—isiXhosa, one of the new South Africa’s eleven official languages, is the obvious choice—but he is 38

J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Secker & Warburg, 1999), p. 3. 40 Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 3. 41 Wilhelm von Humboldt, Humanist without Portfolio: An Anthology of the Writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt, trans. Marianne Cowan (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963), pp. 258 and 295. See also Roger Langham Brown, Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Conception of Linguistic Relativity (The Hague: Mouton, 1967), p. 37. 42 Disgrace, p. 117. 43 Humboldt, On Language, p. 60. 39

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Coetzee’s Critique of Language

171

clear it should not be English. Reflecting his own sense himself as a living anachronism, he thinks it has ‘stiffened’, lost its ‘articulatedness’, and so ‘pressed into the mould of English, Petrus’s story would come out arthritic, bygone’.44 Following these threads out of the labyrinth of Disgrace and into the wider world of European intellectual history reveals something about Lurie’s cultural background and about Coetzee’s ongoing interest in the Humboldtian tradition. Yet, it says little about the intricacies of the labyrinth itself and nothing about the ways in which the experience of reading Disgrace as an artefact of literary writing might constitute a Mauthneresque ‘Critique of English’. To address this, we need to shift the terms of the analysis from the level of character to the level of narration and to move from intellectual history to literary history which does, after all, still have its place. In this context, the question becomes: how might reading Disgrace as a creative adaptation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) enable us to re-think the question of Coetzee’s relationship to Mauthner and, behind that, the ancient quarrel between literature and philosophy? Disgrace itself opens up the possibility of such a reading at a number of levels. For one thing, unlike the buried references to Humboldt, Flaubert’s boldly and, in its day, scandalously innovative novel is explicitly tagged as a part of Lurie’s cultural repertoire. While dwelling on the pleasures of his ‘assignation’ with the Muslim prostitute Soraya, he identifies himself with Flaubert’s heroine: ‘He thinks of Emma Bovary, coming home sated, glazen-eyed, from an afternoon of reckless fucking.’45 Later, after his dutiful, adulterous ‘congress’ with Bev Shaw, the ‘dumpy’ vet who runs an animal refuge in which Lurie ends up working as a volunteer, he boastfully imagines Bev singing to herself in front of the mirror— ‘I have a lover! I have a lover!’—again like Emma.46 At another level, of course, these allusions reflect back on the content of Disgrace itself, inviting us to read it as a selfconscious recasting of Flaubert’s disaster story of illegitimate desire, now told not from the perspective of a young, provincial bourgeois woman in post-revolutionary France, but from Lurie’s point of view as a middle-aged, middle-class, white man of Jewish heritage in post-apartheid South Africa. Yet it is at a third level—the level of narrative form—that the wider literary and, indeed, philosophical significance of Disgrace as a creative re-writing of Madame Bovary becomes clear. Like the basic content of the story, this is evident not through a few incidental allusions but on every page, since it concerns the use Coetzee makes of Flaubertian style indirect libre, the innovative narrative technique that contributed both to Madame Bovary’s initial notoriety and to its subsequent canonical status in the history of the European novel. The consequences of this, which are not only technical, can be seen most clearly through comparison. I shall take just one example from Madame Bovary: the account of Emma’s fantasies about Rodolphe, her latest lover, in chapter 12. By this stage, Emma is already longsettled into her boring marriage and the disappointments of motherhood. After explicitly signalling that ‘she lay awake, dreaming other dreams’, the third-person 44

Disgrace, p. 117.

45

Ibid., p. 5.

46

Ibid., pp. 72, 150.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

172

Peter D. McDonald

narrator, who uses the conventionally novelistic past tense throughout, describes the glamorous life she anticipates leading with Rodolphe, shifting into the hypothetical future conditional. Among other things, Emma imagines they would ‘ride in gondolas, they’d laze in swaying hammocks, and their life would be free and flowing like their silken garments, warm and star-studded like the soft night skies they’d gaze at’.47 In a move characteristic of Flaubert’s technique, the narrator not only enters the time of fantasy—the future conditional—he (?) ventriloquizes Emma, adopting the language she herself borrows from the popular romances she read as a girl. During her convent-school education, as we learn in chapter 6, she developed a taste for pre-revolutionary aristocratic love stories that describe ‘wounded hearts, vows, sobs, tears, and kisses, gondolas by moonlight, nightingales in woods, and “gentlemen” brave as lions’.48 The allusion to the Venetian scenes she read about earlier is understated, but the narrator ensures that when they resurface in chapter 12 via the device of style indirect libre, the deflationary, ironizing effect is not lost. ‘Everything hovered in a harmonious, sun-drenched, bluish haze along the boundless horizon’, the sequence ends, ‘but then the child in her crib would cough, or else Bovary would give a louder snore, and Emma would not fall asleep till morning’.49 At this point, as we move from the romanticized fantasies Emma articulates in her own borrowed idiom to the narrator’s external commentary and from the hypothetical future conditional to the dull routines of Emma’s daily life, her dream-world implodes and we are left thinking about the very different love story that is Madame Bovary itself. Contrast this with the opening sentence of Disgrace: ‘For a man of his age, fiftytwo, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well.’50 Again, as in Flaubert, we have a disembodied third-person narrator reporting what is going on in the mind of the central protagonist. The only difference is that this narrator adopts the present tense—in this instance, the present perfect, signifying a completed action—and gives no cues about the provenance of the idiom used. Though the phrase ‘to his mind’ relativizes the second clause, there is no indication at this point that any of the words belong to Lurie himself. A few pages on, after Lurie becomes embroiled in a sexual scandal with a student, which ultimately costs him his job, various subsequent cues indicate otherwise. This is not just because, as the plot reveals, Lurie clearly has not solved the problem of sex at all, but because we begin to see that thinking of sex as a ‘problem’ to be ‘solved’ is one of Lurie’s many problems. As this phrasing suggests, he is not only a Romantic figure in the Humboldtian mould. He is also an adherent of the countervailing Enlightenment tradition, a further dimension of his European heritage that emerges most clearly in his attitudes to animals, a point to which I shall return. Both traditions play a part in the way he thinks about desire. In his various attempts at justifying his sexual adventurism to his lesbian daughter, Lucy, he switches from citing William Blake—‘Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires’—to 47 Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 174. 48 Ibid., p. 34. 49 Ibid., p. 174. 50 Disgrace, p. 1.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Coetzee’s Critique of Language

173

making rationalistic appeals to what he calls the ‘rights of desire’.51 Seen against this background, or emerging context, it is possible not only to identify the phrase ‘solved the problem of sex’ with Lurie, but to appreciate its oddly self-cancelling status. It is as if we can, on this second reading, re-write the first sentence as follows: ‘For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well.’52 The same can be said for many other passages in which the thirdperson narrator adopts Lurie’s idiom. Take the following account of the forced sexual encounter with the student Melanie that precipitates his fall from grace: He carries her to the bedroom, brushes off the absurd slippers, kisses her feet, astonished by the feeling she evokes. Something to do with the apparition on the stage: the wig, the wiggling bottom, the crude talk. Strange love! Yet from the quiver of Aphrodite, goddess of the foaming waves, no doubt about that.53

This represents a significant re-working of Flaubertian style indirect libre. Unlike Flaubert, who ironizes Emma’s Romantic idiom, playing her future conditional fantasies off against her mundane life as a wife and mother, Coetzee uses and then cancels Lurie’s high-minded phraseology, inviting us to take it, on a first reading, as an unmarked, apparently secure justification in the voice of the narrator, and then, on a second, as a marked, and now suspect, self-description or rationalization on Lurie’s part. The fact that all this takes place, for us as readers, in the perpetually unfolding narrative present only compounds the uncertainties. A passage from Lady Chandos’s letter to Lord Bacon concisely sums up the peculiar experience of continuous composition and decomposition Disgrace yields when we attend to the dialogue with Madame Bovary. ‘Like a wayfarer (hold the figure in mind, I pray you)’, she writes, attempting to describe her own growing doubts about language, ‘like a wayfarer I step into a mill, dark and disused, and feel of a sudden the floorboards, rotten with wetness, give way beneath my feet and plunge me into the racing mill-waters.’54 We could equally recall the linguistic scepticism of Hofmannsthal’s Ein Brief and Mauthner’s call for the destruction of language. By turning the technique of style indirect libre, which Flaubert used for ironic purposes, into a device of linguistic self-cancellation, Coetzee patched together a narrative of rotten floorboards, and, in the process, fashioned a peculiarly literary critique not just of English but of the Humboldtian Weltansicht/Mauthneresque fable convenue/Whorfian recepts that Lurie’s cultureladen version of English encodes. Yet focusing only on the sceptical energies at work in Disgrace misses the emancipatory impulses that pervade it as well. Unlike In the Heart of the Country,

51

Ibid., pp. 69, 89. I use the strike-through feature to draw attention to the difference between Coetzee’s strategy of self-cancellation and Flaubertian irony. It is possible that the publishers of the first British edition of Disgrace wanted to highlight this, and perhaps even allude to the ‘sous-rature’ technique Jacques Derrida developed for his own philosophical purposes in De la Grammatologie (1967), because the title word appears under multiple erasures on the front cover of the hardback edition (i.e. as disgrace). Given the weighty history of the word, the initial lowercase ‘d’ downgrades its status further still. 53 Disgrace, p. 25. 54 Elizabeth Costello, p. 228. 52

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

174

Peter D. McDonald

say, which stages Magda’s Humboldtian desire to transcend the language and writing system she has inherited and her failing but unrelenting attempts to forge another, Disgrace shows Lurie having the tyranny of his own idiom broken for him, largely despite himself, and, consequently, achieving a degree of Mauthneresque freedom— he does, after all, recognize that ‘English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa’. None of this appears likely at the outset. Although we are not encouraged to take the following words at face value, given the device of self-cancellation, it is clear from the second page that Lurie is complacently set in his middle-aged ways: His temperament is not going to change, he is too old for that. His temperament is fixed, set. The skull, followed by the temperament: the two hardest parts of the body.55

In this respect, taking the quotation in its first, uncancelled sense, Lurie is the opposite of the desperate Magda and the baffled Lady Chandos, both of whom actively seek salvation. Yet, as the narrative unfolds he experiences a series of unexpected, often subtle, sometimes violent, shocks—the most harrowing of which is Lucy’s rape and his simultaneous physical assault—that gradually force him out of himself in ways he can neither fully comprehend nor articulate, not just because he does not have the means of doing so—the shocks cannot be understood in terms of the language available to him—but because they have nothing to do with language as such. To make sense of this we can turn briefly to a series of philosophical exchanges about the category of the ‘animal’ published in 2009 in which Coetzee gave an account of what he called a ‘conversion experience’.56 His comments cast some light both on Lurie’s unsettled relationship to English and on its relevance to the quarrel between literature and philosophy. Expressing doubts about the rationalistic form of the exchange to which he was contributing, and, behind that, his scepticism about the dialogue as a written mode central to the history of EuroAmerican philosophy, Coetzee remarked: We (participants in this dialogue) are where we are today not because once upon a time we read a book that convinced us that there was a flaw in the thinking underlying the way that we, collectively, treat nonhuman animals, but because in each of us there took place something like a conversion experience, which, being educated people who place a premium on rationality, we then proceeded to seek backing for in the writings of thinkers and philosophers.

Crucially, this transformative experience has nothing to do with language, whether rational or not, since it ‘as often as not’ centres ‘on some other mute appeal of the kind that Levinas calls the look, in which the existential autonomy of the Other became irrefutable—irrefutable by any means, including rational argument’. If, as we have seen, Disgrace at the level of narrative records and then cancels the numerous ways in which Lurie seeks backing for his beliefs and actions in the writings of the European tradition, it also charts the uncertain but always unsettling effects that a sequence of non-verbal appeals has on him at the level of character,

55

Disgrace, p. 2. Paola Cavalieri, The Death of the Animal: A Dialogue (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), p. 89. 56

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Coetzee’s Critique of Language

175

beginning with the moment in the first chapter when ‘Soraya’s eyes meet his’. In this scene, Soraya asserts her autonomy as a woman with a life of her own, rather than an object of male fantasy—he catches her eye as she is sitting at a table in a restaurant with her two young sons. This ‘glance’, which irrevocably transforms Lurie’s idea of her, puts their relationship on a new footing and ultimately leads Soraya to end it.57 Coetzee may well have been thinking about the ethical implications of the Levinasian ‘look’ particularly in the context of gender relations as a potential resource for Disgrace from the start. The first notebook entry for the project, which is dated 13 December 1994, briefly sketches a dramatic situation in which ‘a man at the prime of his career, a respected writer, is invited on to a Truth Commission’. He turns the invitation down, ostensibly because ‘no one is morally competent to sit in judgement’ but really because he has ‘seduced a student’ and ‘she is about to denounce him’. The note then ends cryptically: ‘Blackmail? His daughter. Her clear eyes.’58 This prefigures the role many woman, including Soraya, the student Melanie, Bev, and Lucy, play in the final version, all of whom meet Lurie’s eyes in ways he finds at once existentially unsettling and ethically irrefutable. Yet it is not only the female gaze or, indeed, the implicit judgements of human eyes that shake Lurie’s sense of himself and the world. Nonhuman animals, beginning with Lucy’s ‘old bulldog bitch’ Katy, also make appeals in ways he finds increasingly impossible to disregard. Characteristically, however, he begins by citing chapter and verse from the European tradition to rationalize his initial indifference. ‘The Church Fathers had a long debate about them, and decided they don’t have proper souls,’ he tells Lucy.59 Later, when he is thinking about two sheep Petrus has bought to slaughter for a party, Descartes, another European exponent of the belief in animals as a sub-order of useful things, now couched in the terms of Enlightenment rationalism, surfaces in a passage of style indirect libre that might be rendered as follows: Sheep do not own themselves, do not own their lives. They exist to be used, every last ounce of them, their flesh to be eaten, their bones to be crushed and fed to poultry. Nothing escapes, except perhaps the gall bladder, which no one will eat. Descartes should have thought of that. The soul, suspended in the dark, bitter gall, hiding.60

A few paragraphs later, all this assertion collapses when ‘a bond seems to have come into existence between himself and the two Persians, he does not know how’—all he knows is that ‘suddenly and without reason, their lot has become important to him’.61 This transformation reflects Disgrace’s preoccupation with what Coetzee in another context calls the ‘quintessential experience of learning, which is a feeling of growing beyond yourself, of leaving your old self behind and becoming a new, better self ’—in other words, learning as an affective ‘conversion experience’.62 57

Disgrace, p. 6. Cited in David Attwell, J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face to Face with Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 218. 59 Disgrace, p. 78. 60 Ibid., pp. 123–4. 61 Ibid., p. 126. 62 J. M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz, The Good Story: Exchanges of Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy (London: Harvill Secker, 2015), p. 178. 58

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Peter D. McDonald

176

Lurie puts it less abstractly at the end of the narrative: ‘Is it too late to educate the eye?,’ he asks himself, recalling a passage he reads from Wordsworth’s The Prelude during the university seminar featured in chapter 3.63 The passage describes the poet’s sense of disappointment at seeing the summit of Mont Blanc and, consequently, having the sublime peak of his imagination ‘usurped upon’ by ‘a soulless image on the eye’.64 Addressing his unresponsive students, Lurie explains: ‘The great archetypes of the mind, pure ideas, find themselves usurped by mere senseimages.’65 Yet, he goes on, ‘the question is not, How can we keep the imagination pure, protected from the onslaughts of reality? The question has to be, Can we find a way for the two to coexist?’ Disgrace itself poses a different, more insistently specific question: can Lurie shed his physically embodied as well as linguistically and culturally encoded Weltansicht/fable convenue/recepts, rather than his Lockean (Wordsworthian?) ‘pure ideas’, and thereby become someone else, perhaps someone new, even better? Unlike In the Heart of the Country, the answers Disgrace offers are, in the first instance, ambivalently affirmative in a Humboldtian sense, at least when read at the level of character. In his final exchange with Lucy, who is, by this stage, ‘lightly pregnant’ as a consequence of the rape and settling into her new life on the farm under Petrus’s protection, Lurie senses that for all the trauma they have both endured, the future will be another country. Though he continues to see the world, or at least his daughter, through an incorrigibly aestheticized and Europeanized gaze—‘a scene ready-made for a Sargent or a Bonnard’, he thinks when he catches sight of Lucy ‘in a field of flowers’—he is hopeful about their prospects. In a small but significant last gesture, Lucy offers him tea ‘as if he were a visitor’. ‘Good’, he thinks, recognizing that his old role as patriarchal father is no longer tenable— ‘Visitorship, visitation: a new footing, a new start.’66 Lucy effects a similar change on the larger political scale. Unlike Magda, who never manages to escape her father’s feudal language and the master–servant order of the farm it encodes, she succeeds in redefining the terms of her relationship with Petrus. In another, more ambiguous Humboldtian gesture, Lurie looks outside English for an appropriate word to describe the new arrangement. He suggests and Lucy accepts ‘bywoner’—a more or less untranslatable Afrikaans term (literally ‘with-liver’ but also ‘sub-dweller’) meaning something like ‘tenant farmer’ in British English or ‘share-cropper’ in American English.67 The implication is that when it comes to the political question of the land, Lucy elects to turn the old racialized order of the colonial and apartheid era on its head, rather than transcend or radically transform it. The answer Disgrace offers to its own central question is also ambivalently affirmative in a Mauthneresque sense, though, in this case, things play out differently depending on whether we are reading at the level of character or narrative. As Lurie reveals in his own final act—surrendering the maimed dog he has befriended to be destroyed—he no longer believes the Christian and Cartesian doctrines about nonhuman animals he once espoused. Yet, in keeping with the way Disgrace 63 66

Disgrace, p. 218. Ibid., p. 218.

67

64 Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., p. 204.

65

Ibid., p. 22.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Coetzee’s Critique of Language

177

re-works Flaubertian style indirect libre, the narrative continues to show him attempting to conceptualize his actions in various ways, rather than destroying language in a willed gesture of Mauthneresque self-emancipation. The vet’s ‘operating room’ in which he works alongside Bev, Lurie now sees, having had his own eyes re-educated not by experiences of ‘rapture’ like Lord and Lady Chandos but by the irrefutable gaze of nonhuman animals (‘sense-images’ that are not ‘mere senseimages’), is a place ‘where the soul is yanked out of the body’, or, in another, less tendentiously theological formulation, a ‘room that is not a room but a hole where one leaks out of existence’.68 Similarly, the concluding paragraphs do not resolve the question of what to call the ‘sessions’ in which he and Bev are engaged. Are they, as another freighted free indirect foreign word suggests, acts of ‘Lösung’?69 ‘German always to hand with an appropriately blank abstraction,’ Lurie observes earlier. Though the word literally means ‘solution’—hence Lurie’s comments on ‘sublimation, as alcohol is sublimed from water, leaving no residue’—it inevitably carries echoes of ‘Endlösung’, the official Nazi term for ‘The Final Solution’.70 We might also recall Lurie’s apparently final solution to another seemingly rational ‘problem’ in the first sentence. Or are the ‘sessions’ dignifying, even sacrosanct, acts of ‘love’, as Lurie himself comes to learn from Bev?71 In the penultimate paragraph he enters the surgery ‘bearing’ the maimed dog ‘like a lamb’, and, in answer to Bev’s question, declares: ‘Yes, I am giving him up’—perhaps, recalling Lurie’s Jewishness, we could say like Abraham when he is called by his Old Testament god to sacrifice Isaac.72 This carefully orchestrated conclusion, which is decisive at the level of character but non-committal at the level of narration, ensures that any experience Disgrace yields as an emancipatory ‘Critique of English’ (European languages?) in Mauthner’s sense is the reader’s alone. L I V IN G R E A D I N G Where does this leave the ancient quarrel between literature and philosophy or, for that matter, the debates about the disciplinary organization of the modern university? To sketch a possible answer, we can return briefly to the exchange about animals to which Coetzee contributed in 2009. ‘One role philosophers can play in the present climate of concern about our relations with other animals’, he commented, is to provide ‘reasoned backing’ for ‘new laws governing the treatment of animals’. Yet ‘an equally important role’, he suggested, ‘might be to alert people to the phenomenon of the look, the appeal that might come at any moment in their lives’. It is tempting, especially given the centrality of the Levinasian ‘look’ in Disgrace, to read this second option, the philosopher as ‘moral guide’ rather than ‘legislator’, as code for Coetzee’s own quasi-philosophical conception of himself as a writer. Yet, as some of the observations he has made about reading and writing over the years suggest, it is clear that he meant what he said: namely, that this is simply 68 71

Ibid., p. 219. Ibid., p. 219.

69 72

Ibid., p. 218. Ibid., p. 220.

70

Ibid., p. 142.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

178

Peter D. McDonald

another, ‘equally important’ way of being a philosopher, not an oblique way of talking about himself as a writer or about writers in general.73 The first of these observations comes from The Good Story (2015), another series of written exchanges to which he contributed, this time with the psychologist Arabella Kurtz. At one point in a brief aside, he outlined what he thinks a ‘phenomenological analysis’ of reading, or, at least, of ‘living reading’ as opposed to ‘dead reading’, might involve. The distinction is crucial, in his view, because while the former is ‘a mysterious affair’, the latter is ‘a barren, unappealing experience’. For the reader, the ‘living’ form ‘involves finding one’s way into the voice that speaks from the page, the voice of the Other, and inhabiting that voice, so that you speak to yourself (your self) from outside yourself ’. The ‘art of the writer’, conversely, ‘lies in creating a shape (a phantasm capable of speech), and an entry point that will allow the reader to inhabit the phantasm’. Understood as ‘a dialogue of sorts’, or an intricate interplay of quasi-dialogues within the reader and within the writer, as well as between writer and reader, the process is ‘mysterious’ partly because it is necessarily fraught. Picking up on one of his own guiding preoccupations in the exchanges with Kurtz, Coetzee insisted that fictionalization plays a part at every level: not just the reader’s ‘fiction of the writer’ (and presumably of her or his self) but the writer’s ‘fiction of the reader’, another ‘phantasm’ that ‘is spoken to and speaks back as the words go down on the page’.74 On this account, it is impossible to see the writer as a surrogate philosopher in any guise, whether ‘moral guide’ or ‘legislator’, or to understand literature as a form of philosophical reflection designed to expose the errors in particular ways of thinking—by, for instance, engaging in a ‘Critique of Language’ whether in Mauthner’s or the early Wittgenstein’s sense. More plausibly, the writer, for Coetzee, is something like a Freudian artist, a figure who, as he put it in an essay from the 1990s, ‘can make a tour of the inner menagerie with a degree of confidence and emerge, when they so wish, more or less unscathed’. In the same essay, he described writing as a ‘transactional’ process, ‘a complex matter of pleasing and satisfying and challenging and extorting and wooing and feeding, and sometimes even of putting to death’ the various Freudian figures that populate the writer’s ‘inner zoo’ and play their part in shaping the ‘inner drama’ of writing. One of these figures is the reader as ‘the-figure-of-the-beloved’ whom the writer ‘tries to please’ but also ‘tries continually though surreptitiously to revise and recreate’ as ‘the-one-who-will-be-pleased’.75 On this account, it is equally impossible to see the reader as a surrogate philosopher, or, indeed, academic literary critic who reads a work like Disgrace to provide ‘reasoned backing’ for arguments of any kind, including ones about Coetzee’s links to Mauthner that might solve the problem of literature’s relations to philosophy once and for all. Rather, the ideal, or implicitly desired, reader, for Coetzee, is a less professionalized, even less securely 73

All quotations from Cavalieri, The Death of the Animal, p. 89. All quotations from Coetzee and Kurtz, The Good Story, p. 179. All quotations from J. M. Coetzee, Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 37–8. 74 75

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Coetzee’s Critique of Language

179

individuated and socialized figure, who is open to being taken outside her or his self by inhabiting a ‘phantasm’ like David Lurie and, I would add, a self-cancelling artefact like Disgrace. Having engaged in a potentially transformative interplay of quasi-dialogues, this reader might emerge as a different, perhaps even better, self, or at least as a reader with a revitalized, re-educated eye/I. This inevitably raises the question of who wrote this essay. Is this the work of Professor Peter D. McDonald, the salaried academic, married, not yet fifty-two, who had a professional interest in teasing out the implications of linking Humboldt, Flaubert, Mauthner, and Coetzee in an effort to move beyond the fossilized legacy of the ancient quarrel between literature and philosophy? Or is it the work of a less stable ‘I’, who, having once read Disgrace, began to see the limits of the English language, its writing system, and the complex European heritage it carries in its wake with new eyes, and, consequently, to think twice about the disciplinary categories, traditions, and structures of the modern university? Your guess is better than mine.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

11 Coetzee and Psychoanalysis From Paranoia to Aporia Jean-Michel Rabaté

The links between J. M. Coetzee’s works and psychoanalysis have been rarely discussed, at least since 1988, when one of the earliest critical essays devoted to his work presented itself as a systematic Lacanian commentary. Teresa Dovey, a colleague of Coetzee at the University of Cape Town at the time, had published a thorough and systematic Lacanian analysis of Coetzee’s early work. While her generic title, The Novels of J. M Coetzee, was the only one visible on the cover, inside it was followed by the programmatic subtitle of ‘Lacanian Allegories’.1 Perhaps because of the solid presence of a Lacanian reading of the first five novels, subsequent critics considered the file to be closed: if the younger Coetzee could indeed be read in Lacanian terms, it was clear that he had later drifted elsewhere and come in closer proximity to the theses of the Chicago school of Aristotelians like his friend and colleague Jonathan Lear. Lear has managed to combine Freud and Aristotle in elegant and precise formulations.2 However, more than twenty years later, the debate was reopened in 2010 when Coetzee and the psychoanalytical therapist Arabella Kurtz exchanged views on Dostoevsky,3 and then with more fanfare with the 2015 publication of their conversations on fiction and psychotherapy.4 Even if the first reviews of their discussions were hedging or reticent— Tim Parks calls them a ‘dialogue of the deaf ’ in the London Review of Books5—my contention is different. I want to argue that The Good Story can be taken as a guide with which one can re-read the whole corpus of Coetzee’s fiction, and as a companion to The Childhood of Jesus—both share the same happy tidings of a

1

Teresa Dovey, The Novels of J. M. Coetzee: Lacanian Allegories (Craighall: Ad. Donker, 1988). See Jonathan Lear, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) and Freud (New York: Routledge, 2005). For Lear, one should reject Lacan’s ‘ethics of psychoanalysis’ because they are excessively negative and tragic, and follow Aristotle, who trusted the ability to gain knowledge and achieve practical wisdom. 3 J. M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz, ‘Nevertheless, my sympathies are with the Karamazovs’, Salmagundi, nos. 166–167 (2010): pp. 39–72. 4 J. M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz, The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy (London: Harvill Secker, 2015). 5 Tim Parks, ‘In Some Sense True’, London Review of Books 38, no. 2 (2016): pp. 25–8. 2

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Coetzee and Psychoanalysis

181

bona adnuntiatio, an evangelion, a good spell, even if the dialogue between the novelist and the psychoanalyst fails to reach any agreement. Perhaps because it had cast its spell too soon, the aporetic6 dialogue, in all its honesty and scruple, was bound to fail. In fact, given that their conversation focused on huge issues including the role played by fiction in our lives, the way we reconfigure past experiences by retelling them, and the links between novels and the construction of personal identity, an exact agreement would have been hard to reach. However, the teeming misunderstandings between the two well-meaning and polite interlocutors may baffle first-time readers. The dialogue’s dead end provides a spectacular aporia that might be taken as an index of Coetzee’s changing views about psychoanalysis, even if he never changed his position regarding his work as fiction. My contention here is not that it would be rewarding to read Coetzee’s fictional works by using a psychoanalytic approach, whether Freudian, Lacanian, Kleinian, or Winnicottian, but that Coetzee’s works, fiction, and essays, taken together, offer important and original insights about the complex links between literature and the Unconscious. For such an exploration, Lacan’s insights would remain operational and productive, but in order to reach that vantage point, one does not have to assume that Coetzee’s novels offer ‘Lacanian allegories’, or that they present ‘allegories of the Lacanian subject’, as Dovey argued. We will have to revisit Dovey’s protocols of readings before suggesting the use of different Lacanian concepts. These might provide a solution facing some of the unsolved queries or dead ends reached by the dialogue with Arabella Kurtz.

L AC AN’ S A L L E G O R I E S A N D PA R A N O I A When Teresa Dovey tackled Lacan’s concepts and synthesized them as a reading method applied to Coetzee’s novels, she had at her disposal relatively few texts in English (she never refers to the original seminars or essays). Only a short and unreliable selection of Écrits was available, Alan Sheridan’s 1977 highly problematic translation. There was only one seminar, also translated by Sheridan, similarly riddled with howlers and misunderstandings: the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1977). This forced Dovey to rely on a group of commentators like Robert Con Davis, Régis Durand, Shoshana Felman, Jane Gallop, Anika Lemaire, Oscar Mannoni, Jacqueline Rose, Elaine Showalter, and Anthony Wilden. They are all excellent, but lumped together they tend to create an unstable composite of Lacan’s teachings gathered from various catchphrases. The synthesis that Dovey managed to produce is impressive, but even when it is successful it uses Coetzee’s novels to explicate the nuances of Lacanian theory rather than the other way round. I had found myself in the same predicament when I published an essay in the collection that she quotes several times, The Fictional Father: Lacanian Readings of 6 The term is often used of Plato’s dialogues in which the interlocutors cannot agree on any common term or logical outcome. Aporia means ‘embarrassment’ because one is trapped in a ‘no way out’ situation.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Jean-Michel Rabaté

182

the Text (1981). At the time, we were all seized by a proselytizing fervour; we were all too eager to bring the good tidings of Lacanian theory to an unenlightened English or American public. This could not but create some confusions, the first of which has to do with Lacan’s tricky notion of the Real. Dovey applies it in its common sense, so as to refer to real things or objects, as we see in a passage discussing the ‘lists of empirical data’ and the precise description of stray objects like ‘tea stains’, ‘rope’, ‘ash’, ‘bones’, and ‘musket balls’ left behind by Jacobus Coetzee’s expedition in Dusklands: ‘The historical discourse of S. J. Coetzee invokes the effects of the Real in the form of notes, which draw upon existing historical documents for substantiation, and in the form of increasingly absurd lists of empirical data . . . ’7 Thus, the three registers of Lacan’s first systemic theorization—the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real—are often used without nuance: when discussing Madga’s repeated killings of her father and her attendant regression to a larval stage, Dovey asserts: ‘Magda has not gained access to the Symbolic, and is therefore not yet fully “human,” that is to say that the form of discourse which she represents remains locked in the Imaginary.’8 How can we make sense of Magda’s highly literary style, of a linguistic virtuosity that has been displayed since the beginning of the text? Moreover, can we ignore that Madga is the very character who introduces for the first time the term ‘allegory’, a term that will recur in the text, and which supposes, if not a perfect literary education, at least a certain degree of reflexivity? Magda writes: In a house shaped by destiny like an H I have lived all my life, in a theatre of stone and sun fenced in with miles of wire, spinning my trail from room to room . . . Then we have retired to sleep, to dream allegories of baulked desire such as we are blessedly unfitted to interpret; and in the morning vied in icy asceticism to be the earlier afoot, to lay fire in the cold grate.9

A contemporary Lacanian critic would be tempted to play on the concept of the Real in Coetzee’s second novel, precisely because the concept combines a doubt as to the very reality of any event. As we know, reality is never a stable foundation for psychoanalysis, it has to be constructed by desire, and, moreover, it does not exist at all for the Unconscious. Lacan opposes the term of Reality as a world of images and representations projected by the ego, a unity made up of wishes, fantasies, and delusions, and the Real, a pure outside intractably resistant to symbolization that can only be reached via the exorbitant Thing. Lacan presented the Wolfman’s (Freud’s famous patient) hallucination of his cut finger as a paradigm for the Real; his Real is always more Surreal or Surrealist than just real. And the Real introduces the crucial function of writing in the later seminars. Writing is given the function of allowing Truth to emerge for an instant through a hole in knowledge because it hollows out the imaginary knowledge that underpins what we call reality. Magda’s first hallucinations of murders facing her father and his second wife turn seamlessly into an actualization of the murder. We 7 9

8 Ibid., p. 164. Dovey, The Novels of J. M. Coetzee, p. 80. J. M. Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country (New York: Penguin, 1982), p. 3.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Coetzee and Psychoanalysis

183

gather that she has shot her father, who dies of the wound, although she keeps on writing and rewriting the impossible event in successive iterations that present so many alterations. The most astonishing twist of In the Heart of the Country is its ending; to make Magda’s dissociated state closer to the Real, Coetzee has her quote famous sentences culled from Nietzsche, Hegel, Blake, Spinoza, and Novalis, among others. She then begins hearing voices from airplanes or machines that approximate what Viktor Tausk called ‘influencing machines’ in a famous paper.10 Finally, in an uncanny echo of the dissolution of language experienced by Samuel Beckett’s character of Watt (1953), moving in a deserted landscape like the old woman of Ill Seen, Ill Said (1981), she begins writing, with huge stones, a few sentences in a partly invented Spanish, a language that she does not know anyhow, positing sentences like SOMNOS DE LIBERTAD.11 As Derek Attridge aptly noted, this moment should not be construed as a regressive backsliding into the Imaginary but as a true embodiment of otherness in language: ‘For the otherness that makes demands on us as we read Coetzee’s novels is not an otherness that exists outside language or discourse, it is an otherness brought into being by language . . . ’12 Developing the idea, which is central to Lacan’s mode of reasoning via the Unconscious, one might say that Madga is meant to allegorize a consciousness beyond ‘psychology’—a word often used by Madga, but with great suspicion, as it was for the later Kafka.13 In her streamlined version of psychoanalytic theory, Dovey takes Lacan’s phallus literally: it figures the conqueror’s sexual organ, seized in its violent act of penetration and conquest. Phallus means ‘mastery over space’,14 whereas a quote from Écrits makes it clear that this term always plays the part of the signifier of absence and castration for Lacan. Here, the eye, the penis, and the phallus of the colonizers are grouped together in their instrumentality. They seek to attain ‘full presence’, read as a Romantic desire for unity with the all. The opening of the chapter on In the Heart of the Country reiterates that the phallus provides the main trope of Dusklands; the female sex-as-hole presents the main trope of Coetzee’s second novel. True, Dovey is aware that Lacan’s phallus means ‘a manque à être’, a constitutive lack,15 but the theme of lack is harnessed in a dichotomy of genres, the epic and the pastoral, both illustrating the colonization of South Africa that is captured in two main images: a phallic allegory or a vaginal allegory; the male, heroic, and epic mode of conquest is replaced by a feminine pastoral in which holes and gestation dominate. This division may correspond to what literary history teaches us, but it distorts Lacan’s classical dialectics of castration, lack, and desire. 10 Viktor Tausk, ‘On the Origin of the “Influencing Machine” in Schizophrenia’, Psychoanalytic Quarterly 2 (1933): pp. 519–56. 11 I will return to the role played by Spanish in the context of Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus (London: Harvill Secker, 2013). 12 Derek Attridge, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (Chicago/London The University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 29. 13 Kafka wrote this aphorism: ‘Never again psychology!’, in Franz Kafka, The Great Wall of China and Other Short Works, trans. Malcolm Pasley (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 94. 14 Dovey, The Novels of J. M. Coetzee, p. 91. 15 Ibid., p. 149.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

184

Jean-Michel Rabaté

Moreover, a theorization that was deployed in the 1950s was abandoned in the late 1960s to promote the Real as pure writing. What Dovey has presented in her book, then, appears closer to thematic readings inspired by the psychoanalytic school of Jung and Bachelard, who insist on the Imaginary. A more worrying theoretical problem in Dovey’s approach is the absence of a clear demarcation between Lacanian readings, deconstructive readings, and insights gleaned from Michel Foucault or Jean Baudrillard. For instance, Paul de Man is often invoked to explain Lacan: Romantic ‘irony’ as defined by de Man highlights Lacan’s meditation on the death drive.16 The term ‘allegory’ is borrowed from de Man’s ‘allegories of reading’ and is never properly linked to Lacan’s dialectics of the signifier. Dovey shifts from Freudian insights provided by André Green about ‘binding’ and ‘unbinding’ to Roy Schafer’s ‘projective’ readings, then to the idea that all texts call upon a repressed Other. The latter remark ushers in Roland Barthes on how to avoid being pigeonholed by meaning. We find ourselves immersed deeply in the discourse of ‘post-structuralism’, a ‘post-modernism’ defined by Fredric Jameson as structured by a clash between the Imaginary and the Symbolic taken to mean private fantasies on the one hand and social networks on the other.17 If Dovey has perceived that there was a theoretical disagreement between Lacan and Derrida in their diverging readings of Poe (she quotes Derrida’s famous essay ‘The Purveyor of Truth’18), she nevertheless conflates the two approaches. For instance, she notes that the views of Lacan and Derrida overlap when they discuss the links between language and masturbation, which leads to considerations of the Lacanian phallus compared with Derrida’s analysis of autoaffection. Surprisingly, Dovey never makes use of the concept of paranoia, the latter only mentioned in a quotation from Anthony Wilden: ‘Since the early Lacan viewed both the paranoid character of the moi and its master–slave relationship to others as characteristics of modern civilization.’19 This is surprising not only because Lacan’s first and only published ‘book’ was a medical dissertation on paranoia,20 but also because any reader of Coetzee’s first novels will recognize a family resemblance between their heroes and contemporary American fiction underpinned by the issue of paranoia. The paranoid drift of Eugene Dawn cannot but evoke the way Vladimir Nabokov pictured Kinbote, the mad commentator and annotator of Pale Fire (1962). Thomas Pynchon’s female Oedipus, the well named Oedipa Maas, carries a Dutch last name that would fit Magda quite well, as we follow her downward spiral into verbal psychosis after the death and burial of her father. In The Crying of Lot 49 (1965), Oedipa, in the same way, spirals into a hermeneutic paranoia when she discovers a plot hinging around the US mail, evoking an ambient ‘paranoid style’ of American politics marked by the Cold War. Such a 16

17 Ibid., p. 55. 18 Ibid., p. 57. 19 Ibid., pp. 97–8. Ibid., p. 43. Coetzee may have read the book—he quotes it by its French title in J. M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1992), 429 n22, and Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 264 n18. 20

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Coetzee and Psychoanalysis

185

concept would not be chosen at random, for it is mentioned when Coetzee refers to Lacan in a 1990 essay on Censorship in South Africa: When Freud draws up his table of the transformations of inadmissible impulses that paranoiacs perform, the projective transformation is the first. The projection ‘He is persecuting me’ (‘He is part of the onslaught’) is, Lacan observes, immediate: there is no reflection, and the efforts of the paranoiac to explain his move as an act of judgment . . . founder under the suspicion of being retrospective or prospective rationalization.21

Combining insights gleaned from Lacan and from Freud, Coetzee concludes his essay in this way: But this is how reason works: reason works by displacement. Yes: but the angle of reasoning of paranoia sees that work from another, a shifted angle: what presents itself as reason is displacement in disguise. Reason cannot explain paranoia to itself, explain it away. In paranoia, reason meets its match.22

Thus, when Coetzee wittily introduces his own name and character as the projected enemy of Eugene Dawn, he is both staging a classically Freudian drama, with ‘Coetzee’ in the role of the hated super-ego who turns into a persecutor, whereas Dawn ends up kidnapping his son and almost stabbing him to death in the final confrontation. What unifies the two halves of Dusklands is the return of another ‘Coetzee’, this time a vicious conqueror who will not hesitate to slaughter African natives in order to reign by overwhelming terror. American imperialism in Vietnam and European colonization of Africa in the eighteenth century are denounced as distinct but related forms of political paranoia. For Lacan, as we learn from Élisabeth Roudinesco’s biography, the impact of Dalí’s seminal conception of paranoia made Lacan break with psychiatric theories of personality and revisit Freudian metapsychology.23 Lacan contributed to a general paranoid turn in the thirties, especially when the Surrealists shifted from a praise of hysteria to a practice of interpretive paranoia providing new systems of interpretation. They also extolled Lacan’s dissertation as a welcome advance after Freud: Lacan was more radical in his treatment of paranoia, more attuned to an analysis of the social context of his case studies, and, finally, less ‘idealist’ as he stood in proximity to dialectical materialism. This gave rise to what David Trotter has called ‘paranoid modernism’, and it is in this later modernism that one might want to inscribe Coetzee’s efforts.24 The ‘paranoid style’ developed by modernism multiplies levels of Reality while referring to their hidden source, the site of the big Other. The Other will be thought of as the ‘enemy’ that Wyndham Lewis was fond of creating for his endless execrations. This Other could also be a feminine 21

Doubling the Point, p. 330; also in Giving Offense, p. 200. Doubling the Point, p. 332. 23 See Élisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–1985, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 110–12, for an account of their meeting, which had been instigated by Lacan. See also her Jacques Lacan: An Outline of a Life and a History of a System of Thought, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 31–2, for a more general assessment. 24 David Trotter, Paranoid Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 284–325. 22

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

186

Jean-Michel Rabaté

double of the male writer, as shown by the later Joyce who forced writing to descend into the deepest recesses of female schizophrenia. A paranoid style was shaping a world teeming with wilder fantasies than could have been imagined, while covering it with a semblance of rational order. The initial creation of the paranoid Eugene Dawn was a tool to get rid of another version of John Coetzee as a linguist and a scientist who believed in the power of computers to simulate rationality until he wrote a dissertation on Beckett’s Watt. Paranoia as a concept proved instrumental in bringing the author into his writer text, and forcing him to engage with his local forebears, all accomplices in the colonial endeavour. Coetzee even entertains the notion that the discourse of paranoia can be simulated by automatic machines: ‘The entry into paranoia is in fact an entry into an automatism. There can be no clearer illustration of this than the fact that, of all the pathologies, paranoia has been the most amenable to artificial simulation.’25 He quotes books by Kenneth M. Colby and William S. Faught, and an essay by Margaret A. Boden, that all describe how a computer can simulate a paranoid discourse. What they produce sounds like involuntary parodies of jokes on paranoids (‘if you ask me anything, it is because you have been sent by my enemies’) but also quite realistic. The Surrealists had engaged in similar simulations in the thirties. We have André Breton’s and Paul Éluard’s simulations of psychotic discourse in The Immaculate Conception (1930) that imitate psychotic styles like ‘Mental debility’, ‘Acute Mania’, ‘General paralysis’, ‘Interpretive delirium’, and ‘Dementia Praecox’.26 Breton and Éluard rejected the idea that they indulged in pastiches of clinical texts, even if they had looked at medical archives, because they held that even the most delirious verbal productions follow basic rules of poetics and universal tropes. Such a point of departure was shared by Lacan, who, like Coetzee, looked for computerized versions of such a ‘discourse of the Other’. Lacan’s turn to linguistics and information theory in his first seminars shares a lot with Coetzee’s initial confidence that a sophisticated computer program can simulate or even analyse a given style, whether literary or not.

T H E SUBJ EC T SUPP OSED N OT TO KN OW Another discussion taken up in Giving Offense (pp. 87–90) suggests that Dovey missed more than the issue of paranoia. When he was interviewed by David Atwell in 1990 about his understanding of Lacan, and questioned on whether he agreed with Dovey’s book, Coetzee replied diplomatically that he had not read her book; however, he insisted, Lacan would always speak from a ‘position of ignorance’.27 Here is how he develops the idea:

25

Doubling the Point, p. 330. André Breton and Paul Éluard, The Immaculate Conception, trans. Jon Graham (London: Atlas Press, 1990), pp. 51–78. 27 Doubling the Point, pp. 29–30. 26

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Coetzee and Psychoanalysis

187

[Lacan] finds his justification not only in the practice of analysis, where the patient seems to speak most truly when he is, so to speak, making a mistake, but in poetry. When one is getting as close to the center of one’s endeavor as this question takes one—where am I when I write?—it may be best to be Lacanian and not bother too much about what one means . . . and that would entail not knowing too much about where one stands in relation to the advice—Lacan’s—that one can afford to speak without ‘thought’.28

This theme recurs throughout Coetzee’s essays and his interviews; it surfaces again in the conversation with Arabella Kurtz, when he mentions a French documentary about philosophy teachers working with kindergarten children. While admiring the courage of the pedagogues and the extraordinary levels of awareness they can create, Coetzee comments that too much rationalism or rationality, when introduced too early, can be detrimental: ‘I am attached to the notion of fantasy, including playfantasy. I would be sorry to see bright young souls turned into exemplary reasoning machines.’29 What he calls fantasy in a discourse informed by Klein, Bion, and Winnicott, had been introduced earlier as Lacan’s notion of a ‘subject supposed to know’. This reappears in another interview, in which Coetzee speaks of writing as ‘a matter of awakening the countervoices in oneself and embarking upon speech with them’, and likens this to the position of what Lacan calls ‘the subject supposed to know’. What Lacan calls the ‘subject supposed to know’ is a fiction generated by the situation of psychoanalysis: from the couch, the analysand projects a mirage of knowledge in the analyst, which is both a condition for transference to take place and a constant condition for collapse. Coetzee’s invocation of this concept would send Dovey’s book back to its most problematic assumption: that the novels she interprets all perform allegories of a Lacanian subject, a subject split by desire and torn between conflicting demands. This is, of course, true, and true for any text. However, this truth offers an example of the paradox implied by the application of psychoanalytic concepts to literature: one will first reconstitute a whole system culled in Freud, Lacan, and others, and then one will show how the system is confirmed by the theoretical readings. In fact, one will discover in the texts the theory that had been necessary to make the readings possible, which makes for a dangerous circularity—a point well made by Pierre Bayard, whose witty objections I mention in my Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Psychoanalysis.30 Bayard remarks that ‘applied psychoanalysis’ looks very much like a religious interpretation: texts end up proving the validity of the Bible or of Freud’s metapsychology. Because psychoanalytical interpretations rely on a hermeneutics of suspicion, they disentangle hidden meanings lurking in the works that are by definition unconscious. The author cannot know anything of the dark forces that generated the work, and has to be enlightened by the critic, but then the same allegories obtain as in every literary text. These readings only yield results that conform to the initial theory. What is found in literary texts is less a product of the 28

29 Coetzee and Kurtz, The Good Story, p. 156. Ibid., p. 30. Jean-Michel Rabaté, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 2–7. 30

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Jean-Michel Rabaté

188

investigation than of its origins and of its presuppositions. Canonical psychoanalytical readings restate the main ideas of psychoanalysis about the Oedipus complex, archaic fantasies, the primal scene, castration, childhood memories. In order to avoid this sterility, Bayard suggests, psychoanalysis should be in a position to learn from literature. Thus, when Coetzee interjects the ‘subject supposed to know’, he implicitly asserts that approaches like Dovey’s remain on the side of knowledge: a whole knowledge of Freud’s or Lacan’s metapsychology will be deployed only to generate readings that remain within the theory’s orbit, and the deeper truth may get lost. In a 1992 essay, Coetzee moves from the ‘subject supposed to know’ to a ‘knowledge supposed to be a subject’ via a commentary on Lacan by Shoshana Felman. Felman had written very cogently: [W]hat is at stake in writing is precisely a reversal, a subversion of subjective knowledge [i.e. of that knowledge which believes it knows itself], a subversion of the self and its self-knowledge. Writing’s knowledge . . . is nothing other in effect than the textual knowledge of what links signifiers in the text [and not the signifieds] to one another; knowledge that escapes the subject but through which the subject is precisely constituted as the one who knows how to escape—by means of signifiers—his own self-presence.31

Coetzee opts then for a more radical ignorance, even prefers the risk of falling into paranoia himself; in an attack on journalistic modes of interrogating people to reach truth, he combines insights that might come from Derrida with a neo-Lacanian position: To me . . . truth is related to silence, to reflection, to the practice of writing. Speech is not a fount of truth but a pale and provisional version of writing. And the rapier of surprise wielded by the magistrate or the interviewer is not an instrument of the truth but on the contrary a weapon, a sign of the inherently confrontational nature of the transaction. The interviewer aligns himself with Richardson’s Lovelace, the man who believes that truth lies inside the subject’s body and that with his rapier-phallus he can search it out there. Overreaction? A paranoid tirade? I deliver it to you uncensored.32

In 1992, Coetzee had taken some distance from Lacanian readings of the text, although he evinces a clearer awareness than Dovey of what the phallus means for Lacan. When discussing Erasmus’s famous The Praise of Folly, he compares the bulging ears of the ass evoked by the writer with the phallus: What is that unreasonable thing that even reasonable men have, that keeps protruding willy-nilly, that they refuse to name as their own but project upon others, that is so identical to itself in all points that it cannot be made to stand for anything else? The phallus, clearly (or less than clearly), but what species of phallus? It cannot be the phallus of the first species, the ‘big’ phallus, the pillar of the law behind which the reasonable man stands; it can only (provisionally, hypothetically, dubiously) be a phallus of the second species, naked, ridiculous, without robes and crown and orb

31

Quoted in Giving Offense, p. 89.

32

Doubling the Point, pp. 65–6.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Coetzee and Psychoanalysis

189

and scepter, without grandeur, the ‘little’ phallus that speaks for/of Moria: not the transcendental signifier but a thing of sport, or free play, of carefree dissemination rather than patrilinearity.33

Once more, this passage betrays the influence of Derrida’s questioning of Lacan’s adherence to the phallus as a ‘transcendental signifier’ in his allegorical reading of Poe’s Purloined Letter and the wish to move on to a sense of ‘dissemination’ that will subvert what remains of gender normativity. The idea of writing in this essay contains it all: knowledge and non-knowledge, madness and reason, full and empty subject, presence and absence. Let us see what this entails.

TRUTH VS. FICTION: AN APORIA Coetzee would agree with Bayard that it is better to apply literature to psychoanalysis than the reverse. This led him to postulate that there is a textual Unconscious that can be analysed as such in a text, precisely because it cannot be reduced to the projection of the author’s psyche or to a previously established psychoanalytic knowledge. Coetzee deployed this concept when he analysed the semantic and syntactic structures of Henry James’s The Ambassadors. This novel not only works with the Unconscious as the language of the Other, but above all creates its textual Unconscious. When analysing the relationship between form and meaning in passive constructions in the plot of The Ambassadors, he offers a subtle analysis of the language used by James, arguing that the agentless form of James’s sentences enables divergent levels of the protagonist’s motivation to be articulated together, and that they thereby create ‘as good a syntactic representation of the unconscious as one is likely to find’.34 As a text contemporary with Freud’s invention of the Unconscious, The Ambassadors attempts a similar exploration of psychic drives through fiction. Strether, an unlikely contrarian ‘ambassador’, has been sent by Chad’s mother. She happens to be a distant prospect of marriage for him if he succeeds in bringing back to the American fold her son, Chad, who has been seduced by European sophistication. Strether betrays his mission by falling in love twice, first with the witty and urbane Miss Gostrey, and then with Chad’s own lover, the beautiful Madame de Vionnet. The fact that Strether apparently remains unaware of his own feelings creates a game of hide-and-seek with the reader. Coetzee’s close reading develops a dialectic of knowing and not-knowing. The main issue is that of self-deception, a recurrent theme in Coetzee’s novels (in Disgrace, David Lurie’s wife accuses him of being a champion of self-deception35). The melancholic truth of the novel’s ending is a recurrent trope in Coetzee’s novels,

33 34 35

Giving Offense, p. 96. ‘The Agentless Sentence as Rhetorical Device’, in Doubling the Point, p. 175. J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Secker and Warburg, 1999), p. 188.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

190

Jean-Michel Rabaté

especially if we compare The Master of Petersburg, Disgrace, and Age of Iron. This is an idea that recurs in the dialogue with Kurtz about truth. Coetzee writes: What ties one to the real world is, finally, death. One can make up stories about oneself to one’s heart content, but one is not free to make up the ending. The ending has to be death: it is the only ending one can seriously believe in. What an irony then that to anchor oneself in a sea of fictions one should have to rely on death!36

Here, Coetzee echoes Walter Benjamin’s idea that ‘Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.’37 Only textual death proves the truth of the text, often by signalling the end of the narrative. On this topic, both Lacan and Derrida would agree: Lacan, because for him the death drive provides the model for all drives, and Derrida, because his concept of writing includes death at its very core. Freud, of course, kept meditating on the links between literature, a deathless Unconscious, and the need to go beyond the pleasure principle to consider a death drive. Missing the opportunity for a deeper agreement, Kurtz then launches a distinction between objective truth and subjective truth.38 Even if one can readily agree that psychoanalysis presupposes the prevalence of an emotional truth in the analytic setting, Coetzee is nevertheless justified to insist that, if he is not so sure about ‘transcendent truths’, he still needs to know whether things happened in the past or did not. What is revealing is that, at this point, he mentions Don Quixote, wondering whether ‘we may be better able to help people like Quixote back to sanity by going along with their stories for a while, pretending to believe they are true’, though he resists the idea that Quixote’s romance stories should be considered ‘poetic truth or higher truth, or transcendent truth or subjective truth’. Coetzee is right here. Literature aims at problematizing the links between historical truth and emotional truth, and Don Quixote does this wonderfully. The exchange cannot but call up a canonical essay of the postmodern moment, Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote’, a ‘fiction’ suggested to Borges when he first read Cervantes’s novel in English as a child, and was disappointed when he later discovered the Spanish original. The narrator takes one sentence from Don Quixote—‘Truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future counselor’— only to disparage the original as ‘mere rhetorical praise of history’, and heap praise on Pierre Menard’s literally identical passage, which, he argues, opens new vistas— one sees a contemporary of William James asserting that history is the foundation of reality: ‘Historical truth, for Menard, is not “what happened”; it is what we believe happened.’39 36

Coetzee and Kurtz, The Good Story, p. 69. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’, in Illuminations,: Essays and Interviews, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 94. 38 Coetzee and Kurtz, The Good Story, p. 70. 39 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’,Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1998), p. 94. 37

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Coetzee and Psychoanalysis

191

Cervantes was a key writer for the young Freud, who would write in a partly invented Spanish a series of letters to his childhood friend Eduard Silberstein. Both admired and continued the ‘exemplary story’ about philosophical dogs, the Coloquio de los perros.40 Moreover, we know that at the end of Don Quixote, Quixano (the real name of the knight in Cervantes’s novel) dies not because of illness or old age, but because of the melancholic depression into which he has fallen. Quixano cannot live without believing in romance and dies from being ‘disenchanted’ when he loses his ideal in Dulcinea. Sancho realizes that Quixano is about to die for want of a sustaining fiction, and pretends to believe in his chivalric dreams; he urges him to start a new adventure—too late. Cervantes’s novel ends with a paradoxical appeal to romantic fiction once it has been made impossible, which suggests that we cannot live without some belief in magic, even if the belief is based on romantic delusions. We know how strenuously Freud distinguished between illusions and delusions. Freud established a rigorous distinction between error (Irrtum), illusion (Illusion), and delusion (Wahnidee). Delusions belong to psychiatry while errors belong to epistemology: Illusions need not necessarily be false—that is to say, unrealizable or in contradiction to reality. For instance, a middle-class girl may have the illusion that a prince will come and marry her. This is possible; and a few such cases have occurred. That the Messiah will come and found a golden age is much less likely . . . Thus we call a belief an illusion when a wish-fulfilment is a prominent factor in its motivation, and in doing so we disregard its relation to reality, just as the illusion itself sets no store by verification.41

Here again, there can be no hard and fast principle of verification, since, after all, at times ‘miracles happen’. Freud needed to introduce the term of ‘ignorance’ (Unwissenheit) to sound categorical: ‘Ignorance is ignorance; no right to believe anything can be derived from it.’42 This Unwissenheit has little to do with the Unconscious, the Unbewusst, for ignorance is not the unconscious, even if it may derive from it. If rationalism dominates in Freud’s text, Coetzee similarly reiterates that he is writing from a ‘post-religious’ perspective.43 For him as for Freud, the belief that after we die we will wake up in a better world is just a lie.44 One might want to criticize Freud’s scientism, as his friend the pastor Pfister did in a famous controversy.45 However, Freud is steadfast in his denunciation of what Lacan would call man’s ‘passion for ignorance’, a hugely invested motivation for compensation beliefs of all sorts. In the same way, one should not look for a belated Christian conversion of the author in The Childhood of Jesus. This is why Don Quixote plays such an important part in it. When he decides that it is time for David to begin reading, Simón gives 40

I have discussed this in The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Psychoanalysis, pp. 9–16. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, trans. W. D. Robson-Scott (New York: Anchor Books, 1964), p. 49. 42 Ibid., p. 51. 43 Coetzee and Kurtz, The Good Story, p. 59. 44 Ibid., p. 15. 45 I have discussed this confrontation in my Crimes of the Future: Theory and its Global Reproduction (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 131–47. 41

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

192

Jean-Michel Rabaté

the boy a tattered copy of Don Quixote adapted for children. David becomes so engrossed in the book that he never abandons it. He seems to teach himself to read by looking at it, although whether he succeeds remains ultimately unanswered in the novel. When Simón and Inés need toilet paper at the end and have only this book, David refuses to tear off a page to clean himself. Don Quixote plays a crucial role in the novel, first of all because it is not a book for children, even in a simplified version with illustrations, and then because it plays the role of a profane Bible in the economy of the novel. Alluding to his debunking of the legends about knights-errant saving damsels in distress, Coetzee takes Cervantes as the paradigm of the modern writer. Coetzee has provided original analyses of what is at stake in Don Quixote. In his Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech, Coetzee had alluded to Cervantes in those terms: [H]ow do we get from our world of violent phantasms to a true living world? This is a puzzle that Cervantes’ Don Quixote solves quite easily for himself. He leaves behind hot, dusty, tedious La Mancha and enters the realm of faery by what amounts to a willed act of the imagination.46

David represents the marvellous child who believes in magic: he refuses to let himself be gagged by official knowledge and takes up the knight’s quest for a more promising future, and Simón will have to play the part of a reluctant Sancho, who nevertheless accompanies the knight on his quest. To prove to his teacher that he can write, David copies a sentence from Don Quixote: ‘Deos sabe si hay Dulcinea o no en el mundo’ (‘God knows whether there is a Dulcinea in this world or not’),47 which leads him to ask: ‘Who is God?’ Simón first avoids a direct answer, the child asks again, and Simón says: ‘God is not no one, but he lives too far away from us to converse with him or have dealings with him. As for whether he notices us, Dios sabe.’48 This echoes an exchange between the knight and the duke and the duchess, whose aim was to assert the possibility of fiction; Don Quixote had said: ‘God knows whether there be a Dulcinea or not in the world, and whether she be imaginary: this is one of those things, the proof whereof is not to be too nicely inquired into.’49 This signals a first moment of doubt for Quixano. The choice of Don Quixote as a non-religious Bible, a literary Bible of some sort, is accounted for by Coetzee in a discussion of René Girard’s theory of triangular desire: Triangular desire makes its first appearance and becomes a target of analysis in Don Quixote, which marks the beginning of the Romanesque tradition of critical fictions. It is thus a specifically modern phenomenon. It arises as a consequence of post-religious humanism and multiplies as social differences are leveled.50

46

47 The Childhood of Jesus, p. 218. Doubling the Point, p. 98. Ibid., p. 218. 49 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Charles Jarvis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 680. 50 ‘Triangular Structures of Desire in Advertising’, in Doubling the Point, p. 131. 48

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Coetzee and Psychoanalysis

193

Indeed, Coetzee’s novel looks back to the gospels and also to the Bible of modern literature, Don Quixote. The common point between the gospels of Jesus and Don Quixote is that both texts deal with the links between the old and the new. In Don Quixote, the knight labours under the delusion that the ancient code of chivalry still obtains, whereas it is obsolete. The comedy derives from his frantic attempts at re-establishing a code that is at odds with reality. Reading the gospels, we assume that Jesus is the Redeemer capable of buying our sins back and hence of undoing original sin, and that he fights against the dominant value system of Roman Palestine until his death. In many ways, The Good Story, insofar as it teases out the role of faith and fiction for life, duplicates the concerns of The Childhood of Jesus. Several times, Coetzee compares his life in America at the time of the Vietnam War, his life in South Africa during and after the Apartheid, and his current life in Australia. In all three moments and places, a system of dominant lies and illusions has maintained a sense of spurious balance of power—wielded, of course, by the powerful. This is why he is so insistent in his request for truth, at least understood as historical truth. His discussion chimes in with the way Derrida tackled it in his ‘History of the Lie’. Derrida aims at a foundational question: ‘Is “self-deception” possible? Is it a rigorous and pertinent concept for what interests us here, that is, the history of the lie? In strictest terms, does one ever lie to oneself?’51 The question points at a difficulty in the theory of lies: if a lie is defined by the fact that I know one thing and say another, how can I lie to myself? If a lie is defined by an intention to be deceitful and dishonest, how can there be an intention to betray oneself? This unassailable question leads to another aporia: if lying is to be understood as a purely inner process, how can one catch anybody lying? Derrida asserts that one can never be caught lying, as one can always say: ‘I was wrong but I did not mean to deceive; I am in good faith.’52 If the lie is restricted to an intention to deceive, as it has been since Plato and Augustine, undecidability prevents any possibility of verification. The only ‘proof ’ would have to come from the subject, especially when he or she falls under the category of the ‘suspect’— which is why for centuries torture has been considered a logical way of extracting the confession, of forcibly breaking into the locked room prohibited to others, in which the secret of perjury or deceit lies. Derrida also notes that ‘lie’, the pseudos, has several meanings. In Greek, pseudos means ‘lie’, but also ‘falsehood’, ‘cunning’, or ‘mistake’. It includes the senses of ‘deception’ or ‘fraud’ as well as ‘poetic invention’. As Derrida concludes his etymological review, this increases ‘the possible misunderstanding about what is meant by “misunderstanding”’,53 which might offer a good definition of the dialogue between Coetzee and Kurtz. We verify this in The Good Story when, in a conversation about the merits of W. G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, Coetzee argues that its hero could not be helped by psychoanalysis simply because psychoanalysis is ahistorical.54 This reproach goes 51 Jacques Derrida, ‘History of the Lie’, in Futures: Of Jacques Derrida, ed. Richard Rand (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 71. 52 Ibid., p. 68. 53 Ibid., p. 66. 54 Coetzee and Kurtz, The Good Story, p. 188.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Jean-Michel Rabaté

194

unchallenged by Kurtz even though she reads Austerlitz positively as leaving a chance to psychoanalysis. Lacan and post-Lacanians like Slavoj Žižek would strongly disagree with the statement that psychoanalysis is ahistorical. Had Kurtz managed to object to this thesis, or to Coetzee’s idea that psychoanalysis cannot deal with group mentality, she might have offered a possible resolution and explained how and why psychoanalysis engages with history. Of course, hers is a different version of psychoanalysis. The psychoanalytic theory Lacan elaborated was marked by his encounter with Louis Althusser’s Marxism, and was thus much more ready to engage with social and historical issues. Similarly, Coetzee quotes Marx and Engels in The Good Story55 and provides a scathing analysis of the ‘State Ideological Apparatus’, as Althusser would call it, thanks to which children are brainwashed about their inheritance and told lies about the asylum-seekers in Australia.56 He contrasts their current delusion with what history books will state. This can be connected with later remarks in the dialogue about the lack of ‘psychological or indeed political analysis of what goes on in the classroom’.57 Taken together, these remarks amount to presenting an excellent commentary of Childhood of Jesus, a novel in which the pedagogical is shown to be political throughout. The ‘new world’ of Novilla is predicated on a consensus that one will live better if one abandons any memory of a past marked by disaster and trauma. Thus, Elena insists that the new world cannot tolerate desire: ‘This endless dissatisfaction, this yearning for the something-more that is missing, is a way of thinking we are well rid of, in my opinion.’58 Indeed, collective life in Novilla is underpinned by a rational decision to abolish the joys and frustrations of desire. All the basic needs being satisfied, there is no excess-value or lust-value either, no surplus enjoyment, not one ounce of the jouissance that Lacan is always reintroducing in his social and libidinal models. Consequently, there should be no longing for a past or for a future. A philosophical discussion between Simón and the stevedores revolves around whether one should live in a timeless present or in a historically conscious society. Simón invokes history when he argues that a crane would help to lift the heavy bags they have to carry on their backs. This history marked by technological progress meets the resistance of the others who claim that they do not feel history in their bones.59 If Simón wins when he convinces them that machinery is useful, he is the first to suffer the consequences when the badly managed crane almost kills him. Even if we see the workers reach a dialogical compromise about a just division of tasks and salaries, the world of Novilla does not appear as a perfect utopia. This is not a classless society, we find a police and a powerful bureaucracy, and idle people live in luxury at La Residencia. We discover the trophies accumulated by the violent rebel Daga: a penthouse equipped with television, a spacious apartment with a view. He embodies the wish to enjoy and share with the child David the fact that he has not renounced primal narcissism. However, those material seductions have 55 56 58

Coetzee and Kurtz, The Good Story, p. 119. 57 Ibid., p. 163. Ibid., pp. 88–9. 59 The Childhood of Jesus, p. 116. The Childhood of Jesus, p. 63.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Coetzee and Psychoanalysis

195

little force against major issues like the desire to have children, the wish to live in a just world, or the respect for freedom. Inés and Simón agree about these priorities. Throughout the novel, Simón had been yearning for a philosophy ‘that shakes one. That changes life.’60 He has changed Inés’s life radically. Simón had accomplished the only possible gift that is possible at all if one follows Derrida: for the latter, a true gift can only be the gift of life or death.61 This is indeed what Simón achieves when he ‘gives’ Inés a son who then becomes ‘the light of [her] life’.62 Coetzee’s political allegory is clear: no society can cut its ties with history even if it is with the best intentions. What he attacks is a democratic totalitarianism, a collective agreement to limit desires by leading a simple life of labor. Novilla’s Platonic Republic smacks of totalitarianism, the soft totalitarianism of meliorist cultures displaying a ‘tolerance’ that soon exhibits its limits. In the name of educating a bright but difficult young boy, one ends up sending him to a specialized school for delinquents. One decides for the others because one wants their good, and then imposes universal rules forcibly. The only way of rejecting this democratic totalitarianism is by thinking a democracy to come; for this, the figure of the child as unpredictable monster provides a useful lever. In the ‘Strong Opinions’ section of Diary of a Bad Year, we find the remark ‘Democracy does not allow for politics outside the democratic system. In this sense, democracy is totalitarian.’63 The point was made by Claude Lefort when he opposed democracy and totalitarianism facing antagonistic conceptions of history: Democracy proves to be the historical society par excellence, a society which, in its very form, welcomes and preserves indeterminacy and which provides a remarkable contrast with totalitarianism which, because it is constructed under the slogan of creating a new man, claims to understand the law of its organization and development, and which, in the modern world, secretly designates itself as a society without history.64

In order to reconnect a society with its history, one should combine the indeterminacy or openness of a ‘democracy (still) to come’ (to use Derrida’s phrase) with a principle as absolute and transcendent as Justice. This is why Simón also invokes Justice: ‘I am not trying to save you,’ he says. . . . [‘]Like you I crossed the ocean. Like you I bring no history with me. What history I had I left behind. I am simply a new man in a new land, and that is a good thing. But I haven’t let go of the idea of history, the idea of change without beginning or end. Ideas cannot be washed out of us . . . The idea of Justice, for instance. We all desire to live under a just dispensation . . . ’ 65

60

Ibid., p. 238. I condense here the whole argument of Jacques Derrida’s theory of the gift as developed in his Given Time, I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992). 62 Ibid., p. 192. 63 J. M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (New York: Penguin, 2007), p. 15. 64 Claude Lefort, ‘The Question of Democracy’, in Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 16. 65 The Childhood of Jesus, pp. 114–15. 61

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

196

Jean-Michel Rabaté

The Childhood of Jesus echoes Derrida’s meditation on hospitality, a concept torn apart between an absolute sense and a relative sense.66 What is affirmed in the aporetic dialogue with Arabella Kurtz is a similar need to move beyond a neo-Freudian synthesis to a deconstructive one. The truth that Coetzee is looking for is defined by the politics of education, and by the shared guilt inherited by a Western world shaped by colonialism and oppression. However, like psychoanalysis, literature cannot be bound to strict ‘fact-checking’ and therefore reaches a truth that is not just ‘legal’ or ‘emotional’ but somehow ‘fictional’ because it entails specific forms of pseudos. In other words, it is a truth whose structure is made up of fiction. When Arabella Kurtz harps on the ‘emotional truth’ which is a fiction slowly replacing the traumas of the past in The Good Story, Coetzee deploys his own brand of impossibility: for him, opposing Thomas Nagel’s philosophical good sense, one can have the intuition of what an animal like a bat might perceive: ‘I think that by a strenuous effort of sympathetic projection one can reach a flickering intuition of what it is like for a bat to be a bat.’67 James Joyce would have managed such a stylistic feat in the ‘Nausicaa’ episode of Ulysses, when a hovering bat appears and mediates between the contrasting interior monologues of Leopold Bloom and Gerty McDowell. By contrast, Kurtz remains too safely in the domain of the possible when she highlights the ‘subjective truth’ that we all create and exchange. More radical in his explorations, Coetzee progresses by overcoming impossibilities: how to write a new gospel of Jesus when one is not a believer, and a parable that doubles as a political fiction about the asylum-seekers and the displaced populations of today’s world? In that sense, he relays his earlier Lacanian approach of the Real as the Hole created in knowledge by writing with a more Derridean approach to thinking, an approach in which one has to think by traversing aporias. The only way to progress in thinking and in writing is to push along in the direction of the Impossible, an insight shared by Georges Bataille and Samuel Beckett. Beckett mentions at the very beginning of The Unnamable: ‘What am I to do, what shall I do, what should I do, in my situation, how proceed? By aporia pure and simple? Or by affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered, or sooner or later?’68 Derrida agrees fully with this programme, which contains in nuce all his philosophy. As he reminds us in his book aptly entitled Aporias, as soon as I think my death, which means of course that I am also considering the truth of writing, I am confronting an aporia. This aporia offers also a unique way out: ‘The aporetic is an exoteric.’69

66

I have tried to show this in The Pathos of Distance (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), p. 163–82. Coetzee and Kurtz, The Good Story, p. 136. 68 Samuel Beckett, ‘The Unnamable’, in Three Novels (New York: Grove Press, 1991), p. 291. 69 Jacques Derrida, Catherine Porter, and Edward P. Morris, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982), p. 39; also quoted in Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 14. 67

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

PART IV CONTEXTS AND INSTITUTIONS

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

12 ‘Wisselbare Woorde’ J. M. Coetzee and Postcolonial Philosophy Carrol Clarkson

WISSELBARE W OORDE The title of this chapter, Wisselbare Woorde, comes from J. M. Coetzee’s novel, In the Heart of the Country (1977).1 Magda, the protagonist, is speaking to Anna, her servant, before going to bed. Anna is unresponsive to Magda’s hectoring and mordantly self-reflexive harangue. ‘This is not going to be a dialogue, thank God,’ says Magda, ‘I can stretch my wings and fly where I will.’2 In the Ravan edition of In the Heart of the Country (published in South Africa in 1978), Magda’s monologue ranges feverishly across different linguistic and cultural registers, and slashes back and forth between English and Afrikaans: Energy is eternal delight, I could have been another person, ek kon heeltemaal anders gewees het. I could have burned my way out of this prison, my tongue is forked with fire, verstaan jy, ek kan met ‘n tong van vuur praat, but it has all been turned uselessly inward, nutteloos, what sounds to you like rage is only the crackling of the fire within, ek is nooit regtig kwaad met jou gewees nie, I have never learned the speech of men, ek wou slegs praat, ek het nooit geleer hoe ‘n mens met ‘n ander mens praat nie. It has always been that the word has come down to me and I have passed it on. I have never known words of true exchange, wisselbare woorde, Anna. Woorde wat ek aan jou kan gee kan jy nie teruggee nie. Hulle is woorde sonder waarde. Verstaan jy? No value.3

For a brief moment at least, we might be attracted to Magda’s claim to stretch her wings and fly where she will—her fleeting Blakean revelry in the autonomy of 1 This chapter draws together and extends ideas raised as part of a rather different overarching line of enquiry in my book, J. M. Coetzee: Countervoices (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). The chapter can be read in conversation with my article, ‘J. M. Coetzee and the Limits of Language’, Journal of Literary Studies 25, no. 4 (2009): pp. 106–24. My thanks to Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm for suggesting that I address the question of postcolonial philosophy in an essay of its own. 2 J. M. Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1978), §203, p. 101. 3 Ibid., §203, p. 101. §203 of the English version of In the Heart of the Country bears close resemblance to the Afrikaans dialogue in the Ravan edition. Of interest is that the Afrikaans word ‘praat’ is rendered as ‘talk’ and ‘speak’ in different places in the English text: ‘I only wanted to talk, I have never learned to talk with another person’, and ‘what was it like with my father when the two of you spoke?’J. M. Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country (London: Penguin, 1982), §203, p. 101.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

200

Carrol Clarkson

self-expression, without the constraints of a speaking to. Yet, as in much of Coetzee’s writing, Magda’s supposedly free speech becomes an inner polemic. She recognizes that an inability to encounter Anna, her servant, in reciprocal dialogue, in ‘wisselbare woorde’, constrains creative self-expression, and she too is trapped in a language of master–slave subjugations in apartheid South Africa. ‘“Sê vir my, Anna,”’ Magda continues, ‘“hoe noem jy my? Hoe heet ek?” I breathe as softly as I can. “Hoe noem jy my in jou gedagtes?”’4 And Anna replies, ‘“Mies?”’, then a little later, ‘“Mies Magda?”’ Magda tries to coax Anna into calling her by name: ‘Ja; of sommer net Magda, nê. Magda is mos die naam waarmee ek gedoop is, nie Mies Magda. Sou dit nie snaaks klink as die predikant die kinders so doop—Mies Magda, Baas Johannes, ensovoorts? . . . Kan jy Magda sê? Kom, sê vir my Magda.’ ‘Nee mies, kan nie.’ ‘Magda. Dis eenvoudig. Nouja, môreaand probeer ons weer, dan sien ons of jy Magda kan sê.’ . . . ‘Nag mies.’5

I quote this passage at some length since it is a mainspring for the discussion to follow in which I explore two related literary-critical problems: an ethics and politics of representation (in all the valencies of ‘representation’), and an ethics and politics of address. Differently put, the chapter asks questions about speaking of and speaking for and speaking to. In much of his writing—as the excerpts from In the Heart of the Country show—Coetzee explores a tension between freedom of expression and responsibility to the other, but it is in the slippage from saying to addressing that we are led to further thought about modes and sites of consciousness—and hence accountabilities—in the interlocutory contact zones of the post-colony.6 4 ‘Tell me, Anna, what do you call me? What is my name? . . . What do you call me in your thoughts?’ (In the Heart of the Country, §203, Penguin edn, p. 102). 5 In the Heart of the Country, §203, Ravan edn, p. 102. ‘Yes, or just Magda, hey. Magda is just the name I’m Christened by, not Miss Magda. Wouldn’t it sound funny if the minister baptized the children like that: Miss Magda, Master Johannes and so on? Can you say Magda? Come, say Magda to me.’ ‘No Miss, can’t.’ ‘Magda. It’s simple. Well then, we’ll try again tomorrow night. Then we’ll see if you can say Magda.’ ‘Night, Miss.’ The translation I provide here is a more literal version of the Afrikaans than the passage as it appears in the published English edition of In the Heart of the Country. In his essay, Roads to Translation, Coetzee writes: ‘My English does not happen to be embedded in any particular sociolinguistic landscape, which relieves the translator of one vexatious burden . . . Dialogue comes with its own set of problems, particularly when it is very informal and incorporates regional usages, contemporary fashions and allusions, or slang. My dialogue is rarely of this kind. For the most part its character is formal, even if the rhythms are more abrupt than the rhythms of narrative prose’ (‘Roads to Translation’, Meanjin: Tongues: Translation: Only Connect 64, no. 4, special issue (2005): pp. 141–61; 143). The Afrikaans version certainly does situate the dialogue within a ‘particular sociolinguistic landscape’; the published English version attains a certain quality of abstraction. 6 Mary Louise Pratt brought the phrase ‘contact zone’ into critical currency: ‘I use this term to refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today’ (Mary Louise Pratt, ‘Arts of the Contact Zone’, Profession (Jan. 1991): pp. 33–40; 34).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Coetzee and Postcolonial Philosophy

201

In wrestling with the contentious question of Coetzee’s engagements with postcolonial discourses (and in coming to a sharper appreciation of what a postcolonial philosophy might be), this chapter thinks through some aspects of Coetzee’s work in relation to two key postcolonial thinkers: Martinique-born philosopher and psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon (1925–61), and anti-apartheid activist and founder of the Black Consciousness Movement, Steve Biko (1946–77), who died in police detention as a result of injuries sustained during torture.

STEVE B IKO, NADINE GORDIMER, A ND J. M. COETZEE A cursory reading of many of Coetzee’s critical essays and interviews could easily lead one to the notion that he has, at best, a reluctant interest in postcolonial discourses and literatures: ‘my intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African,’ he says in the interview with David Attwell after winning the Nobel Prize,7 and Coetzee somewhat mordantly reflects that his essay on Alex La Guma ‘emerged from a rather resigned perception that, if I were going to stay on in the United States, it might well have to be as an Africanist, that is, as a specialist in a peripheral and not very highly regarded body of literature’.8 While at Buffalo between 1968 and 1971, Coetzee read Césaire, Senghor, Lukács, Fanon, and, as he puts it, he ‘even read Chairman Mao’. As Coetzee started writing Dusklands he wanted ‘to find an imaginative (imaginary) place for [him]self in the Third World and its narratives of itself ’—but (Coetzee goes on to comment), ‘Sadly, Lukács and Mao proved of no help there.’9 What help Fanon was Coetzee does not say, but, as this chapter goes on to discuss, much of Fanon’s thinking about language resonates with Coetzee’s own—and in ways that make for a more nuanced appreciation of the term ‘postcolonial philosophy’. First, though, I would like to entwine two distinct strands in one short thread of a literary-political scene in 1970s and 1980s South Africa. Steve Biko founded the Black Consciousness Movement and was killed in police detention—his collected works, which were critical of the efforts of white liberals and emphasized the necessary autonomy of the black struggle for freedom, were published in 1978, the year after his death, under the title I Write What I Like. During the same period, Coetzee published a series of texts that seemed to respond to Biko’s challenge, by staging black characters who remained radically other to the efforts of liberal white interlocutors. It is clear that Coetzee was profoundly disturbed by, and followed very closely, the events leading up to Steve Biko’s death in September 1977 and the inquest that began in November of the same year. Coetzee was writing Waiting for the Barbarians at the time, and verbal echoes of newspaper reports can be tracked in the 7 J. M. Coetzee in ‘An Exclusive Interview with J. M. Coetzee’, Dagens Nyheter/DN.se., 8 Dec. 2003, p. 2, http://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/an-exclusive-interview-with-j-m-coetzee/, accessed 11 Oct. 2016. 8 J. M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge, MA/ London: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 336. 9 Ibid., p. 338.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

202

Carrol Clarkson

manuscripts of the novel.10 Yet when it comes to their respective political philosophies, and the strategies they adopted, Steve Biko and J. M. Coetzee are strikingly different. I am thinking, for instance, of Coetzee’s imagining of a future society in South Africa ‘of no discernible ethnos’ in which ‘differences wash away’.11 Set this against Biko’s sustained and impassioned appeal for a distinctive and collective coming into being of black consciousness. Biko writes about the deeply flawed ‘myth of integration’ proposed by white liberals in South Africa;12 for him, these myths are ‘artificially integrated circles’ and ‘a soporific to the blacks’.13 In several of his essays (ranging through topics such as student politics, primary education, religion, white liberalism, and fear in South African politics) Biko speaks in detail about the irreparably corrosive effects of assuming a Western European standard to be a universal one. Citing Aimé Césaire’s letter of resignation to the French Communist Party in 1956, Biko reminds his student audience in Cape Town in 1971 of the ‘peculiarity of our problems which aren’t to be reduced to subordinate forms of any other problems’. He repeats Césaire’s words within the local context of 1970s apartheid South Africa, so that the performative and deictic force of Césaire’s ‘our’ is reactivated with singular impact: Biko reiterates, for his fellow students, the ‘peculiarity of our culture’, the ‘peculiarity of our history, laced with terrible misfortunes which belong to no other history’.14 With reference to the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, Coetzee speaks of ‘the almost infinite lattice that a shared European culture provides’,15 but within the context of South Africa, when pressed about ‘the duties’ of the writer, Coetzee is careful to distinguish different sources of this perceived duty. His ‘tiny demurral’ is the tacit assumption that the obligations imposed by society should take precedence over what is constitutional to the individual writer; what ‘one might loosely call conscience’, or, as Coetzee says he tentatively prefers to call it, a ‘transcendental imperative’.16 Again, Coetzee’s core preoccupations as a writer—I am thinking specifically of his unrelenting interrogation of the self—take an entirely different scope and focus to those of Biko. The moral energies and commitments in Biko’s writing find expression in political solidarity; and to begin with, the ‘quintessence’ of black consciousness lies in its collective identity—its ‘group power’ and ‘group pride’.17 At a cursory glance, then, the approaches of Biko and Coetzee have little if anything in common when it comes to questions of the political obligations of the 10 David Attwell draws attention to newspaper clippings from the Cape Times that Coetzee kept. One article in the Cape Times (‘Pathologist questioned on brain injury’) reports: ‘Evidence has been given of an incident on the morning of September 7 when Mr Biko allegedly went berserk, assaulted people and had to be restrained by force’ (Cape Times, 26 Nov. 1977, p. 4). See David Attwell, J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face to Face with Time (Auckland Park: Jacana, 2015), pp. 113–14 and 121–3. 11 Doubling the Point, p. 342. 12 Steve Biko, I Write What I Like, ed. Aelred Stubbs (Harlow: Heinemann African Writers Series, 1987), p. 22. 13 Ibid., p. 64. 14 Ibid., p. 67. Biko delivered his speech White Racism and Black Consciousness at a student conference sponsored by the Abe Bailey Institute for Inter-racial Studies in Cape Town, January 1971. The speech is published in I Write What I Like. 15 Doubling the Point, p. 67. 16 Ibid., p. 340. 17 Biko, I Write What I Like, p. 68.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Coetzee and Postcolonial Philosophy

203

writer in apartheid South Africa. Certainly, Coetzee has been criticized for his political apathy, for his failure to do justice to the political energies of the antiapartheid struggle—or, to put this in the scathing phrasing that Nadine Gordimer uses in her 1984 book review of Life & Times of Michael K, Coetzee ‘denies the energies of the will to resist evil’.18 But to take this line of argument is to conflate disparate elements, and (with specific reference to the title of this paper) it runs the risk of thinking ‘postcolonial philosophy’ sub specie aeternitatis—as if it did not matter who was doing the philosophizing, and as if only one kind of writerly intervention were conceivable in ethico-political terms. Yet Gordimer’s critique of Coetzee invites closer attention, and leads me to consider Coetzee’s writing and thinking in relation to Biko’s in a more nuanced way. Gordimer’s review of Life & Times of Michael K, first published in The New York Review of Books in 1984, is prescriptive and high-handed in both the tenor and tone of its argument. ‘Coetzee’s heroes are those who ignore history, not make it,’ Gordimer writes. The lives and commitments of those engaged in the antiapartheid struggle ‘are not present in the novel’—and for Gordimer, this perceived hiatus is tantamount to a disavowal of those political energies. The review takes this line of discussion through to some questionable assertions: A revulsion against all political and revolutionary solutions rises with the insistence of the song of cicadas to the climax of this novel. I don’t think the author would deny that this is his own revulsion.19

At the same time, though, Gordimer registers her appreciation of Coetzee’s treatment of colonial racism in the novel: ‘The presentation of the truth and meaning of what white has done to black stands out on every page, celebrating its writer’s superb, unafraid creative energy as it does.’20 Gordimer’s criticism follows on from a tacit assumption that politically engaged writing must play out at the level of political themes and that the characters should hold explicit political views. Her literary touchstone is the realist novel. In her terms, the absence of a realist representation of the daily lives and ideological commitments of political activists in South Africa is equivalent to a political failure—a breach in the responsibility of the South African writer. ‘This is a challengingly questionable position for a writer to take up in South Africa, make no mistake about it,’ Gordimer goes on to say.21 Before coming to Coetzee’s responses to Gordimer’s review (which raise the stakes of the literary-political debate), I turn to a foundational premise in Steve Biko’s writings as he develops the concept of black consciousness. Read alongside Biko’s philosophy, Gordimer’s dismissiveness of Coetzee on political grounds is open to question, even on the terms that Gordimer herself sets in her review of Life & Times of Michael K.

18 Nadine Gordimer, ‘“The Idea of Gardening”, Life & Times of Michael K, by J. M. Coetzee’, review in New York Review of Books (2 Feb. 1984) ): pp. 3–6 (my emphasis). 19 Ibid., p. 5. 20 Ibid., p. 4. 21 Ibid., p. 4.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

204

Carrol Clarkson

The writings collected in I Write What I Like comprise essays, interviews, letters, and extracts from trials, spanning the years 1969–72. Many of the essays were first published in newsletters of the South African Students’ Organization (SASO). Biko had been an active member of the multi-racial National Union of South African Students (NUSAS), but he broke away in 1968 to form SASO—a black student organization. In several of his papers, Biko explains in no uncertain terms his reasons for distancing himself from white liberals: ‘These self-appointed trustees of black interests boast of years of experience in their fight for “the rights of blacks”. They have been doing things for blacks, on behalf of blacks, and because of blacks.’22 In Biko’s terms, the racially privileged white liberal in apartheid South Africa of the 1960s and 1970s can only ever engage with black oppression as a ‘peripheral problem’ to be solved; the lived experience of the black person, by contrast, is ‘a struggle to get out of the situation’, and this is why, for Biko, ‘blacks speak with a greater sense of urgency than whites’.23 Since ‘no white person can escape being part of the oppressor camp’, instead of assuming a patronizing and inauthentic role, ‘[w]hite liberals must leave blacks to take care of their own business while they concern themselves with the real evil in our society—white racism.’24 A reading of Biko leads one to be wary of the grounds of Gordimer’s critique of Coetzee. If anything, Coetzee is more acutely aware of the political and ethical implications of his subject position as a white writer of European descent in apartheid South Africa, and certainly, from Dusklands onwards, Coetzee’s vivisection of white racism in his fiction is a distinctively chilling and compelling aspect of his writing. These preoccupations extend to Coetzee’s critical essays too, and in ways that pitch the problem in a philosophical, rather than an illustrative, field. ‘White Writing isn’t about writing by people with white skins’, Coetzee says in an interview with David Attwell, ‘but about European ideas writing themselves out in Africa.’25 Increasingly, it becomes clear that Coetzee’s appreciation of what is at stake in playing out his own European literary legacies in writing South Africa cuts to the quick of political concerns at that time, and it brings a distinctive if controversial voice to postcolonial studies: Coetzee’s attentiveness to his own subject position is bound up in the ethical and political risks of literary representation. In the lecture that he delivered at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town in 1987,26 and in his direct responses to Nadine Gordimer’s review across several interviews, Coetzee addresses the question of literary realism, and acknowledges the attractions of Gordimer’s position in South Africa: the general position Lukács takes on what he calls realism as against modernist decadence carries a great deal of power, political and moral, in South Africa today: one’s first duty as a writer is to represent social and historical processes; drawing the procedures of representation into question is time-wasting and so forth.27

22

23 Ibid., p. 22. 24 Ibid., p. 23. Biko, I Write What I Like, p. 25. Doubling the Point, pp. 338–9. 26 This lecture, ‘The Novel Today’, was published the following year in the literary magazine, Upstream (vol. 6, no. 1 [summer 1988]: pp. 2–5). 27 Doubling the Point, p. 202. 25

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Coetzee and Postcolonial Philosophy

205

The phrase I wish to draw attention to here is ‘procedures of representation’. It is easy to assume that a self-reflexive fictional enterprise and a project of socio-political activism share no common ground. Gordimer comes close to suggesting that they are mutually exclusive, that creative energy expended on language turning in on itself in a novel is an evasion of more urgent political concerns that could (and even should) be directly addressed. But such a view ignores the effects of the performative and historical operations of language. It runs the risk of assuming that language is a given—and even neutral—medium for representing a social reality, rather than its being a politically and historically charged force itself that generates social perceptions in terms of a particular intersubjective locution. Once language is recognized to have this force, ‘drawing the procedures of representation into question’ becomes politically meaningful, and, in conversation with David Attwell, Coetzee is insistent that an ‘unquestioning attitude toward forms or conventions’, even when these are literary or linguistic forms, ‘is as little radical as any other kind of obedience’28—this in the teeth of recognizing how difficult it is for a South African writer to make a compelling case for such a position. For Gordimer, the explicit political themes of the story and whatever solutions they offer take precedence. But one way to speak about Coetzee’s oeuvre is surely in terms of his relentless enquiry into the processes of storytelling, the modes of telling that both enable and constrain the writer or the artist within a particular socio-historical context. A questioning and challenging of interlocutory sites of consciousness, and a prior questioning of the authority to write in the first place, have become signature features of Coetzee’s writing. One only needs to think of the Magistrate’s efforts to write what he had intended to be ‘the annals of an Imperial outpost’ in the closing pages of Waiting for the Barbarians;29 of the sustained enquiry about writing and authorship in Foe and He and his Man; and, in very different ways, the examination of challenges facing scholar-writers like Mrs Curren, David Lurie, Elizabeth Costello, and the J. C. of Diary of a Bad Year. One way in which these questions are played out on a formal level is through Coetzee’s sustained experiments with the use of the first and third persons: who has the authority to say ‘I’, to take up the position of the one who speaks or writes? And on whose behalf, and for whom, does a narrative take shape? ETHICS AND POLITICS O F LITERARY REPRESENTATION Questions about the ethics and politics of literary representation gain particular urgency as Coetzee grapples with the implications of writing the extreme violence of the apartheid state. One focal point of these reflections is the representation of 28

Ibid., p. 64. J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (London: Vintage, 2000), p. 168. David Attwell cites one of Coetzee’s notes, dated 17 October 1977, from the manuscripts of Waiting for the Barbarians: ‘I have no interest in telling stories; it is the process of storytelling that interests me. This man . . . as a “he” living in the world, bores me. “Creating” an illusionistic reality in which he moves depresses me. Hence the exhausted quality of the writing’ ( J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing, p. 112). 29

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

206

Carrol Clarkson

torture—even more specifically, Steve Biko’s murder while in police detention. Coetzee confronts the ethics and politics of literary representation in two of his essays: ‘Into the Dark Chamber’ (first published in 1986 and collected in Doubling the Point), and ‘Breyten Breytenbach and the Reader in the Mirror’ (first published in 1991 and reprinted in Giving Offense). ‘Into the Dark Chamber’ registers that Waiting for the Barbarians is a novel about ‘the impact of the torture chamber on the life of a man of conscience’;30 Biko’s detention, trial, and the inquest into his death provide an immediate historical context at the time of writing this novel.31 But (as I have written elsewhere) it is clear to me that Coetzee was familiar with Jean Améry’s At the Mind’s Limits, and so Coetzee’s concerns extend beyond the immediate South African historical context to address the ethics of literary representation and address them in broader philosophical terms too.32 Holocaust survivor Jean Améry, in At the Mind’s Limits, speaks in a poignantly compelling way about the difficulty of conveying the extremes of human experience in language at all. In the concentration camps, he writes, ‘[t]o reach out beyond concrete reality with words became before our very eyes a game that was not only worthless and an impermissible luxury but also mocking and evil’. In no place other than the brute reality of the camp ‘did the attempt to transcend it prove so hopeless and shoddy’.33 At several moments in his book, Améry focuses on the linguistic breaking points in his own account: he has had experiences so extreme that they defy the everyday mechanisms of representation and meaning, and an integral part of his ethical enquiry is to place those mechanisms under philosophical pressure. ‘It would be totally senseless to try and describe here the pain that was inflicted on me,’ Améry observes: One comparison would only stand for the other, and in the end we would be hoaxed by turn on the hopeless merry-go round of figurative speech. The pain was what it was. Beyond that there is nothing to say. Qualities of feeling . . . mark the limit of the capacity of language to communicate.34

The torture scene in Waiting for the Barbarians35 resonates in disturbing ways with Améry’s account of his own unspeakable torture at Fort Breendonk in Belgium;

30

Doubling the Point, p. 363. Even so, Waiting for the Barbarians was not banned by the South African Censorship Board: Reginald Lighton’s report acknowledged the ‘considerable literary merit’ of the novel, and stressed that it would have little popular appeal. The report deflects attention away from its resonance with a local historical context to stress universal themes; it zooms in on the less than a dozen ‘offensive’ words in the novel—hardly grounds for banning the book. See J. C. Kannemeyer’s extended discussions of Steve Biko, Waiting for the Barbarians, and the novel’s reception, ‘n Geskryfde Lewe (Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball, 2012), pp. 347–55 and 364–75. 32 In J. M. Coetzee: Countervoices, in the chapter ‘Etymologies’, I speak at some length about Waiting for the Barbarians and At the Mind’s Limits, most especially in relation to the linguistic representation of torture in both texts. See pp. 167–75. 33 Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), p. 19. 34 Ibid., p. 33. 35 Waiting for the Barbarians, pp. 132–3. 31

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Coetzee and Postcolonial Philosophy

207

Améry’s clinically detailed record of events culminates in the unnerving observation: ‘Torture, from Latin toquere, to twist. What visual instruction in etymology!’36

ET H IC S AND PO L ITICS O F AD D R E SS The experiences of colonial oppression also mark a limit of what can be conveyed— most especially when the language used is that of the colonizer. An enquiry into the interlocutory forces at work in the post-colony is at the core of Frantz Fanon’s work. The first chapter of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks has the title ‘The Black Man and Language’; the opening sentence reads: We attach a fundamental importance to the phenomenon of language and consequently consider the study of language essential for providing us with one element in understanding the black man’s dimension of being-for-others, it being understood that to speak is to exist absolutely for the other.37

What interests me is that Fanon speaks about language as an intrinsically intersubjective and political force working through its speakers: this rather than the idea that language is a static and neutral tool for representing a conceptual field that stands apart from it. While Sartre is Fanon’s obvious point of philosophical reference here, the passage I have just cited also resonates with the Bakhtin of The Dialogic Imagination: ‘As a living, socio-ideological concrete thing, as heteroglot opinion, language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else’s.’38 Now, if speaking a language, in Fanon’s terms, ‘means above all assuming a culture and bearing the weight of a civilization’,39 then the use of English in postcolonial South Africa is inextricably caught up in the torsions of its political history. And certainly, in the worlds of his fiction, it is often along fraught linguistic and cultural borderlines, along contingent liminal zones of expression and understanding, that Coetzee sustains concentrated ethical and historically inflected enquiries. I am thinking, for example, of Jacobus Coetzee’s initial encounter with the people of the ‘land of the Great Namaqua’ in Dusklands, of Mrs Curren and Florence and Vercueil in Age of Iron, of Susan Barton and Friday in Foe, of the Medical Officer 36

Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, pp. 22–3. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), p. 1. The philosophical touchstone here is the Sartre of Being and Nothingness. Sartre’s notion of beingfor-others gains poignant intensity in Fanon’s postcolonial context. Sartre writes: ‘If we start with the first revelation of the Other as a look, we must recognize that we experience our inapprehensible beingfor-others in the form of a possession. I am possessed by the Other; the Other’s look fashions me in my nakedness, causes it to be born, sculptures it, produces it as it is, sees it as I shall never see it. The Other holds a secret—the secret of what I am . . . By virtue of consciousness the Other is for me simultaneously the one who has stolen my being from me and the one who causes “there to be” a being which is my being.’ Jean-Paul Sartre, Basic Writings, ed. Stephen Priest, trans. of the passage cited above Hazel E. Barnes (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 227–8. 38 Fanon, Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 293. 39 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 1–2. 37

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

208

Carrol Clarkson

and Michael K, of the Magistrate and the Barbarian Girl, of David Lurie and Petrus—and Pollux—in Disgrace.40 Here is just one of the passages from Dusklands: A Hottentot gains much by contact with civilization but one cannot deny that he also loses something. . . . Put him in Christian clothes and he begins to cringe, his shoulders bend, his eyes shift, he cannot keep still in your presence but must incessantly twitch. No longer can you get a truthful answer to a simple question, his only study is in how to placate you, and that means little more than telling you what he thinks you want to hear.41

An unquestioning submission to the prevailing discourse runs the risk of resulting in what South African writer Zoë Wicomb refers to as the ‘psychic violence’ of assimilation,42 and in Wicomb, as in Coetzee, this violence is recognized (and analysed) as it plays itself out in the dominant language and culture that generate the lines of force along which we relate to others.43 This violence of assimilation through language gains intense political urgency in Biko’s reflections on the impossible task of speaking in English in a postcolonial and apartheid court of law: You may be intelligent but not as articulate, you are forced into a subservient role of having to say yes to what they are saying, talking about what you have experienced, which they have not experienced, because you cannot express it so well. This in a sense inculcates also in numerous students a sense of inadequacy. You tend to think that it is not just a matter of language, you tend to tie it also with intelligence in a sense, you tend to feel that that guy is better equipped than you mentally.44

One keenly senses the detrition of the self—of self-expression—in the field of a colonial language. And this is at least one context in which to revisit the passage 40 The trouble with ‘Pollux’ (for Lurie) is that this name is not of Lurie’s choosing, and the hierarchical binary opposition of the colonial dyad—European/non-European, civilized/primitive, Western/Other—is disrupted. Pollux cannot be alienated, or rendered ‘other’—untranslatable— through his name. Lurie senses the waning of his own cultural dominance, and the physical violence of his retaliation not only acts out this loss, but brings home to Lurie that in his efforts to assert his authority he perpetuates the colonial legacy he himself has also been led to question. Is it possible to disaggregate his European literary-cultural values from the racist aftershocks of colonialism? 41 J. M. Coetzee, Dusklands (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1974), p. 69. 42 Zoë Wicomb, ‘Translations in the Yard of Africa’, Journal of Literary Studies 18, nos. 3–4 (2002): pp. 209–23; 213. 43 Zoë Wicomb’s essay, ‘Translations in the Yard of Africa’, speaks about Disgrace ‘as a text that struggles with translation as concept-metaphor for the postapartheid condition’ (p. 210). Her point of departure is an insightful and poignant reflection on the indigenous Khoi-Khoi woman, Krotoa, who, at the age of 10, was taken into the Dutch fort in the Cape shortly after the arrival of Jan van Riebeek in 1652. With her aptitude for languages, her role quickly became that of translator and ‘unofficial diplomat’ (p. 212). 44 Biko, I Write What I Like, p. 107. Bakhtin comes to mind again here: the word ‘becomes “one’s own” only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. . . . Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated—overpopulated—with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one’s own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process’ (Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 293–4).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Coetzee and Postcolonial Philosophy

209

from In the Heart of the Country with which I opened this chapter: despite Anna’s refusal to call Magda by her first name only, the impossibility of not saying ‘Mies’ enforces her subservient role. The performative force of the language of address means that not even Magda is able to effect a change in their way of relating; in Biko’s terms, she is unable to escape from the ‘oppressor camp’.45 Throughout his critical writings Coetzee is consistent in his stance that challenging the prevailing powers of discourse is part of a writer’s ethical duty, and, given that language operates in intersubjective fields, and that Coetzee’s use of English bears with it the freight of a colonial legacy, the implications of this challenge are political. In Coetzee’s writing this challenge has a double impetus: first, the appreciation that language is not merely a static medium for representation— that it has transitive force; second, the appreciation that a different mode of saying has to be imagined if an other mode of thinking is to find expression in ways that challenge received templates. I use the word ‘transitive’ here in the ordinary sense of ‘passing out of itself; passing over to, or affecting something else; operating beyond itself ’.46 But (still keeping Fanon and Bakhtin in mind), I take this ‘something else’ not to be the object (the ‘it’, the ‘theme’) under discussion in the interlocutory event, but the interlocutors themselves. The ground of the discussion now shifts: the scene of address, rather than the subsumptive content of what is said, becomes the focus of attention. Speaker (or writer) and addressee are affected through the utterance’s transitive force. This idea finds poignant expression in Steve Biko’s last published interview, where the discussion is about interrogation and torture. Biko has this to say: If they talk to me, well I’m bound to be affected by them as human beings. But the moment they adopt rough stuff, they are imprinting on my mind that they are police. And I only understand one form of dealing with police and that’s to be as unhelpful as possible.47

Modes of saying affect modes of being in an interlocutory relation to the other. Questions of the ethics and politics of address find expression in several of Coetzee’s critical essays and interviews: the essay on Achterberg’s Ballade van de Gasfitter, the interview with the title ‘The Poetics of Reciprocity’ (in Doubling the Point), the review essay on Paul Celan and his translators in Inner Workings, to name a few. But for now I turn my attention to Coetzee’s reflections on the middle voice (in the brief essay ‘A Note on Writing’) as he considers the verb ‘to write’. To think of the verb as an instance of the middle voice is to take into account its reflexive action on the subject, as in a verb like ‘to bathe’—which means to bathe oneself. Citing Roland Barthes, Coetzee thinks through the idea that ‘today to write is to make oneself the centre of the action of la parole; it is to affect writing in being

45

Biko, I Write What I Like, p. 23. William Little et al., The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973). 47 Biko, I Write What I Like, p. 152. 46

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

210

Carrol Clarkson

affected oneself ’.48 If we take heed of Fanon and Bakhtin in their realization that an utterance is not only a representation but an address, then a further thought is that any shift in the language not only alters what is to be conveyed, it also recalibrates the relative bearings of the interlocutors. The analysis of a politics of address is vital to a keener appreciation of the conditions determining what can be said. Differently put: an ethics and politics of representation cannot be thought independently of an ethics and politics of address. I return briefly to Gordimer’s critique of Coetzee. In response to the pressure to write a realist fiction of the sort that Gordimer seems to advocate as the only politically responsible kind, Coetzee has this to say: In Africa the only address one can imagine is a brutally direct one, a sort of pure, unmediated representation; what short-circuits the imagination, what forces one’s face into the thing itself, is what I am calling history. ‘The only address one can imagine’— an admission of defeat. Therefore, the task becomes imagining this unimaginable, imagining a form of address that permits the play of writing to start taking place.49

The word that catches one’s attention here is ‘address’—and we are now in a position to appreciate ‘the play of writing’ not simply as Eurocentric avant-gardism of an uncommitted kind, but as generating a disruption of the received field of language which forces a way of relating. I use the word ‘relating’ in the double sense of telling of something and relating to someone as a way of thinking about Coetzee’s searing attentiveness to writing as an experimental process50—a complex activity that tackles problems of representation, self-reflection, and literary address. These concerns arise in two of Coetzee’s critical essays where Steve Biko features prominently: how does the writer create a space for literary production in an apartheid state, generate a form of storytelling that addresses, but does not capitulate, to the stipulations of that state? Coetzee’s essay ‘Into the Dark Chamber’ reads Christopher van Wyk’s poem ‘In Detention’ to ask about the hold that the torture chamber has on the imagination of South African writers. But here is the difficulty: if on the one hand the torture chamber can serve as a striking metaphor for the atrocities of apartheid, the novelist (in Coetzee’s case not a victim of torture himself ) has to imagine a scene of extreme violence—beyond experience—and convey that in the measure of a received language. How to do this, and still do justice to the exorbitance of the torture victim’s experience? Is silence a viable alternative? Shying away from the effects of racial oppression in the South Africa of the 1970s and 1980s would be to play into the hands of the censors. Coetzee puts it this way: ‘The true challenge is: how not to

48 Doubling the Point, p. 94; Coetzee is citing Barthes’s essay, ‘ “To Write”: An Intransitive Verb?’ (p. 142). The question of transitivity in a grammatical sense deserves a separate essay of its own. I take this question further in a forthcoming paper, ‘Coetzee’s “Womanizing” ’. 49 Doubling the Point, pp. 67–8. 50 Coetzee often uses the word ‘experiment’ in a somewhat technical yet thought-provoking way to speak about his own creative practice. As I put it in J. M. Coetzee: Countervoices, one way to consider Coetzee’s writing is as a series of sophisticated experiments with the effects that can be generated by putting certain linguistic structures into the field of narrative play. (Countervoices, p. 5. See especially my discussions of ‘experiment’, pp. 5–6 and pp. 11–14).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Coetzee and Postcolonial Philosophy

211

play the game by the rules of the state, how to establish one’s own authority, how to imagine torture and death on one’s own terms.’51 The last chapter of Giving Offense looks at a poem by writer and political activist Breyten Breytenbach. The poem ‘Brief uit die Vreemde aan Slagter’ (‘Letter from Foreign Parts to Butcher’) was first published in the Netherlands in 1972 under the title Skryt—a collected volume of Breytenbach’s writings. The book was banned in South Africa. The subtitle of Breytenbach’s poem is ‘For Balthazar’—hence the poem is quite specifically addressed to the prime minister in South Africa at the time, Balthazar John Vorster. The subtitle for the first part of Coetzee’s essay is ‘Addressing the State’, and in his essay Coetzee offers an incisive appreciation of Breytenbach’s attempt to establish ‘poetic authority’ to speak in the name of those tortured and martyred at the security police headquarters, John Vorster Square. The names of fifteen prisoners are registered in an appendix to the poem. The poem’s address is thus a complex one, directed at the butcher/obstetrician/prime minister Balthazar, but also at a ‘reader over the shoulder, a “prisoner”, ready to question Breytenbach’s authority to speak as I for him’.52 In these and other essays Coetzee thinks through the ethical and political potential of different literary and linguistic modes of address; in his own fiction he creates a writing field that calls totalitarian discourses into question without being arrogated by them. This is why Coetzee’s position within a defined South African literary or political establishment will remain a contested one; and this is surely the mainspring of his writing’s ethical and political challenge. Biko and Coetzee write from entirely different subject positions in apartheid South Africa, and in entirely different expressive practices as political activist and novelist respectively. But the problem of language as address is a central preoccupation for both writers, and since language gives meaningful expression to your values and accountabilities it becomes even more critical to question where you are speaking from and to consider the ways in which the given language calls you to account.53 These are some of the questions that concern the Fanon of Black Skin, White Masks, especially in the chapter ‘The Lived Experience of the Black Man’, which starts out with Fanon’s thoughts about being hailed in the street: ‘Dirty Nigger!’ or ‘Look! A Negro!’54 Fanon analyses the force these verbal encounters exert on his thinking, and on his sense of himself. By way of words in a white world, Fanon becomes ‘an object among other objects’;55 his image of himself is ‘solely negating. It’s an image in the third person.’56 This ‘reconsideration of myself ’, writes Fanon,

51

Doubling the Point, p. 364. J. M. Coetzee, Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 216. 53 In Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Bernard Williams speaks about the need to trust in deliberating ‘from what I am’. He argues against ‘the obsessional and doomed drive to eliminate’ a subjective point of view in much contemporary ethical philosophy. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 222. 54 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 89. 55 Ibid., p. 89. 56 Ibid., p. 90. 52

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

212

Carrol Clarkson

‘this thematization, was not my idea,’57 and he feels as though it is ‘another me’ who writes.58 Fanon’s reflections here can be read as a personalized illustration in the field of language of a leading thesis in The Wretched of the Earth: Because it is a systematized negation of the other, a frenzied determination to deny the other any attributes of humanity, colonialism forces the colonized to constantly ask the question: “Who am I in reality?”59

Homi Bhabha helpfully speaks about Fanon’s oeuvre as an exploration of ‘the psycho-affective realm, which is neither subjective nor objective, but a place of social and psychic mediation’.60 The psycho-affective realm, because it deals with the emotions, the imagination, and the psychic life, has universal appeal, Bhabha elaborates. But ‘it is only ever mobilized into social meaning and historical effect through an embodied and embedded action, an engagement with (or resistance to) a given reality, or a performative agency of the present tense’.61 Fanon’s own philosophy, then, does not play out in the style of dispassionate reasoned argument, sub specie aeternitatis. Instead, it is personal, subjectively invested, lived.

COUNTERVOIC ES In all of the scenes of linguistic encounter in Biko, Coetzee, and Fanon, it is clear that language generates lines of force that determine the frequencies of selfexpression. At the risk of proposing a simplified schema: Biko’s is a struggle for assertive agency; Fanon experiences and analyses the psychic shocks of cultural interference; and for Coetzee, writing from a privileged subject position, the ethical project is to question the sources and practices of his own authority. Coetzee’s texts often unhinge expected sites of narrative authority: the use of the third person, present tense in his autobiographical fiction; the presentation of fictional characters whose lives and views uncannily share some aspects of Coetzee’s own; narratives focalized through protagonists with a tenuous hold on the contexts in which they find themselves; characters whose motives and ideals are uncertain, and sometimes even contradictory to themselves. Through these and other narrative strategies of subjective displacement, Coetzee poses an unrelenting challenge to the idea of supposedly stable ‘centres of consciousness’,62 not least an authorial centre of consciousness. It is not the case in a Coetzee novel that characters each articulate clear if contesting positions amongst which a reader can choose. At least part of the philosophical drama in a Coetzee novel arises in the reader’s effort to bring a reliable perspective into focus. It is not always clear where a particular view is coming from, let alone whether it is to be trusted. For Coetzee, the ability to 57

58 Ibid., p. 89. Ibid., p. 92. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), p. 182. 60 Homi Bhabha in the preface to Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. xix. 61 Ibid., p. xix. 62 Bernard Williams, ‘A Passion for the Beyond’, London Review of Books 8, no. 14 (7 Aug. 1986): pp. 5–6; 3. 59

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Coetzee and Postcolonial Philosophy

213

question one’s own certitudes—‘a matter of awakening the countervoices in oneself and embarking upon speech with them’—constitutes nothing less than a measure of the writer’s seriousness.63

O TH E R MO DE S OF RES I S TA NC E : FR AN TZ FA NON A N D J . M. CO E T Z E E An opening passage from Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth reads: Challenging the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of viewpoints. It is not a discourse on the universal, but the impassioned claim by the colonized that their world is fundamentally different.64

Thus, early on in Fanon’s writing it becomes clear that his own philosophy, and the style in which he conducts it, will not necessarily adopt a Western methodology and practice in an unquestioning way. But I would like to draw attention to the passage as it appears in the original French text: La mise en question du monde colonial par le colonisé n’est pas une confrontation rationnelle des points de vue. Elle n’est pas un discours sur l’universel, mais l’affirmation échevelée d’une originalité posée comme absolue.65

In the original French text, Fanon’s claim is more radical than it is in the English translation: ‘échevelée’ (translated as ‘impassioned’) means dishevelled; the Collins Robert French dictionary also offers the words ‘wild’ and ‘frenzied’. But there are also conceptual differences between the two versions. The English translation of Fanon’s text offers ‘fundamentally different’—a phrase that implies stable sites for comparison, with the colonial world setting the terms of that comparison. Fanon’s French text, however, speaks of an ‘originalité posée comme absolue’—an originality posed as absolute—which is not simply a difference from the norm. This brings me back to a question of language, to the tensions between inherited and creative modes of saying, which determine the channels through which it is possible to think. For Fanon, decolonial thinking demands a break with conventional styles of presenting philosophical argument, and even a cursory glance at his texts confirms the originality of his approach. In Coetzee these questions open up quite explicitly onto the relations between philosophy and literature. It is not as if his novels offer allegories for free-standing, a priori philosophical

63 My book J. M. Coetzee: Countervoices can be read as an extended exploration of this idea. A key passage in an interview of Coetzee’s with David Attwell, in Doubling the Point, reads: ‘Writing is not free expression. There is a true sense in which writing is dialogic: a matter of awakening the countervoices in oneself and embarking upon speech with them. It is some measure of a writer’s seriousness whether he does evoke/invoke those countervoices in himself, that is, step down from the position of what Lacan calls ‘ “the subject supposed to know”’ (p. 65). 64 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 6. 65 Frantz, Fanon, Les Damnés de la Terre (Paris: La Découverte Poche, 2002), p. 44.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

214

Carrol Clarkson

arguments; it is not even the case that his fiction stages clear-cut, recognizable philosophical positions. Fiction breaks new paths of thought, rather than following existing ones: ‘Storytelling . . . is not a way of making messages more—as they say— “effective’,” Coetzee writes. ‘Storytelling is another, an other mode of thinking.’66 And as in Fanon, it is not as if there is a programme set in advance. For Coetzee the project of writing is experimental, precipitating the writing self into a language of discovery: ‘you write because you do not know what you want to say’, and what that writing yields ‘may be quite different from what you thought (or half-thought) you wanted to say in the first place. That is the sense in which one can say that writing writes us.’67 Coetzee’s attentiveness to the forces of language, and his wrestling with the processes and styles of storytelling, have philosophical import, quite apart from any philosophical ‘messages’ or ‘themes’ or ‘ideas’ that might be expressed at the level of content. I am thinking of the ethico-political effects that accrete to narrative and syntactic choices. So, for example, a sustained use of the passive voice, or of agentless sentences, or of the third person rather than the first (especially in the autobiographical texts), yields further thoughts about subjective agency and accountability; the use of the present tense rather than the past tense short-circuits the possibility of the kind of inbuilt value judgement one might anticipate in a retrospective narrative—thus activating the moral imagination of the reader. And by now it should be clear that in his self-reflexive questioning of, and attentiveness to, the contingency and cultural valency of the language and literary heritage that are, at the same time, such an integral part of his writing, Coetzee makes a distinctive contribution to postcolonial thinking. We are also in a position to appreciate that ‘postcolonial philosophy’ itself is far from a monolithic body of work. If philosophy is above all ‘a writing practice’, as Cary Wolfe puts it,68 so too is literature, and for Coetzee, storytelling offers ‘an other’ mode of thinking, ‘an other’ mode of representing and addressing the question of how to live.

‘The Novel Today’, p. 4 (my emphasis). Doubling the Point, p. 18. Within the context of a conversation about Nadine Gordimer’s position, Coetzee comments: ‘One writes the books one wants to write. One doesn’t write the books one doesn’t want to write. The emphasis falls not on one but on the word want in all its resistance to being known’ (Doubling the Point, p. 207). 68 Cary Wolfe, ‘Introduction: Exposures’, in Philosophy and Animal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), p. 9. 66 67

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

13 The J. M. Coetzee Archive and the Archive in J. M. Coetzee Jan Wilm

T H E J. M. CO E TZ E E A R C H I V E No matter what time of the year one enters the Harry Ransom Center’s (HRC) ‘inner sanctum of the reading room’1 at the University of Texas at Austin, one seems always to be in the company of a handful of scholars working on the personal archive of J. M. Coetzee available there. Through the directorial leadership of Stephen Enniss (as prepared by Tom Staley before him),2 the HRC has in recent years become one of the most important havens for scholars from across the globe to anchor their research on contemporary writing. The papers of living authors such as Don DeLillo, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Coetzee3 can be studied rigorously, and the studies emerging from this research will be altering the nature of scholarship produced on the respective authors in the future. Epistemologically, it can be a complicated endeavour to research archival material by a living writer: the temporal distance traditionally thought to be conducive to rigorous philological analysis is still lacking; and the often involved pressure of swiftly finding the novel nugget for hermeneutic explanation may easily turn into a race for positivistic extirpation in a climate of growing academic competition and precariousness. And willy-nilly, the achievements of literary studies as a discipline healthily detached from the author, informed by deconstruction and ethical reading, are being rewound. Such risks might be considered especially unfortunate in Coetzee studies, as it is there that diligent scholarship has constructed an academic climate, which rightfully tolerates a plurality of readings, diverse uses of reading methods, and approaches to the author’s ambiguous, complex, and elusive oeuvre.

1 Martin Woessner, ‘The Writing of Life’, Los Angeles Review of Books, 17 Apr. 2016, https:// lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-writing-of-life/#!, accessed 20 Nov. 2016. 2 See D. T. Max, ‘Letter from Austin—Final Destination: Why do the archives of so many great writers end up in Texas?’, The New Yorker, 11 June 2007, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/ 2007/06/11/final-destination, accessed 20 Nov. 2016; Stephen Enniss, ‘Director’s Note’, The Harry Ransom Center, http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/about/director/, accessed 20 Nov. 2016. 3 These examples are all located in the HRC; numerous other examples may be found in other archives, in other languages, in other countries around the world.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

216

Jan Wilm

At first glance, it might seem that Coetzee studies could be in danger of becoming a field of empirical research for years to come because of the sheer quantity of material lodged in the HRC, ever luring scholars to unearth archival ‘evidence’. The Coetzee Papers are a ‘vast archive’4 consisting of ‘140 document boxes . . . documenting all of Coetzee’s major writings and including notes, typescripts, background research materials and publicity materials’,5 and they have been available for research at the HRC since March 2013, when the bulk of the papers was transferred to Austin from the Houghton Library at Harvard University (additional material not previously available at Harvard has been added for the Austin collection).6 Already, two monographs have grown from engagements with the archive: David Attwell’s critical biography J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing (2015), an ‘account of [his] reading Coetzee’s manuscripts’;7 and my study of Coetzee’s oeuvre, The Slow Philosophy of J. M. Coetzee (2016), which argues for a philosophical approach to his works in part by focusing on the ‘slow composition[al] [process which] may be gleaned from a consideration of his archival material’.8 Additionally, the fellowships provided by the HRC for scholars from across the globe to research the holdings at the institution have been dominated by a focus on Coetzee since the papers became available in 2013. Yet, the promises of further archival scholarship aren’t owed (alone) to the promotion of scholarly stipends, but rather to Coetzee’s importance to world literature as well as to the disciplines of literary studies and philosophy. Leaving aside the merits of Coetzee as a writer, scholarship on Coetzee carries a certain cachet for building symbolic capital in the academic marketplace, and the growing importance of genetic criticism in academia only adds to the appeal of the archive. This tendency in academia is what Wolfgang Ernst describes as ‘the inflation of the archive’ in his study Stirrings in the Archives (2002): ‘Never has the concept of the archive as research space or object of cultural theory been so salient as today.’9 However, despite a more general drift of the humanities (and culture as a whole) towards positivism, desiring answers, resolutions, explanations, Coetzee’s papers at Woessner, ‘The Writing of Life’. The HRC’s description of the papers’ scope also details ancillary material, such as ‘1600 photographs’, and it is noted that ‘[t]he research potential of the Coetzee papers is further enriched by over 100 computer disks’, ‘a computer reel tape’, ‘a large format magnetic tape cassette’, ‘15 VHS recordings’, and ‘7 audio cassette tapes’. ‘J. M. Coetzee: An Inventory of His Papers at the Harry Ransom Center’, Harry Ransom Center Website, http://norman.hrc.utexas.edu/fasearch/findingAid. cfm?eadid=00717, accessed 20 Nov. 2016. 6 ‘News Release—March 21, 2013’, Harry Ransom Center Website, http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/ press/releases/2013/coetzee.html, accessed 20 Nov. 2016. 7 David Attwell, J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing : Face to Face with Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 17. 8 Jan Wilm, The Slow Philosophy of J. M. Coetzee (London/New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), p. 37. Also, J. C. Kannemeyer’s biography of Coetzee, A Life in Writing, makes use of archival material, which was being transferred from Harvard to the HRC at the time of his finishing the book (A Life in Writing, trans. Michiel Heyns [Johannesburg/Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2012], p. 11). 9 Wolfgang Ernst, Stirrings in the Archives: Order from Disorder, trans. Adam Siegel (Lanham Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), especially his first chapter ‘The Inflation of the Archive’, p. 1. 4 5

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

The J. M. Coetzee Archive

217

the HRC are worth reflecting upon for other reasons. Because Coetzee has documented his compositional process so meticulously, providing the numerous extant drafts for all of his published works—from Dusklands to Summertime—the archive seems to offer a promise of completion and wholeness. That it does so hinges in part on a longstanding assumption that archives are totalities, or large corpora—that they are inclusive rather than exclusive systems of collection. This view has long been questioned, especially by Michel Foucault who theorized the archive during a time when post-structuralism (and he himself) was busy challenging the very idea of wholeness as it did the ideas of beginnings and endings. And yet, Foucault used the term archive in a very open way: he ‘had in mind a very generalizing concept of the archive’10 when he conceived of archives in a ‘nonnarrative-historical’11 sense, as entireties of the systemic ‘density of discursive practices’, of ‘systems that establish statements as events . . . and things’. In his Archeology of Knowledge (1969) Foucault noted that ‘all these systems of statements (whether events or things)’ were what he ‘propose[d] to call archive’;12 furthermore, he explained that no archive is ever whole, complete, and that an ‘archive cannot be described in its totality’.13 This lack of completeness certainly applies to Coetzee’s papers, not least because some of his archival materials, such as the notes and drafts of his two latest novels, The Childhood of Jesus (2013) and The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), as well as his ‘most private letters . . . are not currently available to researchers’.14 The idea of completeness of his papers is also complicated by the fact that his oeuvre is not, as it were, complete; while scholars are working with his papers, Coetzee continues to publish. Nevertheless, the illusion of a comprehensive collection—the sense that the Coetzee Papers constitute a whole—is emphasized by the information that Coetzee was involved in the curating process, having provided his personal archive as a Vorlass. The German neologism refers to a consciously donated or sold archive by a living writer—as opposed to a posthumous archive, a Nachlass, papers which might connote having been discovered by an heir or a scholar, or even having been stolen by a scholarly scoundrel such as the narrator who is after the Aspern Papers, rather than having been supplied by the author. Vorlass is a relatively new term,15 formed only in the 1990s and derived from the word Nachlass, which refers to ‘[w]ritings remaining unpublished at an author’s death’ (OED).16 Posthumous papers may 10 Stefan Heidenreich, ‘Unknown knowns and the law of what can be said’‚ in The Archive as a Productive Space of Conflict, ed. Markus Miessen et al. (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016), pp. 385–92; 387. 11 Ernst, Stirrings in the Archives, p. 31. 12 Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), p. 128. 13 Ibid., p. 130. 14 Attwell, J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing, p. 19. 15 See Ulrich Raulff, ‘Nachlass und Nachleben. Literatur aus dem Archiv’, in Literaturarchiv— Literarisches Archiv. Zur Poetik literarischer Archive/Archives littéraires et poétiques d’archives. Écrivains et institutions en dialogue, ed. Stéphanie Cudré-Mauroux and Irmgard M. Wirtz (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013), pp. 17–34; 17–18. 16 While the Germanism Nachlass is used in the English language (the OED dates it to 1842), Vorlass is, as of 2016, not part of the English lexicon.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

218

Jan Wilm

come with the connotation of having been abandoned and therefore of being disorderly, involving a lack of control by the writer; they may, then, seem like a ‘more complete’ archive in one way, as the death of the author might preclude any destruction of parts of the papers. Contrary to that, ‘prehumous papers’ (as it were) strike one as involving more care, since the process of donation is a voluntary one, and therefore might give the impression that the author’s consent is evidence of candour. However, voluntariness might, in fact, be precisely the opposite— anything from a decoy to deceit. In the end, neither Nachlass nor Vorlass gives us any deeper insight into the epistemic status of an archive. Yet, even if one accepts the premise that an archive can’t ever be complete, the idea or illusion of an archive seeming so carries its own authority, and indeed its own influence on scholarly endeavour. Even if no amount of knowledge accumulated in Coetzee’s papers can verify anything about his works in a way that is epistemologically superior to his published oeuvre—which is what I’ll argue here—there exists an important dimension to the Coetzee Papers that makes them seem more exceptional among the many archives now available for living writers. This dimension is to do less with Coetzee’s work than with himself. Throughout his career, Coetzee has exhibited a purposeful reticence to grant access to the inner workings of his compositional process—he has given relatively few interviews and has consistently refused to make any interpretive comment on his work whatsoever. Early on, before Dusklands was published, he corresponded with his publisher, who was befuddled by the dual death of the slave Klawer in the work and who had asked Coetzee to explicate. The author responded by saying: ‘I don’t believe in the principle of authorial explication’, and instead cited an interpretation of the text by Jonathan Crewe.17 So, Coetzee’s decision to make his personal archive available to scholars during his lifetime raises epistemological questions about the status of his archive in relation to his published oeuvre. Do his drafts and notes demand analyses and interpretations similar to our critical studies of the novels and autrebiographies, in their own right? Or should they be viewed as antecedent for their potential revelatory function about the writer’s toolshed, which had been locked up until the opening of the Coetzee Papers in Austin? What is the epistemic and hermeneutic promise of this (perhaps) necessarily private, candid nature of an archive of an author whose public persona as well as his fictions are marked (and perhaps shaped) by elusiveness, vagueness, and even aloofness? To approach these questions, let me contextualize how the papers came to Austin. While it’s fruitless to speculate about Coetzee’s personal reasons for giving his archive to the HRC, his links to Austin are readily established. When he was a student at the University of Cape Town, his professor Guy Howarth, an important early mentor-figure, ‘advised him to write to Professor Joseph Jones at the University

17 J. M. Coetzee, letter to Peter Randall, 22 February 1974; quoted in Wilm, The Slow Philosophy, p. 25.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

The J. M. Coetzee Archive

219

of Texas at Austin (UT) about graduate study’.18 He did, successfully so, and ‘accepted an assistantship from UT and enrolled as a graduate student there’.19 Howarth had himself been to Austin in 1958 and has subsequently given his own papers to the HRC, where they’re still available for research, along with material by ‘Jones, who was instrumental in getting Howarth’s archive there’.20 Coetzee, of course, studied the HRC’s holdings of papers by Samuel Beckett—as he claims in Doubling the Point (1992), out of a ‘coincidence’21—and, drawing on these, he wrote his dissertation, The English Fiction of Samuel Beckett: An Essay in Stylistic Analysis. For this he was awarded a PhD in 1969.22 Coetzee has kept relations with UT and the HRC throughout his life: he returned ‘to Austin to work on his novel Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) and again in 1995 to present a course in creative writing’.23 While the historical contexts to the papers’ placement at the HRC are readily answered, it’s useful to reflect on a set of questions surrounding Coetzee and his archive, which are relevant to scholars of literature and philosophy alike. In doing so, I will argue for a scholarly use of the available papers that is neither positivistic nor fetishistic. These questions are: how may the archival material be used productively and in the spirit of an ethical reading? In what way do the image and the institution of the archive figure in Coetzee’s oeuvre, and how might this affect our use of his archive, our readings of his works? In light of the outcome of such reflections, I will argue for a use of the archive which will neither inhibit genetic scholarship nor narrow the epistemological and hermeneutic perspectives onto Coetzee’s oeuvre through ‘evidence’ that his archival material might yield.

U SE S O F T H E AR C H I V E Before delving into the heart of the archive, let me reflect on a temptation when working with a writer’s papers: that of running roughshod over readings which rely on the texts and nothing but the texts in their published forms. Those prone to this temptation are scholars of literature more than so-called ordinary readers, and the temptation consists in viewing the material in the personal archive, because it has been private for so long, as the more authoritative depth to the mere surface which is the published oeuvre. The danger lies in the way such an approach reinstalls a very limiting notion of authorial intention through different means. If an author’s previously private and newly public papers are accorded more interpretative weight simply for having been hidden until now, scholarship is in danger of digging the 18 Nicholas Jose, ‘J. M. Coetzee, R. G. Howarth, South to South’, New Scholar: An International Journal of the Humanities, Creative Arts and Social Sciences 3, no. 2 (2014): pp. 85–98; 87. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Coetzee in Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge, MA/ London: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 25. 22 For a historical account of the Beckett Papers’ way to Austin, see Mark Nixon, ‘Beckett’s Manuscripts in the Marketplace’, Modernism/modernity 18, no. 4 (2011): pp. 823–31, esp. 824–5. 23 Jose, ‘J. M. Coetzee, R. G. Howarth, South to South’, p. 87.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

220

Jan Wilm

author out of his symbolical grave and reviving him or her to zombie-like status, half-dead, half-alive, haunting criticism anew—or worse, being made, through some positivistic alchemy, to twitch in any way the scholar wishes, when the archive is used merely to verify the scholar’s interpretation by hard evidence that comes directly from the author, but from outside (or beneath or above) the oeuvre. Nicola Evans warns of this when she writes that ‘genetic criticism can also be construed as resurrecting the authority of the author through its focus on the author’s intentions and strategies as these are revealed in the working notes’.24 Such scholarship—what I, following Derek Attridge, have previously called ‘instrumental reading’25—may revert to traditions of criticism, such as biographical, Marxist, Freudian, Lacanian, and Ricoeurian approaches, that found meaning in the secret, the hidden, the suppressed. Such criticism holds high the productive phenomena of the search, the discovery, the illumination, that which has to be dug or drilled out of the depths, the darknesses. The most valid epistemology, as this belief holds, never stays on the surface, never in the light, it never focuses on what is there.26 The ethical turn in literary studies (and in the humanities more generally) has implicitly challenged this assumption. It has done so, Rita Felski writes in Uses of Literature (2008), through an exhortation to look at, rather than through, the literary work, to attend to the act of saying rather than only the substance of what is said. The act of reading enacts an ethics and a politics in its own right, rather than being a displacement of something more essential that is taking place elsewhere.27

In contrast, ethical approaches allow responsive and responsible readings of a literary text without attempting to use the work of literature for the corroboration of a theory or a philosophy, and without attempting to use the text against itself in an endeavour to uncover what was perceived as its silences about a philosophy or an ideology.28 Like most literary criticism, Coetzee scholarship has frequently made use of such ‘unethical’ readings, not because the works explicitly profess any kind of theory or ideology, but, in fact, precisely because they don’t. The works’ silences about unequivocal ideological, philosophical, or theoretical positions are often seen as an opening into which specific readings can be uttered. Such readings have been important to discourses concerning Coetzee’s socio-historical, political, and aesthetic contexts, and no such reading should be dismissed outright, especially since the defining topical and aesthetic features of Coetzee’s works are perhaps their ambiguity, and so their openness to plural approaches. However, the kind of approach I am calling ‘unethical’ smacks of negativity, both in form and realization, 24 Nicola Evans, ‘Inside the Writer’s Room, the Artist’s Studio and Flaubert’s Parrot’, in Literary Careers in the Modern Era, ed. Guy Davidson and Nicola Evans (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 167–83; 171. 25 See Wilm, The Slow Philosophy, esp. pp. 16–17, 30–1. 26 Phenomenologically, epistemologically, what is there is notoriously difficult to answer. 27 Rita Felski, Uses of Literature (Malden, MA/Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), p. 20. 28 See Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004); and Derek Attridge, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), esp. pp. 32n. 64, 39–40, 60 n. 62.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

The J. M. Coetzee Archive

221

since it uses the texts in acts of metaphorical violation, wrenching their topical engagements out of the aesthetics they’re couched in, exposing their purported ideologies, or foisting alien ideologies onto them. From the perspective of ethical criticism such use of literature might be described as ab-use, since an artwork’s aesthetics are thereby treated as merely incidental to the more relevant ideological arguments therein. Felski writes: Whatever definition of ideology is being deployed (and I am aware that the term has undergone a labyrinthine history of twists and turns), its use implies that a text is being diagnosed rather than heard, relegated to the status of a symptom of social structures or political causes.29

Felski’s arguments echo—without quoting—Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’s widely discussed ideas of surface reading positioned against symptomatic reading. I’ve argued elsewhere that Best and Marcus’s . . . proposition emphasizes a phenomenological attention to what is there by offering a rejoinder to traditional views that ‘the surface is associated with the superficial and deceptive, with what can be perceived without close examination and, implicitly, would turn out to be false upon closer scrutiny’.30

Like Felski, Best and Marcus argue that ‘[a] surface is what insists on being looked at rather than what we must train ourselves to see through’.31 Bringing these comments on surface and depth to bear on the status of the archive of Coetzee’s papers, one might draw a related picture, in which Coetzee’s published works would correspond to the surface that needs to be looked through so as to get a glimpse at the archival depths, the hidden truths. This is a paradoxical picture, since it turns literary works upside down. By way of chronology, a literary work’s truth is on the surface, in the literary work that has blossomed; the archival material, then, is the ground from which it bloomed. But my metaphor is deceiving, as it hierarchizes the flower (the work) over the soil (the archival papers). This view has recently been echoed by Hans Magnus Enzensberger when he spoke about his own Vorlass, which he donated to the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach; Enzensberger refers to his archival material at Marbach as his ‘compost heap’.32 On this view the archival material is seen simultaneously as decomposing rubbish and as productive humus, a view which is apposite in Enzensberger’s case, as it was when he was preparing his Vorlass for Marbach that he encountered a folder of forgotten papers, out of which he subsequently grew a memoir, Tumult (2014). As will be seen in Coetzee’s case, the hierarchization of mere archival ante-text33 and final published work is equally problematic, regardless of which is argued to surpass 29

Felski, Uses of Literature, p. 6. Wilm, The Slow Philosophy, p. 53; quoting Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’, Representations 108, no. 1 (2009), pp. 1–21, 4. 31 Best and Marcus, ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’, p. 9; original emphasis. 32 See Hans Magnus Enzensberger, ‘Wiedersehen mit den Fünfzigern: Ein Gespräch mit Jan Bürger’, Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte IX, no. 4 (2015): pp. 95–110; 95. 33 The avant-text(e) is also called the ante-text and refers to an author’s ‘preparations for [a] text that are known collectively as the “avant text” ’ (Evans, ‘Inside the Writer’s Room’, p. 171). 30

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

222

Jan Wilm

the other. Rather than a hierarchization, I suggest to use Enzensberger’s metaphor and to view Coetzee’s archive as a compost heap as well, and to see that the material is always both: rubbish and humus. As will be seen, this is useful because it circumvents a simplistic hierarchization and because it highlights that the archival material is not the published work, but that it is not immediately less important, also because it has itself been published (as part of the institutional archive it is stored at and where it is accessible), but also not immediately more important than the individual works. Such a paradoxical view is useful mostly because it complicates the privileging of the archive as the secret splendours that have been withheld from the literary work, even if such a view often seems plausible because of the qualities of the literary work. I also argue for the use of the archive as compost heap concerning Coetzee as his writing process is both a form of composing and of composting. In composition, all of his works go through large numbers of drafts; he is an assiduous and abundant note-taker; he uses writing as a form of finding what it is he must write about,34 which allows him to test out characters, scenes, events, and styles, which may be abandoned to be recycled or regrown later. Frequently, his notebooks and drafts show cases where he is clarifying (to himself, or perhaps to future scholars?) how and where parts of his composition have been ‘absorbed’. Reading his papers in such a way emphasizes a basic understanding about a literary artefact: that it is made and doesn’t arrive fully born. Literary composition is marked by traces of diversions and revisions, and so the archive of a writing life is frequently far more voluble than the more polished nature of the published texts. Any sizeable archive comes with the lure of the novelty, the temptation of the new. One might adapt Theodor W. Adorno’s notion about ‘the new’ in art in his Aesthetic Theory (1970), where he argues in favour of the new in an inclusive way by saying that ‘whatever fails to honor [the new] in the context of the artwork becomes a deficiency’.35 Whatever honouring of the new occurs in a sense that is exclusive or disconnected from the work of art is considered by Adorno as a fetishization of something extrinsic to the work of art, as ‘forget[ting] the ends and fetishiz[ing] the means as an end in itself ’.36 Adorno has nothing to say about literary archives in his Aesthetic Theory, but his thoughts about fetishization are easily used for a consideration of them. A literary archive such as Coetzee’s is a phenomenon intricately bound to a specific point in time, as it gains its importance only when it is new, being opened after the publication of the books. It would be nonsensical to release an archive before the 34 In Doubling the Point Coetzee puts this tersely: ‘[Y]ou write because you do not know what you want to say. Writing reveals to you what you wanted to say in the first place. In fact, it sometimes constructs what you want or wanted to say’ (p. 18). 35 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 1997), p. 22. 36 Ibid., p. 33. In this conception, the ends would correspond to the published works, while the means would correspond to the archival papers, the avant-textes. Rather than wishing to apply Adorno’s aesthetic theory in any way to Coetzee’s works here, I merely use his ideas to get a grip on the concept of ‘fetishization’, as I explain in the following. Even this conception of means and ends isn’t wholly satisfying, as it enforces the rhetoric of ‘before and after’ (also inherent in the avant-texte), which may be just as problematic as ‘surface and depth’.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

The J. M. Coetzee Archive

223

publication of the book that it gave rise to—who would research it?—since the opening of an archive is the publication of a new book—or, rather, of a new library. A literary archive conserves the old and constitutes that which came before the published artwork in the processes of creation. Yet, for the reception of the artworks, for readers and scholars, a literary archive stands in a relation to the published works as that which is new. Therefore, a problem connected to archival scholarship is that the archival material might easily be used in a fetishistic way if the raison d’être of scholarship is reduced to verification in a positivistic way or discovery in the way of a secret history. A reductive attempt at an inference from these ideas might be that the more literary criticism turns to archival material, the less it turns to literature. However, ever since the turn from orality to literacy, the manuscript, the archival material, is, of course, inherently part of what is defined as literature,37 while the ‘deconstruction of traditional hierarchies’38 and the impact of structuralism and post-structuralism has had a profound influence on the traditional hierarchies between manuscript and literary work. Contextualizing genetic criticism through its developments in France since the 1970s, Bodo Plachta notes: The discovery of the ‘avant-texte’ (‘ante-text’), the demand for a ‘poétique des brouillons’ (‘poetics of rough drafts’) and the concentration on the ‘work’s textuality in time and space’ . . . have intensified the approach formulated by ‘critique génétique,’ whose originality mainly consists in the fact that it combines aspects of textual theory with an empirical basis, namely the analysis of handwritten traces.39

Peter Barry notes that ‘[much] can be learned . . . by studying the process of textual genesis, and engaging in the practice of the fascinating and growing art of genetic criticism’.40 Perhaps it’s telling that Plachta honours the empirical basis as if it were something that textual criticism was lacking, and perhaps it’s telling that Barry describes genetic criticism not as a science, a form of critique, or merely a school or discipline of scholarship, but as an art. And, as an art, one could argue that, despite the theoretical sensibilities against its congealing to a mere positivism, it is itself susceptible to fetishization. Frequently, this fetishization is fed by sheer quantity. I’ve noted the scope of the Coetzee Papers; Nicola Evans argues that archival scholarship’s turn to the ‘drafts, sketches, and early versions’ of a literary text is frequently complicated by the overwhelming volume of the writer’s avant-textes. She notes that ‘the sheer volume of the avant text renders more urgent the question where to draw the line on what counts as an author’s writing and what counts as simple notetaking’. In a related 37 See Michael G. Sargent, ‘Manuscript Textuality’, in The Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship, ed. Neil Fraistat and Julia Flanders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 224–35. 38 Ibid., p. 225. 39 Bodo Plachta, ‘Introduction: How International is Scholarly Editing? A Look at Its History’, in Scholarly Editing and German Literature: Revision, Revaluation, Edition, edited by Lydia Jones et al. (Amsterdam: Brill/Rodopi, 2015), pp. 1–20, 17. 40 Peter Barry, Reading Poetry (Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 2013), p. 196.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Jan Wilm

224

case for caution, Evans writes that a further complication might be ‘that the avant text makes the tangible material of the text important in the way that the printed novel is not’, thereby implicitly hinting at a possible fethishization of the archival material that veers away from ‘literary criticism’ into ‘literary tourism’. What Evans describes, then, is a paradoxically Janus-faced dynamics at play when foregrounding the importance of the archival material as superior or even equivalent to the published works. On the one hand, the authority of the author is reborn in the struggle to excavate ‘the author’s intentions and strategies as these are revealed in the working notes’.41 On the other, the fetishization of the archival material disconnects the objects in the archive from both the author and, far more problematically, from the artworks that have grown from these avant-textes, which can create a literary criticism that has little right to associate itself with either literature or criticism. The extreme result of such a fetishization is what Adorno describes as ‘[t]he false relation to art’, which he compares to ‘anxiety over possession. The fetishistic idea of the artwork as property that can be possessed and destroyed by reflection has its exact correlative in the idea of exploitable property within the psychological economy of the self.’42 As Adorno isn’t referring to archives here, my citing him—my use of Adorno— to describe a possible relationship to the literary text via its archival material explicates the added twist of how a fetishistic relationship to a writer’s archive removes the reader or the critic from the work of art in a double way. Whereas Adorno is describing the fetishistic relationship to the work of art as false, the relationship is nevertheless a relationship to the artwork, whereas in the relationship to the archive, it could be argued that what one is fetishistic about isn’t even the artwork but that which came before the artwork—the means, not the end. To circumvent a genetic positivism and a genetic fetishization, one has to try to establish an ethical critique génétique, a use of the archive that tries not to move away from the literary work but rather towards it. This mode is what I would call an ‘ethical archive use’ that doesn’t aim at undermining the author’s works by ennobling the archival material, and that doesn’t neglect the archival work by regarding it as beneath the text, negating it as merely incidental. Throughout, my use of the word use has been inflected by Felski, who claims that ‘aesthetic value is inseparable from use’.43 Concentrating on literary criticism as a whole, Felski argues for a critique that is ‘respectful rather than reductive, dialogic rather than high-handed’.44 Her approach is useful to an ‘ethical archive use’ as well. The archive shouldn’t be fetishized, the archive should be used for enrichments of ethical readings of the literary texts—and the archives themselves should be read ethically, similar to the published works. The archive should be used rather than revered, respected rather than worshipped; the archive is useless if it is not in dialogue with the published text, and the critic is not using the potential of the archive if he or she doesn’t reflect that he or she is the mediator of this dialogue.

41 43

42 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 13. Evans, ‘Inside the Writer’s Room’, p. 171. 44 Ibid., p. 7. Felski, Uses of Literature, p. 8.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

The J. M. Coetzee Archive

225

When attempting to bring the published work into dialogue with the archival material, it’s necessary to view the archive as a work that is in some way parallel to the published work, without its being quite the same work. It is an other work, an ‘autre-oeuvre’, an oeuvre that will be necessary to view neither as beneath nor as before.45 I use the term ‘autre-oeuvre’ so as to eschew insufficient temporal and spatial semantics when referring to the Coetzee Papers, as both the temporal and the spatial relationship between published work and archival material are suspect when trying to speak in an ethical, dialogic way of the relationship between archive and artwork. The temporal is problematic since the chronological precedence of the archive creates a hierarchy that could allow the theoretical privileging of the archive. The spatial is problematic since the archive could be viewed as the more valid depth to the published surface. Both of these clash with an understanding of ethical, dialogical use, as one is then in danger of viewing the surface suspiciously and thereby implicitly warranting an engagement that leads to a ‘climactic gesture [of] a triumphant tearing-off ’46 in order to get at the true meaning. To avoid an unethical or a fetishistic archive use, one may have to turn, perhaps paradoxically, not to the archive, but to the published works—or, rather, to the archive in the published works.

T H E AR C H I V E I N J . M . C O E T ZEE In his first published fiction, Dusklands, ‘the scale of the mountain Coetzee was climbing’ was enormous, not only because it was his first work, but because it included a ‘linking of self and history on a grand, world-historical scale’.47 In this first tread on the boards of world literature, Coetzee already makes use of an ‘archival dynamics’ that will mark a large part of his writing. Here, this archival dynamics is manifold, as the first narrative of the book, ‘The Vietnam Project’, is modulated partly as an essay, the ‘Introduction’ to which makes up the second section of this first narrative, so that the text mimics an archiving of another text. The second narrative of the book, ‘The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee’, intensifies this archival dynamics by introducing a layering of archival material: the narrative ‘is a collection of . . . documents’,48 both real and imagined. In the narrative, J. M. Coetzee feigns the ‘mere’ translator role of an actually existing deposition, a Relaas by one real Jacobus Coetzee, a distant relative of whom is J. M. Coetzee (The real Jacobus was spelt ‘Jacobus Coetsé’). Using the technique of Nabokovian editor-fiction, J. M. Coetzee invents a father-figure, S. J. Coetzee, who is supposed 45 The term is formed analogously to Coetzee’s term ‘autrebiography’ (Doubling the Point, p. 394) as referring to something that is simultaneously autobiography and fiction. The archival material may be conceived of as an oeuvre that is simultaneously the published work and something else, something other. 46 Coetzee in Doubling the Point, p. 106. 47 Attwell, J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing, p. 52. 48 David Attwell, J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993), p. 44.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

226

Jan Wilm

to have ‘[e]dited, with an Afterword’49 and to have published Het relaas van Jacobus Coetzee, Janszoon. Not only does Coetzee place himself in world history, he also places his first published work in a swirl of various figurations of archives; he inscribes himself into the archive of history and incorporates the archive as a phenomenon into his fiction. Dusklands is presented as an archive itself, an archive, among other things, of Jacobus Coetsé’s deposition. J. M. Coetzee breaks not only the conventions of translation with Dusklands, when he ‘actively rewrit[es] the historical documents themselves’,50 he also implicitly comments on the conventions of archiving, showing them as being subject to the same arbitrariness as everything else when he ‘tampers substantially with the deposition’.51 Coetzee archives himself in and through his first book in various ways: first, by writing literature, the way every writer inscribes part of his lived experience into the pages of a book, a form of transmuted self-archiving; second, by taking an obscure deposition by a historical figure whose descendant he is and including it in his literary text, thereby making a literary work function as an archive of this document as well as of his historical ancestry; and third, by altering this archival text by Jacobus Coetzee, thus making the voice of J. M. Coetzee an invisibly archived trace in the transformed text. And the archive ‘stands behind’ Dusklands in another way, because the book is itself borne from an academic ‘archive-socialization’, Coetzee having researched in archives during his formative years leading up to his becoming a novelist; it was, in fact, in the university archive in Austin that ‘he came across the “Relaas” of Jacobus Coetsé’.52 Dusklands is a textual archive borne from an encounter with an archive, it points forever to a text in an archive (the Relaas), which is itself a textual archive, and so forth. But while Dusklands points to past archives in this way, the book itself seems also to point to future archives: as Coetzee’s first published book it is a textual archive that prepares his subsequent ones, and it can be seen as setting a precedent with regard to the complexities of textuality at play in Coetzee’s novels and memoirs. In his third autrebiography, Summertime (2009), Coetzee even archives Dusklands in the Julia sections of the book, while archiving much else, beginning with himself in another way, as this narrative is situated after his death. Summertime draws attention to its archival quality also by highlighting a textual materiality, for example through the transcribed nature of the interviews with people close (and not so close) to John Coetzee, or through the repeated intrusion of the remark ‘[Silence.]’,53 which breaks any realist illusion of narrative by pointing to a scriptor working on the papers one is reading. The technique is similar to the question marks and the intrusions of words such as ‘(Hiatus in MS)’54 in one of Coetzee’s influences, Samuel Beckett, who uses them in Watt (1953). Like Watt, Summertime is ‘a text that overtly plays with its own archive and induces its critics to do the 49 50 52 53 54

J. M. Coetzee, Dusklands (London: Secker & Warburg, 1982), p. 51. 51 Ibid., p. 45. Ibid. Kannemeyer, A Life in Writing, p. 21; Attwell, J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing, p. 56. For example, J. M. Coetzee, Scenes from Provincial Life (London: Harvill Secker, 2011), p. 413. Samuel Beckett, Watt, ed. C. K. Ackerley (London: Faber & Faber, 2009), p. 207.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

The J. M. Coetzee Archive

227

same’, as Claire Lozier has argued about Beckett’s novel.55 By explicitly referring to a potential Coetzee archive, or to the lack thereof,56 Summertime ironizes an archive use while simultaneously inscribing it into his work. The book begins with passages from Coetzee’s notebooks, although it is unclear whether the entries are from real notebooks or whether they’re imagined. And it doesn’t really matter. The book makes the archive part of the fiction a priori, and so Coetzee implicitly questions the empirical and positivist validity of archival material, tacitly cautioning readers to treat the archive with the appropriate analytical care. At the same time, of course, the mention of a Coetzee archive in the book also fires the reader’s interests in such archival material, even if it’s lacking in the diegesis—and perhaps precisely because of this. By engaging with archives in these ways in Dusklands and Summertime, Coetzee’s works make the archive an object of reflection, which the scholar working with his papers might become aware of during his or her reading in the archive. Working with the Coetzee Papers, one is as if already inscribed in the text, the way literary professors might be said to be inscribed in the text of Disgrace (1999) as its protagonist David Lurie is a university professor himself. There is no longer an ‘innocent’ way of approaching such texts, then, since they make specific kinds of readers part of the story-world. In the second autrebiography, Youth (2002), the main character, John, contemplates the writing of a book in the context of his ‘por[ing] over Burchell’ in the reading room of the British Museum. It’s pertinent that John’s thoughts are narrated in an archive space, in the ‘library that defines all libraries’, where he reads the two ‘heavy volumes’57 of William Burchell’s Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa (1822 and 1824). John is reading an archive in an archive, and this reading of the archive, he muses, must be approached through a peculiarly paradoxical epistemology so as to enable him to ‘write a book as convincing as Burchell’s and lodge it in this library that defies all libraries’. He thinks: He will have to school himself to write from within the 1820s. Before he can bring that off he will need to know less than he knows now; he will need to forget things. Yet before he can forget he will have to know what to forget; before he knows less he will have to know more. Where will he find what he needs to know? He has no training as an historian, and anyway what he is after will not be in history books, since it belongs to the mundane, a mundane as common as the air one breathes. Where will he find the common knowledge of a bygone world, a knowledge too humble to know it is knowledge?58

From this description one can glean an ethical relationship with the archive, through the urge to write from within, which presupposes a deep immersion in the text at hand. Yet, the epistemological impetus behind John’s thoughts isn’t one Claire Lozier, ‘Watt’s Archive Fever’, Journal of Beckett Studies 22, no. 1 (2013), pp. 35–53; 37. The interviewer notes his inability to ‘lay [his] hands on [John Coetzee’s] course descriptions from the 1970s—the University of Cape Town doesn’t seem to archive material like that’ (Scenes from Provincial Life, p. 444; my emphasis). 57 Scenes from Provincial Life, p. 259. 58 Ibid., p. 260. 55 56

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

228

Jan Wilm

of reverence or of a positivism whose climactic gesture is a ‘triumphant tearingoff ’;59 it’s neither entirely fetishistic nor destructive, even if it might be said to carry flavours of both. The impulse is related to the use of a text as I’ve laid out above, ‘respectful rather than reductive, dialogic rather than high-handed’,60 a creatively productive impulse. Including the archive in the world of fiction in such ways is one of the anticipatory strategies that Coetzee includes in his texts, creating complexity for a variety of readers, while also luring philologists and so-called serious, and professional, readers to the archive. One could read this inclusion of the archive, this archiving of the archive in fiction, in various ways, all of which increase the interest in Coetzee’s archival material without elevating it in a fetishistic sense over the published works. One might detect an archival politics at work to promote the research of Coetzee’s oeuvre, since the effect that the archive has on scholarship about his work is doubtless influenced by the reticence throughout his life to comment on his work. But one must be careful not to believe that the publication of his papers at the HRC runs counter to his refusal to interpret himself. The Coetzee Papers don’t solve any problems and they don’t answer questions in a final way. This makes them very similar to his published works. The epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic questions about his works are now merely more complex, since the amount of text about which these questions must be asked has greatly increased. Scholars are enticed to read more, to read on, and to return to the literature with fresh perspectives from the archive. What one is left with, ultimately, is acts of reading, of making meaning from the texts in conjunction with the archival material. Many of Coetzee’s works implicitly feature acts and gestures of reading, of meaning-making, of interpretation, thus allowing the reader to reflect on his or her own methods and modes of reading and interpretation; and the representation of the archive in the works allows for similar spaces of reflection. The frequent engagement in Coetzee’s works with the materiality of texts, with archives of all sorts, letters, diaries, manuscripts, books, or, as in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), with ‘wooden slips on which are painted characters in a script [the Magistrate has] not seen the like of ’,61 induce us to think through our ways of making sense of how we make sense from textual material. In the beginning of Waiting for the Barbarians, the Magistrate attests to being a hobby archaeologist,62 and he treats the acquisition of knowledge as an excavation, a penetration of the surface to plumb what lies beneath.63 As he digs out the wooden slips and the remnants of a long-gone civilization he ruminates: ‘Perhaps in my digging I have only scratched the surface. Perhaps ten feet below the floor lie the

59

60 Ibid., p. 7. Coetzee in Doubling the Point, p. 106. J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (London: Vintage, 2004), p. 15. 62 Ibid. 63 My rhetoric echoes Best and Marcus’s as they argue against deep reading when speaking of ‘modes of reading that attend to the surfaces of texts rather than plumb[ing] their depths’ (Best and Marsus, ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’, pp. 1–2). 61

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

The J. M. Coetzee Archive

229

ruins of another fort, razed by the barbarians, peopled with the bones of folk who thought they would find safety behind high walls.’64 The Magistrate goes on to describe how he has ‘succeeded in uncovering several of the largest structures to floor level’ and how ‘[t]he most recently excavated stands out like a shipwreck in the desert’.65 In these passages the novel nudges the Magistrate (and the reader) to view the site of excavation as a metaphorical archive, curiously by literally and very subtly drawing out the etymological connotations of the archive— here it links to an ark, a chest bearing treasure, and an arche, a ship bearing life across time. And, as Jacques Derrida describes in Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995), through the etymological roots of the archive as the arkheion, the excavation site, one might view the shipwreck in the desert not only as a beginning and a chest of knowledge, but also as a site of political power, as the arkheion is ‘a house, a domicile, an address’, but also ‘the residence of the superior magistrate’.66 The later transformation of the Magistrate from a confidant in the business of colonial rule to a more ethical being might have its beginnings not only with the blind girl, but might already be taking shape as he discovers this archive in the desert. Faced with an archive, the Magistrate is faced with the impetus to read the archive, and, as will be seen in due course, the reading of an archive is always riven with dynamics of power: ‘There is no political power without control of the archive.’67 As the Magistrate demonstrates, it’s all too easy to use (and ab-use) any archive to suit one’s own interpretation, even one’s own ideology. It’s important that the Magistrate initially ‘sentence[s] petty offenders to a few days of digging in the dunes’.68 Only later does an awareness of the power associated with archives seem to dawn on him, when he ultimately makes up a meaning of the wooden slips. And he deliberately uses them for an act to bring about his downfall, to set an example, to do penance, or to bring about change. The Magistrate only then turns the archive into the magisterial residence, by making himself the owner of the archive. Yet, conversely, he allows the archive to own him, as his action may be read as an act of turning the archive against himself, so that he might turn himself into an archive, turning the office of this Magistrate into a history of the ethical example he is (perhaps failingly) trying to set. At the end of the book, he concludes that, as an archivist and as archive, he has indeed failed.69 He has failed because he has failed to control the archive; he assumes that he will be forgotten. By implication, he has also failed because he has not let go of his colonialist ideologies (perhaps he could not, cannot), as they might be part of his ab-use of the archive (of misreading the wooden slips), the way they were part of his sentencing petty offenders to do his digging. An archive as a space of power, and so as a space of potential failure, a space of remembering as well as of forgetting, is also part of Coetzee’s 1994 novel The

64

65 Ibid., p. 15. Waiting for the Barbarians, p. 16. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 2 (my emphasis). 67 Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 4. 68 Waiting for the Barbarians, p. 15. 69 Ibid., p. 169. 66

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

230

Jan Wilm

Master of Petersburg. When Dostoevsky returns to the Russian city after the death of his stepson, Pavel, he immediately begins to frame the figure of the child through expressions of textuality, such as when he muses on the daughter of his dead son’s landlord: ‘Strange how in a child a feature can take its perfect form while in the parent it seems a copy!’70 Dostoevsky implicitly questions the binarism of what comes first, the original or the copy. The idea of original and copy carries a dimension of before and after that correlates to an idea of memorizing and conserving versus forgetting and destroying, which Derrida describes as inherently part of any archive. To Derrida, an archive is always simultaneously an assembly of the past and ‘an irreducible experience of the future’.71 In fact, Derrida’s idea of ‘archive fever’ is marked by precisely this conflict between the conservation drive and the death drive.72 Without wanting merely to apply Derrida’s theories to Coetzee’s novel, one could argue that Coetzee’s novel is doing, in the register of fiction, the kind of reflection that Derrida is doing in the register of philosophy, and when working with the Coetzee Papers, it might be useful to reflect on the way in which The Master of Petersburg allows us to view the archive. The novel isn’t an exception in Coetzee’s body of work in how it engages with images and figurations of the archive. However, here the archive is foregrounded in a more explicit way than in other works. The plot surrounding a father’s grief over his dead son and the reconstruction of the young man’s involvement with the anarchic circles of Nechaev put Dostoevsky in the archivist’s or interpreter’s position; the uncertain circumstances of Pavel’s death force him to conjecture, to think in a way that is similar to the drives of Derrida’s archive, as Dostoevsky is thinking through loss and forgetting (the death of his son, the slipping of memory) while having also to think through conservation and production (the storing of memory, and the creative act of writing into being his dead son). In the beginning of the novel, Dostoevsky addresses the question of the archive quite literally, when contemplating the father’s duty to remember in a world that is gripped by forgetting: ‘Only he wants to gather and conserve those memories. Everyone else adheres to the order of death, then mourning, then forgetting. If we do not forget, they say, the world will soon be nothing but a huge library.’73 As in Waiting for the Barbarians, the archive is also addressed as a space of power, specifically when Pavel’s posthumous papers are with the police and Dostoevsky wishes desperately to access them, so as to try reading his son back to life through them. But when, towards the end of the novel, he finally has the chance to read Pavel’s papers, he is struck by a reluctance to read them on moral grounds. Suddenly he’s in a position of power over a son who is no longer able to defend himself. Pavel is at the mercy of the reader, of the interpreter: ‘There is something ugly in this intrusion on Pavel, and indeed something obscene in the idea of the Nachlass of a child.’74

70 71 74

J. M. Coetzee, The Master of Petersburg (London: Vintage, 2004), p. 13. 72 Ibid., p. 19. 73 The Master of Petersburg, p. 14. Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 68. Ibid., p. 216.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

The J. M. Coetzee Archive

231

Yet, something similar is always the case when reading a Nachlass, and even when reading a Vorlass. Questions announce themselves: what is there? What can be read? How can it be read? How should it be used? Epistemology in this sense is always also ethical. Through one of the key elements in Coetzee’s work, the representation of archives within archives, the reflection of the image and the phenomenon of the archive, these questions become even more urgent. Because the archive as a trope, as a figure, as a phenomenon, both narrated and reflected, is part of Coetzee’s fictional world, readers and scholars working with the Coetzee Papers are asked to reflect on the status of his archive. Viewing the archive as something external to the fictional works and worlds is complicated because the archive is part of his narrative worlds. The inclusion of figures of the archive in the works heightens the dialogic quality of his writing, as multiple forms of text become mixed and layered. Anne Haeming goes so far as to argue that the ‘prominent appearance of diaries, travelwriting, letters and archive material in [Coetzee’s] work’ points to an aspect of his ‘writing [which] questions whether humans can have authority over ontic reality’.75 If we believe that the status of the archive is one whose epistemology is superior to Coetzee’s works, we might fall prey to the various acts of trickery Coetzee’s works have frequently played on us. Most importantly, we might forget the playful sense of playing with an archive. Earlier, I glossed the German term Vorlass. What I have neglected to mention is that, in its current use, the term Vorlass is derived from the term Nachlass, and through the prefix vor- it describes the way in which papers have been made available before posthumousness. Yet, there is a more archaic use of the term, dating to the sixteenth century, then spelt vorlasz. It is a term from falconry and described a little feather tip attached to a swing-lure with which the falconer could coax the falcon back to the glove during training. The Vorlass, but perhaps the literary archive as a whole, is also a metaphorical lure, and like falcons of philology we’re invited to come and train our reading. But we must understand that the archive is a space of power, and that we have our own power to exercise. Do we go to the archive, to the institution where the Vorlass is housed, do we play the game? Do we ourselves enter into our own archivesocialization that produces ‘more archive’?76 And if we do go, if we take the bait, what responsibility do we have when swallowing it, when making use of the archive? Do we come towards it and become ensnared in the power dynamics of the archive? Do we take it in or tear it apart like positivists, and thereby destroy the pleasure of the game? Or do we take it and take flight, allowing others to follow in our own feathery wake?

75 Anne Haeming, ‘Authenticity: Diaries, Chronicles, Records as Index-Simulation’, in J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory, ed. Elleke Boehmer, Katy Iddiols, and Robert Eaglestone (London/New York: Continuum, 2009), pp. 173–84, 175. 76 Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 68.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Bibliography W O RK S BY J . M . C O E T ZE E Coetzee’s fictions and other texts are listed below in either their 1st edition or the 1st UK edition if editions were published simultaneously. Different editions may be used by this volume’s contributors in their respective chapters. ‘The English Fiction of Samuel Beckett: An Essay in Stylistic Analysis’, PhD thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 1969. Dusklands (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1974). In the Heart of the Country (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1977). In the Heart of the Country (London: Martin Secker and Warburg Ltd, 1977). In the Heart of the Country (London: Vintage, 2004). ‘The Agentless Sentence as Rhetorical Device’, Language and Style 13, no. 1 (1980): pp. 26–34. Waiting for the Barbarians (London: Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd, 1980). Dusklands (London: Secker & Warburg, 1982). Life & Times of Michael K (Martin Secker & Warburg, 1983). Truth in Autobiography (Cape Town: University of Cape Town, 1984). Foe (London: Secker & Warburg, 1986). ‘The Novel Today’, Upstream 6, no. 1 (summer 1988): pp. 2–5. White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988). Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1992). Age of Iron (London: Secker & Warburg, 1990). The Master of Petersburg (London: Secker & Warburg, 1994). ‘Retrospect: The World Cup of Rugby’, Southern African Review of Books 38 (1995): p. 20. Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996). Boyhood (London: Secker & Warburg, 1997). Disgrace (London: Secker & Warburg, 1999). The Lives of Animals, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). Stranger Shores: Literary Essays, 1986–1999 (London: Secker & Warburg, 2001). Youth (London: Secker & Warburg, 2002). Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (London: Secker & Warburg, 2003). ‘Fictional Beings’, Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 10, no. 2 (June 2003): pp. 133–4. ‘An Exclusive Interview with J. M. Coetzee’, DN.se, 8 Dec. 2003, p. 2, http://www.dn. se/kultur-noje/an-exclusive-interview-with-j-m-coetzee, accessed 11 Oct. 2016. ‘As a Woman Grows Older’, New York Review of Books (15 Jan. 2004): pp. 11–14. Lecture and Speech of Acceptance upon the Award of the Nobel Prize in Literature, delivered in Stockholm in December 2003 (New York: Penguin Books, 2004). ‘Roads to Translation’, Meanjin: Tongues: Translation: Only Connect 64, no. 4, special issue (2005): pp. 141–61. Slow Man (London: Secker & Warburg, 2005). Diary of a Bad Year (London: Harvill Secker, 2007).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

234

Bibliography

Inner Workings: Literary Essays, 2002–2005 (London: Harvill Secker, 2007). Summertime (London: Harvill Secker, 2009). Scenes from Provincial Life (London: Harvill Secker, 2011). The Childhood of Jesus (London: Harvill Secker, 2013). ‘The Old Woman and the Cats’, in Cripplewood/Kreupelhout, ed. Berlinde De Bruyckere and J. M. Coetzee (Brussels: Mercatorfonds, 2013), pp. 7–28. The Schooldays of Jesus (London: Harvill Secker, 2016). Works Co-authored by J. M. Coetzee Coetzee, J. M. and Auster, Paul, Here and Now: Letters, 2008–2011 (London: Viking, 2014). Coetzee, J. M. and Arabella Kurtz, ‘Nevertheless, my sympathies are with the Karamazovs’, Salmagundi, nos. 166–167 (2010): pp. 39–72. Coetzee, J. M. and Arabella Kurtz, The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction, and Psychotherapy (London: Harvill Secker, 2015). O T H E R W OR K S C I T E D Ackerley, C. J. and S. E. Gontarski, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 2004). Adorno, Theodor W., Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994). Adorno, Theodor W., Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 1997). Ameriks, Karl, ed., ‘Introduction: Interpreting German Idealism’, in The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 1–17. Améry, Jean, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980). Anker, Elizabeth, ‘Why We Love Coetzee: or, The Childhood of Jesus and the Funhouse of Critique’, in Critique and Postcritique, ed. Elizabeth Anker and Rita Felski (Durham, DC: Duke University Press, 2017), pp. 183–208. Arendt, Hannah, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture’, Social Research 38, no. 3 (1971): pp. 417–46. Arens, Katherine, Empire in Decline: Fritz Mauthner’s Critique of Wilhelminian Germany (New York: Peter Lang, 2001). Atkins, Beryl et al., Collins Robert French Dictionary (London/Glasgow/Toronto: Collins, 1978). Attridge, Derek, ‘Introduction: Derrida and the Questioning of Literature’, in Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 1–29. Attridge, Derek, ‘Oppressive Silence: J. M. Coetzee’s Foe and the Politics of the Canon’, in Decolonizing Tradition: New Views of Twentieth-Century ‘British’ Literary Canons, ed. Karen R. Lawrence (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), pp. 212–38. Attridge, Derek, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (Chicago/ London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004). Attridge, Derek, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004). Attridge, Derek, The Work of Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Attwell, David, ‘Review of The Novels of J. M. Coetzee: Lacanian Allegories by Teresa Dovey’, Research in African Literatures 20, no. 3 (1989): pp. 515–19. Attwell, David, J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Bibliography

235

Attwell, David, J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face to Face with Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Augustinus, Aurelius, Confessions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). Bacon, Francis, Novum Organum, trans. P. Urbach and J. Gibson (Chicago: Open Court, 1994), Book 1, Aphorism 95 (paragraph 64). Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). Balcombe, Jonathan, Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals [foreword by J. M. Coetzee] (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Barry, Peter, Reading Poetry (Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 2013). Barth, John, ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’, in The Friday Book: Essays and Other Non-Fiction (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), pp. 62–76. Barth, John, ‘The Literature of Replenishment’, in The Friday Book: Essays and Other NonFiction (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), pp. 193–206. Barthes, Roland, S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974). Barthes, Roland, ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives’, trans. Lionel Duisit, New Literary History 6, no. 2 (1975): pp. 237–72. Beckett, Samuel, Watt ed. C. K. Ackerley (London: Faber & Faber, 2009). Beckett, Samuel, Three Novels (New York: Grove Press, 1991). Beckett, Samuel, ‘Ill Seen Ill Said’, in Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho, Stirrings Still, ed. Dirk Van Hulle (London: Faber and Faber, 2009). Beckett, Samuel, Murphy, ed. J. C. C. Mays (London: Faber and Faber, 2009). Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 83–109. Ben-Zvi, Linda, ‘Samuel Beckett, Fritz Mauthner, and the Limits of Language’, PMLA 95, no. 2 (1980): pp. 183–200. Best, Stephen and Sharon Marcus, ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’, Representations 108, no. 1 (2009): pp. 1–21. Bhabha, Homi, ‘Framing Fanon’, Foreword to The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004), pp. vii–xli. Biko, Steve, I Write What I Like, ed. Aelred Stubbs (Harlow: Heinemann African Writers Series, 1987). Blumenberg, Hans, ‘Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Möglichkeit des Romans’, in Ästhetische und metaphorologische Schriften, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001), pp. 47–74. Bok, Sissela, Lying (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1978). Borges, Jorge Luis, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’, in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1998), pp. 88–95. Bredeck, Elizabeth, Metaphors of Knowledge (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992). Brennan, Timothy, ‘Postcolonial Studies between the European Wars: An Intellectual History’, in Marxism, Modernity, and Postcolonial Studies, ed. Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 185–203. Breton, André and Paul Éluard, The Immaculate Conception, trans. Jon Graham (London: Atlas Press, 1990). Burchell, Willam John, Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa, 2 vols. (London: Batchworth Press, 1953).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

236

Bibliography

Carroll, Robert and Stephen Prickett, eds., The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Casanova, Pascale, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Cavalieri, Paola, The Death of the Animal: A Dialogue (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). Cavell, Stanley, Disowning Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Cavell, Stanley, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988). Cavell, Stanley, ‘The Mrs. William Beckman Lectures’, in In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (London/Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 3–104. Cavell, Stanley, This New Yet Unapproachable America (Albuquerque: Living Batch Press, 1989). Cavell, Stanley, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990). Cervantes, Miguel de, El Coloquio de los Perros (Madrid: Artemisia Ediciones, 1900). Cervantes, Miguel de, Don Quixote, trans. Charles Jarvis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Cheah, Pheng, What Is a World?: On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). Clarkson, Carrol, ‘J. M. Coetzee and the Limits of Language’, Journal of Literary Studies 25, no. 4 (2009): pp. 106–24. Clarkson, Carrol, J. M. Coetzee: Countervoices (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, iii: 1807–14, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959). Connor, Steven, ‘I Believe that the World’, http://www.stevenconnor.com/world/world. pdf, accessed 1 Nov. 2016. Cottingham, John, ‘The Ethics of Self-Concern’, Ethics 101, no. 4 (1991): pp. 798–817. Crary, Alice, ‘Does the Study of Literature Belong in Moral Philosophy? Some Reflections in the Light of Ryle’s Thought’, Philosophical Investigations 23, no. 4 (2000): pp. 315–50. Crary, Alice, Beyond Moral Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Crary, Alice, ‘J. M. Coetzee, Moral Thinker’, in J. M. Coetzee and Ethics: Philosophical Perspectives on Literature, ed. Anton Leist and Peter Singer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), pp. 249–68. Crary, Alice, ‘Ethics and Literature’, in The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, ed. Hugh LaFolette (London: Wiley Blackwell, 2013). Crary, Alice, Inside Ethics: On the Demands of Moral Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). Damrosch, David, What is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). Davis, Robert, The Fictional Father: Lacanian Readings of the Text (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981). Defoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe (Raleigh: Alex Catalogue, 1996). Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 1st US edn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). Derrida, Jacques, ‘The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils’, Diacritics 13, no. 3 (1983): pp. 2–20. Derrida, Jacques, ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’, in Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 207–72. Derrida, Jacques, ‘Signature Event Context’, in Limited, Inc. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), pp. 1–19.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Bibliography

237

Derrida, Jacques, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992). Derrida, Jacques, Given Time, I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992). Derrida, Jacques, ‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge: 1992), pp. 33–75. Derrida, Jacques, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). Derrida, Jacques, ‘Is there a Philosophical Language?’, in Points . . . Interviews 1974–1994, ed. Elizabeth Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 216–27. Derrida, Jacques, De la Grammatologie (Paris: Edition de Minuit, 1997). Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). Derrida, Jacques, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998). Derrida, Jacques, ‘History of the Lie’, in Futures: Of Jacques Derrida, ed. Richard Rand (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 71. Derrida, Jacques, ‘Hostipitality’, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 358–420. Derrida, Jacques, The Animal that Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). Derrida, Jacques et al., ‘The Purveyor of Truth’, Yale French Studies, no. 96 (1999): pp. 124–97. Derrida, Jacques and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). Derrida, Jacques, Catherine Porter, and Edward P. Morris, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982). Diamond, Cora, ‘Anything But Argument?’, Philosophical Investigations 5 (1982): pp. 23–41. Diamond, Cora, ‘Anything But Argument?’, in The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 275–301. Diamond, Cora, ‘The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy’, in Stanley Cavell et al., Philosophy and Animal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), pp. 43–90. Dovey, Teresa, The Novels of J. M. Coetzee: Lacanian Allegories (Craighall: Ad. Donker, 1988). Dworkin, Ronald, Religion without God (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). Edmonds, David, Would You Kill the Fat Man? The Trolley Problem and What Your Answer Tells Us about Right and Wrong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). Ellmann, Richard, James Joyce, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). Enniss, Stephen, ‘Director’s Note’, The Harry Ransom Center, http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/ about/director/, accessed 20 Nov. 2016. Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, Tumult (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014). Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, ‘Wiedersehen mit den Fünfzigern: Ein Gespräch mit Jan Bürger’, Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte IX, no. 4 (2015): pp. 95–110. Erasmus, Desiderius, The Praise of Folly and Other Writings, ed. Robert M. Adams (New York: Norton, 1989). Ercolino, Stefano, The Maximalist Novel: From Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (New York/London: Bloomsbury, 2014). Ernst, Wolfgang, Stirrings in the Archives: Order from Disorder, trans. Adam Siegel (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

238

Bibliography

Evans, Nicola, ‘Inside the Writer’s Room, the Artist’s Studio and Flaubert’s Parrot’, in Literary Careers in the Modern Era, ed. Guy Davidson and Nicola Evans (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 167–83. Faber, Alyda, ‘The Post-Secular Poetics and Ethics of Exposure in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace’, Literature and Theology 23, no. 3 (Sept. 2009): pp. 303–16. Fanon, Frantz, Les Damnés de la Terre (Paris: La Découverte Poche, 2002). Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004). Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008). Farago, Jason, ‘J. M. Coetzee’s Stunning New Novel Shows What Happens When a Nobel Winner Gets Really Weird’, New Republic, 14 Sept. 2013, https://newrepublic.com/article/ 114658/jm-coetzees-childhood-jesus-reviewed-jason-farago, accessed 30 Nov. 2016. Felski, Rita, Uses of Literature (Malden, MA/Oxford: Blackwell, 2008). Ferrante, Elena, Neapolitan Novels, 4 vols., trans. Ann Goldstein (New York: Europa Editions, 2011–14). Ffrench, Patrick, The Time of Theory: A History of Tel Quel 1960–1983 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Fish, Stanley, Is There a Text in This Class: The Authority of Interpretative Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary, trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Forster, E. M., ‘Notes on the English Character’, in Abinger Harvest (London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1964), pp. 3–15. Foucault, Michel, The Archeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972). Frankfurt, Harry, ‘Identification and Wholeheartedness’, in The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 159–76. Freud, Sigmund, The Future of an Illusion, trans. W. D. Robson-Scott (New York: Anchor Books, 1964). Gabriel, Markus, Fields of Sense: A New Realist Ontology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). Gabriel, Markus, Why the World Does Not Exist, trans. Gregory S. Moss (Malden, MA: Polity, 2015). Gadamer, Hans-Georg, ‘Plato and the Poets’, in Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato, trans. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 39–72. Gaita, Raimond, A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice (London: Routledge, 2000). Gaita, Raimond, The Philosopher’s Dog (London: Routledge, 2003). Gaita, Raimond, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2004). Gaynesford, Maximilian de, ‘Speech Acts, Responsibility and Commitment in Poetry’, in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, ed. Peter Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 617–37. Gaynesford, Maximilian de, ‘The Seriousness of Poetry’, Essays in Criticism 59 (2009): pp. 1–21. Gaynesford, Maximilian de, The Rift in the Lute: Attuning Poetry and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Geiger, Ido, ‘Writing the Lives of Animals’, in J. M. Coetzee and Ethics: Philosophical Perspectives on Literature, ed. Anton Leist and Peter Singer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), pp. 145–69.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Bibliography

239

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, ‘Der Erlkönig’. Goethes Gedichte in zeitlicher Folge (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 2004). Goodman, Nelson, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1985). Gordimer, Nadine, ‘ “The Idea of Gardening”, Life & Times of Michael K, by J. M. Coetzee’, review in New York Review of Books (2 Feb. 1984): pp. 3–6. Griem, Julika, Monkey Business: Affen als Figuren anthropologischer und ästhetischer Reflexion 1800–2000 (Berlin: Trafo, 2010). Habermas, Jürgen, ‘Notes on a Post-Secular Society’, signandsight.com, 18 June 2008, http://www.signandsight.com/features/1714.html, accessed 28 Nov. 2016. Haeming, Anne, ‘Authenticity: Diaries, Chronicles, Records as Index-Simulation’, in J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory, ed. Elleke Boehmer, Katy Iddiols, and Robert Eaglestone (London/New York: Continuum, 2009), pp. 173–84. Hämäläinen, Nora, ‘Honour, Dignity and the Realm of Meaning’, in Language, Ethics and Animal Life: Wittgenstein and Beyond (New York/London: Bloomsbury, 2012), pp. 179–94. Hämäläinen, Nora, Literature and Moral Theory (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Harcourt, Edward, ‘Truth and the “Work” of Literary Fiction’, British Journal of Aesthetics 50, no. 1 (2010): pp. 93–7. Harman, Graham, Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures (Washington: Zero Books, 2010). Harrigan, Pat and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). Hayes, Patrick, J. M. Coetzee and the Novel: Writing and Politics after Beckett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Hayot, Eric, On Literary Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Heidenreich, Stefan, ‘Unknown knowns and the law of what can be said’, in The Archive as a Productive Space of Conflict, ed. Markus Miessen et al. (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016), pp. 385–92. Heise, Ursula, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, The Lord Chandos Letter (London: Syrens, 1995). Humboldt, Wilhelm von, Humanist without Portfolio: An Anthology of the Writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt, trans. Marianne Cowan (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963). Humboldt, Wilhelm von, On Language, trans. Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Hunt, Lynn, Inventing Human Rights (New York: Norton, 2007). James, David, Modernist Futures: Innovation and Inheritance in the Contemporary Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). James, Henry, The Ambassadors (London: Electric Book Co., 2001). Janik, Allen and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973). Jose, Nicholas, ‘J. M. Coetzee, R. G. Howarth, South to South’, New Scholar: An International Journal of the Humanities, Creative Arts and Social Sciences 3, no. 2 (2014): pp. 85–98. Joyce, James, Finnegans Wake (London: Penguin, 1992 [1939]). Joyce, James, Ulysses (London: Penguin Classics, 1992 [1922]). Kafka, Franz, The Great Wall of China and Other Short Works, trans. Malcolm Pasley (London: Penguin, 1991).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

240

Bibliography

Kannemeyer, J. C., J. M. Coetzee: A Life in Writing, trans. Michiel Heyns (Johannesburg/ Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2012). Kannemeyer, J. C., ‘n Geskryfde Lewe (Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball, 2012). Kant, Immanuel, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1992). Karpik, Lucien, L’économie des singularités (Paris: Gallimard, 2007). Kierkegaard, Søren, Fear and Trembling, trans. Alastair Hannay (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985). Kittler, Friedrich, Philosophien der Literatur (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2013). Knausgård, Karl Ove, My Struggle, 6 vols., trans. Don Bartlett (London: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009–11). Korsgaard, Christine, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Korsgaard, Christine, Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Kripke, Saul A., Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). Lacan, Jacques, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1977). Lacan, Jacques, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1998). Lamarque, Peter and Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Langham Brown, Roger, Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Conception of Linguistic Relativity (The Hague: Mouton, 1967). Latour, Bruno, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Latour, Bruno, ‘Waiting for Gaia. Composing the Common World through Arts and Politics’, http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/124-GAIA-LONDON-SPEAP_ 0.pdf, accessed 1 Nov. 2016. Lazarus, Neil, The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Le Goff, Anne, ‘Living with Animals, Living as an Animal’, in Languages, Ethics and Animal Life, ed. Niklas Forsberg, Mikel Burley, and Nora Hämäläinen (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), pp. 124–38. Le Rider, Jacques, Fritz Mauthner (Paris: Bartillat, 2012). Lear, Jonathan, ‘Ethics, Mathematics, and Relativism’, in Essays on Moral Realism, ed. Geoffrey Sayre-McCord (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988) [this essay first appeared in Mind 92, no. 365 (1983): pp. 38–60]. Lear, Jonathan, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Lear, Jonathan, Freud (New York: Routledge, 2005). Lear, Jonathan, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). Lear, Jonathan, ‘Ethical Thought and the Problem of Communication’, in J. M. Coetzee and Ethics: Philosophical Perspectives on Literature, ed. Anton Leist and Peter Singer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), pp. 65–88. LeClair, Tom, The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary Fiction (Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989). Lefort, Claude, ‘The Question of Democracy’, in Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 9–20.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Bibliography

241

Leist, Anton and Peter Singer, eds., J. M. Coetzee and Ethics: Philosophical Perspectives on Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). Levinas, Emmanuel, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969). Levinas, Emmanuel, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1988). Little, William et al., The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973). Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Nidditch, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Lowry, Elizabeth, ‘The Schooldays of Jesus by J. M. Coetzee review—no passion in an ascetic allegory’, Guardian Online, 18 Aug. 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/ aug/18/the-schooldays-of-jesus-jm-coetzee-review, accessed 11 Oct. 2016. Lozier, Claire, ‘Watt’s Archive Fever’, Journal of Beckett Studies 22, no. 1 (2013), pp. 35–53. Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Boston: MIT Press, 1971). McDonald, Peter D., The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). McDowell, John, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1996). McFall, Lynne, ‘Integrity’, Ethics 98 (1987): pp. 5–20. Macintyre, Alasdair, After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 1985). Mackie, J. L., Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (New York: Penguin, 1977). Man, Paul de, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). Man, Paul de, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edn (London: Methuen, 1983). Marais, Mike, ‘ “Disgrace” and the Task of the Imagination’, Journal of Modern Literature 29, no. 2 (winter 2006): pp. 75–93. Marais, Mike, Secretary of the Invisible: The Idea of Hospitality in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009). Markovits, Benjamin, ‘The Childhood of Jesus by J. M. Coetzee—review’, The Guardian, 2 Mar. 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/02/childhood-of-jesus-jmcoetzee-review, accessed 1 Nov. 2016. Marx, Karl, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, ed. and trans. Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). Mauthner, Fritz, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, 3 vols. (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1912–13). Mauthner, Fritz, Prager Jugendjahre: Erinnerungen (Munich: Müller, 1918). Mauthner, Fritz, Muttersprache und Vaterland (Leipzig: Dürr & Weber, 1920). Mauthner, Fritz, ‘Ex Libris’, http://www.archive.org/stream/fritzmauthner_01_reel01#page/ n305/mode/1up, accessed 10 June 2016. Max, D. T., ‘Letter from Austin—Final Destination: Why do the archives of so many great writers end up in Texas?’, The New Yorker, 11 June 2007, http://www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2007/06/11/final-destination, accessed 20 Nov. 2016. Mendieta, Eduardo, ‘Existentialisms in the Hispanic and Latin American Worlds: El Quixote and Its Existential Children’, in Situating Existentialism: Key Texts in Context, ed. Jonathan Judaken and Robert Bernasconi (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), pp. 180–210. Miłosz, Czesław, ‘A Quarrel with Classicism’, in The Witness of Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 61–75.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

242

Bibliography

Moi, Toril, ‘The Adventure of Reading: Literature and Philosophy, Cavell and Beauvoir’, Literature and Theology 25, no. 2 (2011): pp. 125–40. Moretti, Franco, Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to García Márquez (London: Verso, 1996). Moretti, Franco, Distant Reading (New York: Verso, 2013). Mulhall, Stephen, Wittgenstein’s Private Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Mulhall, Stephen, The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). Musil, Robert, The Confusions of Young Törless (New York: Penguin Classics, 2001). Nabokov, Vladimir, Pale Fire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962). Nagel, Thomas, The Possibility of Altruism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970). Nagel, Thomas, ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, The Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (Oct. 1974): pp. 435–50. Nagel, Thomas, ‘War and Massacre’, in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 53–74. Nagel, Thomas, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Nagel, Thomas, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Twilight of the Idols: Or How to Philosophise with a Hammer (London: T. Fisher Urwin, 1899). Nixon, Mark, ‘Beckett’s Manuscripts in the Marketplace’, Modernism/modernity 18, no. 4 (2011): pp. 823–31. Nozick, Robert, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). Nunberg, Geoffrey, The Linguistics of Punctuation (Stanford: CSLI, 1990). Nussbaum, Martha Craven, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). Nussbaum, Martha Craven, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Nussbaum, Martha Craven, ‘Stages of Thought’, The New Republic 238, no. 8.7 (May 2008): pp. 37–41. O’Neill, Onora, ‘The Power of Example’, in Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 165–86. Oates, Joyce Carol, ‘Saving Grace: J. M. Coetzee’s “Childhood of Jesus” ’, New York Times Review, 29 Aug. 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/01/books/review/j-m-coetzeeschildhood-of-jesus.html, accessed 11 Oct. 2016. Ortega y Gasset, José, Meditations on Quixote, trans. Evelyn Rugg and Diego Marín (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1963). Osterhammel, Jürgen, Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Beck, 2009). Parfit, Derek, ‘On What There Is’, in On What Matters, ii, ed. and intro. Samuel Scheffler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 719–49. Parks, Tim, ‘In Some Sense True’, London Review of Books 38, no. 2 (2016): pp. 25–8. Partridge, Eric, You Have a Point There (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953). Peperzak, Adriaan, To The Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1993). Pippin, Robert B., Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991). Plachta, Bodo, ‘Introduction: How International is Scholarly Editing? A Look at Its History’, in Scholarly Editing and German Literature: Revision, Revaluation, Edition, ed. Lydia Jones et al. (Amsterdam: Brill/Rodopi, 2015), pp. 1–20.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Bibliography

243

Plato, Meno, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1976). Plato, The Republic, trans. D. Lee (London: Penguin, 1987). Plato, Symposium, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing Company, 1997). Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Christopher Rowe (London: Penguin, 2005). Posner, Richard A., ‘Against Ethical Criticism’, Philosophy and Literature 21, no. 1 (1997): pp. 1–27. Pratt, Mary Louise, ‘Arts of the Contact Zone’, Profession ( Jan. 1991): pp. 33–40. Pynchon, Thomas, The Crying of Lot 49 (New York: Harper & Row, 1965). Rabaté, Jean-Michel, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Rabaté, Jean-Michel, Crimes of the Future: Theory and its Global Reproduction (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014). Rabaté, Jean-Michel, The Pathos of Distance (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016). Raphael, D. D., ‘Can Literature Be Moral Philosophy?’, New Literary History 15, no. 1 (1983): pp. 1–12. Raulff, Ulrich, ‘Nachlass und Nachleben. Literatur aus dem Archiv’, in Literaturarchiv— Literarisches Archiv. Zur Poetik literarischer Archive/Archives littéraires et poétiques d’archives. Écrivains et institutions en dialogue, ed. Stéphanie Cudré-Mauroux and Irmgard M. Wirtz (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013), pp. 17–34. Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). Rich, Paul, ‘Tradition and Revolt in South African Fiction: The Novels of André Brink, Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee’, Journal of Southern African Studies 9, no. 1 (1982): pp. 54–73. Ricks, Christopher, The Force of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). Romanes, George John, Mental Evolution in Man: Origin of Human Faculty (London: University of Michigan, 1888). Rorty, Richard, ‘Religion As Conversation-Stopper’ in Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin, 1999), pp. 168–74. Rorty, Richard, Philosophical Papers, iv: Philosophy as Cultural Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Rosati, Connie S., ‘Moral Motivation’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, winter 2016, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2016/entries/moralmotivation/, accessed 11 Oct. 2016. Roudinesco, Élisabeth, Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–1985, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990). Roudinesco, Élisabeth, Jacques Lacan: An Outline of a Life and a History of a System of Thought, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). Sargent, Michael G., ‘Manuscript Textuality’, in The Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship, ed. Neil Fraistat and Julia Flanders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 224–35. Sartre, Jean-Paul, Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writings, ed. Stephen Priest (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). Sayre-McCord, Geoffrey, ed., Essays on Moral Realism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). Scott, Walter, Ivanhoe (New York: Krill Press, 2015). Sebald, W. G., Austerlitz (Munich: Hanser, 2001). Sehsagiri, Urmila, ‘The Boy of La Mancha: J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus’, Contemporary Literature 54, no. 3 (2013): pp. 643–53. Seltzer, Mark, The Official World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

244

Bibliography

Shafer-Landau, Russ, Moral Realism: A Defence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003). Shakespeare, William, The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Skerl, Jennie, ‘Fritz Mauthner’s “Critique of Language” in Samuel Beckett’s “Watt” ’, Contemporary Literature 15, no. 4 (1974): pp. 474–87. Slote, Michael, Morals from Motives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Smith, Adam, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2000). Smith, Zadie, ‘Two Directions for the Novel’, in Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (New York: Penguin Press, 2009), pp. 72–96. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, ‘Theory in the Margin: Coetzee’s Foe Reading Defoe‘s Crusoe/Rosana’, English in Africa 17, no. 2 (1990): pp. 1–23. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, ‘Marginality in the Teaching Machine’, in Outside in the Teaching Machine (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 64–5. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). Stevenson, Angus, Oxford Dictionary of English, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Stichweh, Rudolf, Die Weltgesellschaft. Soziologische Analysen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000). Sturgeon, Nicholas, ‘Altruism, Solipsism and the Objectivity of Reasons’, Philosophical Review 83, no. 3 (1974): pp. 374–402. Svavarsdóttir, Sigrún, ‘Moral Cognitivism and Motivation’, Philosophical Review 108 (1999): pp. 161–219. Tajiri, Yoshiki, ‘Beyond the Literary Theme Park: J. M. Coetzee’s Late Style in The Childhood of Jesus’, Journal of Modern Literature 39, no. 2 (2016): pp. 72–88. Tausk, Viktor, ‘On the Origin of the “Influencing Machine” in Schizophrenia’, Psychoanalytic Quarterly 2 (1933): pp. 519–56. Taylor, Charles, The Language Animal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). Taylor, Gabriele, ‘Integrity’, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 55, no. 1 (1981): pp. 144–5. Tiberius, Valerie, The Reflective Life: Living Wisely with our Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Trilling, Lionel, ‘Manners, Morals and the Novel’, The Kenyon Review 10, no. 1 (1948): pp. 11–27. Trilling, Lionel, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). Trotter, David, Paranoid Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Turgenev, Ivan, Fathers and Sons, ed. and trans. Richard Freeborn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Underhill, James W., Humboldt, Worldview and Language (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009). Van Hulle, Dirk, ‘Textual Awareness’, PhD thesis, University of Antwerp, 1999. Vaughan, Michael, ‘Literature and Politics: Currents in South African Writing in the Seventies’, Journal of Southern African Studies 9, no. 1 (1982): pp. 118–38. Vattimo, Gianni, Of Reality: The Purposes of Philosophy, trans. Robert T. Valgenti (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). Vice, Samantha, ‘Truth and Love Together at Last’, in J. M. Coetzee and Ethics: Philosophical Perspectives on Literature, ed. Anton Leist and Peter Singer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), pp. 293–315. Walker, Margaret Urban, ‘Ineluctable Feelings and Moral Recognition’, in Moral Contexts (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), pp. 141–64.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Bibliography

245

Walkowitz, Rebecca L., Born Translated (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). Wallerstein, Immanuel, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). Watt, Ian, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London: Vintage Books, 1956). Weiler, Gershon, Mauthner’s Critique of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). White, Duncan, ‘The Schooldays of Jesus by JM Coetzee is maddening, obscure—and brilliant’, Telegraph Online, 20 Aug. 2016, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/whatto-read/the-schooldays-of-jesus-by-jm-coetzee-is-maddening-obscure–and/, accessed 12 Oct. 2016. Wicomb, Zoë, ‘Translations in the Yard of Africa’, Journal of Literary Studies 18, nos. 3–4 (2002): pp. 209–23. Williams, Bernard, ‘Internal and External Reasons’, in Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 101–13. Williams, Bernard, ‘Persons, Character and Morality’, in Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 1–19. Williams, Bernard, ‘A Passion for the Beyond’, London Review of Books 8, no. 14 (7 Aug. 1986): pp. 5–6. Williams, Bernard, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 2011). Wilm, Jan, The Slow Philosophy of J. M. Coetzee (London/New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Kegan Paul, 1933). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the ‘Philosophical Investigations’ (New York: Harper & Row, 1958). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Zettel, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Big Typescript, TS 213, ed. and trans. C. Grant Luckhardt and Maximilian A. E. Aue (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, ed. P. Hacker and J. Schulte, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. Hacker, and J. Schulte, 4th edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009). Woessner, Martin, ‘Coetzee’s Critique of Reason’, in J. M. Coetzee and Ethics: Philosophical Perspectives on Literature, ed. Anton Leist and Peter Singer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), pp. 222–46. Woessner, Martin, ‘Angst Across the Channel: Existentialism in Britain’, in Situating Existentialism, ed. Jonathan Judaken and Robert Bernasconi (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), pp. 145–79. Woessner, Martin, ‘The Writing of Life’, Los Angeles Review of Books, 17 Apr. 2016, https:// lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-writing-of-life/#!, accessed 20 Nov. 2016. Wolfe, Cary, Philosophy and Animal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Wood, James, ‘Truth, Convention and Realism’, in How Fiction Works (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), pp. 223–48. Woolf, Virginia, ‘Modern Fiction’, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, iv: 1925–1928, ed. Andrew McNeille (London: The Hogarth Press, 1984), pp. 157–65. Wordsworth, William, The Prelude: 1798–1799 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1917).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Index Ackerley, C. J. 161 n. 3 Adeimantus 19–20 Adorno, Theodor W. 73 n. 16, 222, 224 Althusser, Louis 194 Ameriks, Karl 2 Améry, Jean 206–7 animals 1, 20–1, 91–106, 109, 125, 130–1, 152–3, 158, 170–2, 174–7 ape 17, 87 bacillus 96 bat 52, 108–9, 154, 196 beetle 168 cat 92–6, 103, 105 chimpanzee 154 cicada 203 cockroach 10 dog 1 n. 1, 10, 71–2, 86, 99–101, 103–4, 109, 155, 168, 175–7, 191 donkey 188 eating animals 19, 21–2, 158, 175 elephant 96 fish 21, 26–7, 33, 134 n. 25 giraffe 109 mouse 95 ox 92, 95 oyster 154 pig 22, 93 rat 22, 168 rhinoceros 101 sheep 72, 155, 175, 177 spider 40–3, 45 zoo 93, 178 see also Coetzee, Lives of Animals, The; Coetzee, Death of the Animal, The contributions to; vegetarianism; ethics, animals Anker, Elizabeth 87 n. 83 Appelfeld, Aharon 161–2 Aquinas, Thomas 96 n. 22, 97–8 archive: as object in itself 2, 14, 54 n. 14, 64, 88, 215–31 materials drawn from 4, 6–7, 54, 57 n. 22, 59–62, 64–6, 93 n. 11, 96 n. 22, 143–4, 149–50, 153, 175, 218 Arendt, Hannah 121–2 Arens, Katherine 160, 162 n. 8, 168 Aristophanes 110 Aristotle 7, 96 n. 22, 166, 180 Attridge, Derek 1, 12, 91–106, 220 Acts of Literature 35 n. 3, 53–5, 106 n. 58 J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading 1, 37 n. 6, 38–9, 53, 62, 64, 70 n. 1, 110 n. 15, 111 n. 21, 132 n. 16, 135 n. 32, 155, 183, 220 n. 28

Singularity of Literature, The 70, 101 n. 47, 220 n. 28 This Strange Institution Called Literature 53, 106 n. 58 Work of Literature, The 105 n. 57 Attwell, David Doubling the Point 6–7, 38 n. 11, 41 n. 25, 43 n. 37, 44 n. 41, 56–7, 59–60, 68–9, 85, 149 n. 30, 154, 167, 186–8, 201–2, 204–6, 209, 210, 213 n. 63, 214, 219, 222, 225, 228 ‘Exclusive Interview with J. M. Coetzee, An’ 201 J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face to Face with Time 3, 6, 54 n. 14, 144 n. 7, 175 n. 58, 202 n. 10, 205 n. 29, 216–17, 225–6 J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing 54, 62, 64, 110 n. 20, 225 ‘Review of The Novels of J. M. Coetzee: Lacanian Allegories by Teresa Dovey’ 54 Augustine of Hippo 22, 193 Austen, Jane 97 Auster, Paul 1, 4, 56, 83, 86, 157 autobiography 3 n. 4, 4, 6, 8, 57–9, 85–6, 156, 212, 214, 225, see Coetzee, J. M.: Boyhood; ‘Confession and Double Thoughts’; Summertime; Truth in Autobiography; Youth Bach, J. S. 88, 157 Bachelard, Gaston 184 Bacon, Francis 40, 167–8, 173 Bakhtin, M. M. 129, 207–10 Balcombe, Jonathan 111 Barry, Peter 223 Barth, John 88 Barthes, Roland 6, 128, 184, 209 Bataille, Georges 196 Baudrillard, Jean 184 Bayard, Pierre 187–9 Beckett, Samuel 4, 14, 46–7, 56, 72, 84, 160–1, 167, 183, 196, 219, 226–7 Ben-Zvi, Linda 161 n. 3 Benjamin, Walter 190 Bennington College 149 Best, Stephen 81 n. 56, 221, 228 n. 63 Bhabha, Homi 63, 212 Bible, The 11, 18, 31–4, 77, 101–2, 177, 187, 192–3, 196 Biko, Steve 201–4, 206, 208–12 Bion, Wilfred 187 black consciousness 8, 201–3, see also Biko, Steve Blake, William 111, 172–3, 183, 199

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

248

Index

Blumenberg, Hans 75 Boden, Margaret A. 186 Bok, Sissela 41 n. 28 Borges, Jorge Luis 160, 190 Bredeck, Elizabeth 160, 162 n. 5 Brennan, Timothy 63 Breton, André 186 Breytenbach, Breyten 206, 211 British Museum 227 Brooks, Cleanth 4 Bruyckere, Berlinde de 56, 93–8, 103 Burchell, William 227 Byron, Lord 102, 148 Casanova, Pascale 74 n. 17 Cavalieri, Paolo 91, 93, 98, 101, 174, 177–8 Cavell, Stanley 24, 28, 32–3, 72, 130 n. 14, 147 n. 20, 150 Celan, Paul 162, 209 Cervantes, Miguel de (including Don Quixote) 6–7, 18, 28–31, 33, 80, 82, 87, 136–7, 144, 147–50, 153, 156–7, 167, 190–3 Césaire, Aimé 201–2 Cheah, Pheng 73 n. 12 Clarkson, Carrol 8, 199–214 Coetzee, J. M.: ‘Achterberg’s “Ballade van de gasfitter”: The Mystery of I and You’ 209 Age of Iron 75, 95, 103, 108, 144, 149, 154–6, 190, 205, 207 ‘Agentless Sentence as Rhetorical Device, The’ 189 ‘As a Woman Grows Older’ 105 Boyhood 71, 85–6, 119, 156 ‘Breyten Breytenbach and the Reader in the Mirror’ 206, 211 ‘Censorship in South Africa’ 185 Childhood of Jesus, The 1, 4, 5, 11–13, 18–34, 42, 71–3, 75–88, 99, 103–4, 115 n. 41, 116 n. 45, 132–42, 144–5, 147, 156–9, 169 n. 37, 180–1, 183 n. 11, 191–6, 217 ‘Confession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky’ 57–60, 63, 68–9 Cripplewood/Kreupelhout 56 Death of the Animal, The, contributions to 91–4, 98, 101, 174, 177–8 Diary of a Bad Year 8, 107, 110 n. 14, 115 n. 37, 116 n. 43, 156, 169 n. 37, 195, 205 Disgrace 14, 85, 93 n. 11, 98–100, 102–5, 107–8, 130–2, 135–6, 144, 148–9, 154–6, 170–9, 189–90, 205, 207–8, 227 Doubling the Point 4, 7, 38, 41, 43 n. 34, 44 n. 41, 56–9, 68–9, 85, 146 n. 15, 148 n. 23, 149 n. 30, 154 n. 50, 162 n. 4, 165, 167, 184 n. 20, 185–6, 189, 192, 201–2, 204–6, 209–11, 213 n. 63, 214, 219, 222, 225, 228

Dusklands 1, 108, 110–15, 118–20, 143, 168–9, 182–6, 201, 204, 207–8, 217–18, 225–7 Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons 1, 8, 17, 45 n. 42, 52–5, 60, 87, 93, 95 n. 19, 96–8, 101–8, 109 n. 13, 115 n. 42, 144, 149, 152–4, 156, 158, 167–9, 173–4, 205 ‘Erasmus: Madness and Rivalry’ 10–11, 186–9 ‘Exclusive Interview with J. M. Coetzee, An’ 201 Expedition to the Baobab Tree, The (trans. of Wilma Stockenström) 56 ‘Fictional Beings’ 151 ‘Gianni Vattimo—Temptations of Realism: Comments on Paper Presented at UCT September 4, 2000’ 145–6 Foe 7–8, 55, 60–9, 75, 120–2, 143, 205, 207 Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship 10–11, 38 n. 10, 56, 178, 184 n. 20, 185–9, 206, 211 ‘He and His Man’ 75, 205 (with Paul Auster) Here and Now: Letters, 2008–2011 1, 4, 56, 83, 86, 157 In the Heart of the Country 8, 12, 35, 37–51, 61, 85, 143, 168–9, 173–4, 176, 182–3, 199–200, 209 Inner Workings 56, 152 n. 42, 162 n. 4, 209 ‘Into the Dark Chamber’ 206, 210 ‘Isaac Newton and the Ideal of a Transparent Scientific Language’ 165–8 Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech 146, 148, 192 Land Apart, A 56 Life & Times of Michael K 8–9, 61, 75, 87, 203, 207 Lives of Animals, The 1, 70, 87, 93 n. 11, 94–5, 101, 106, 108, 109 n. 13, 152, 169 Master of Petersburg, The 85, 102, 104, 107, 190, 229–30 (with Arabella Kurtz) ‘Nevertheless, my sympathies are with the Karamazovs’ 180 ‘Note on Writing, A’ 209–10 ‘Novel Today, The’ 9–10, 148 n. 25, 204, 214 ‘Old Woman and the Cats, The’ 12, 93–8, 103 ‘Paul Celan and his Translators’ 209 Posthumous Confession, A (trans. of Marcellus Emants) 56 Realism and the Novel 143 ‘Samuel Beckett’s Lessness: An Exercise in Decomposition’ 56 Schooldays of Jesus, The 1, 4–5, 12, 71–3, 75–88, 99, 102, 144–5, 147, 157–8, 217 Slow Man 1, 103–4, 107, 144, 169 n. 37 ‘Statistical Indices of “Difficulty” ’ 56 Stranger Shores 56, 162 n. 4 Summertime 5, 71, 85, 107 n. 1, 108, 110n, 115–18, 156, 169 n. 37, 217, 226–7

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Index The English Fiction of Samuel Beckett: An Essay in Stylistic Analysis 4–5, 7, 56, 219 (with Arabella Kurtz) The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction, and Psychotherapy 1, 13, 93 n. 7, 143, 150, 154, 175, 178, 180–1, 187, 190–1, 193–6 Truth in Autobiography 7, 57–60, 63, 67 Waiting for the Barbarians 8, 105, 107, 130–2, 135, 168–9, 201–2, 205–7, 219, 228–30 ‘What Is Realism?’ 149, 152 White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa 42, 56, 147, 204 works of Ford Madox Ford with particular reference to the novels, The 3, 55, 72 Youth 3 n. 4, 4, 71, 156, 227–8 see also University of Cape Town; University of Chicago (for academic courses and contexts) Colby, Kenneth M. 186 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 47–8 Collins Robert French Dictionary 213 Committee for Social Thought, see University of Chicago Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de 163 Connor, Steven 73–4 Cottingham, John 41 n. 26 Crary, Alice 4, 13, 98–9, 125–42 Creeley, Robert 6 Crewe, Jonathan 218 Dadaism 160 Dalí, Salvador 185 Damrosch, David 74 n. 17 Davis, Robert Con 181–2 Dean, Andrew 7, 52–69 Defoe, Daniel 64–5, 75, 144 DeLillo, Don 215 Derrida, Jacques 58–60, 91, 95, 99, 184, 188–90 Acts of Literature 35 n. 3, 53–5, 106 n. 58 Animal That Therefore I Am, The 92 Aporias 196 Archive Fever 229–31 Given Time, I. Counterfeit Money 195 ‘History of the Lie’ 193 ‘Hostipitality’ 102 n. 52 ‘Is there a philosophical language?’ 35 n. 3 Margins of Philosophy 128 n. 7, 196 Of Grammatology 59, 62, 173 n. 52 Of Hospitality 102, 105 ‘Purveyor of Truth, The’ 184, 189 Signature Event Context 128 n. 7 That Dangerous Supplement 59 This Strange Institution Called Literature 53, 106 n. 58 ‘White Mythology’ 128 n. 7 Descartes, René 2, 40, 46, 49, 96 n. 22, 153, 175 Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach 221 Diamond, Cora 52, 96–7, 99, 101, 106, 129

249

Dickens, Charles 84 n. 72, 97 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 57–9, 68, 85, 102, 157, 180 see Coetzee, J. M.: ‘Confession and Double Thoughts’; Master of Petersburg, The Dovey, Teresa 54–5, 70 n. 2, 180–8 Du Toit, André 3 Dufourmantelle, Anne 102 n. 52 Durand, Régis 181 Dworkin, Ronald 151 Edmonds, David 146 n. 16 Éluard, Paul 186 Engels, Friedrich 194 Ennis, Stephen 215 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus 221–2 Erasmus, Desiderius 10–11, 188–9 Ercolino, Stefano 75 Ernst, Wolfgang 216–17 eros 9, 12, 102, 105 moral life 107–8, 114–22 ethics 1–2, 12, 49–50, 70, 72, 99–101, 110 n. 14, 156, 158, 169, 175, 215 animals 91–106, 152–5, 158 archives 219–31 politics of literary representation 199–214 see also Attridge, Derek; Clarkson, Carrol; John, Eileen; Levinas, Emmanuel; Woessner, Martin Evans, Nicola 220, 221 n. 33, 223–4 Faber, Alyda 155 n. 55 Fanon, Frantz 8, 201, 207, 209–14 Farago, Jason 31 Faught, William S. 186 Felman, Shoshana 181, 188 Felski, Rita 220–1, 224 Ferrante, Elena 74 Ffrench, Patrick 6 Fiedler, Leslie 6 Fish, Stanley 128 n. 7 Flaubert, Gustave 6, 144, 150, 153, 170–7, 179 Ford, Ford Madox 3, 55, 72 Forster, E. M. 128–9 Foucault, Michel 6, 184, 217 Frankfurt, Harry 41 n. 27 Freud, Sigmund 178, 180–5, 187–91, 195, 220, 229 Fried, Michael 130 n. 14 Fucks, Wilhelm 5 Gabriel, Markus 145 n. 10 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 9 n. 20 Gaita, Raimond 3, 99–100, 104 Gallop, Jane 181 Gass, William 48 n. 58 Gasset, Ortega y 150 n. 34 Gaynesford, Max de 12, 35–51 Geiger, Ido 118 n. 49 Glaucon 19–21

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

250

Index

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 72 n. 6 Gontarski, S. E. 161 n. 3 Goodman, Nelson 73, 79 Gordimer, Nadine 8–9, 61, 63, 67, 148 n. 25, 203–5, 210, 214 n. 67 Green, André 184 Griem, Julika 11–12, 70–88

Klein, Melanie 181, 187 Knausgård, Karl Ove 74 Köhler, Wolfgang 97–8 Korsgaard, Christine 41 n. 26, 113 n. 31 Kripke, Saul 139 n. 48 Kurtz, Arabella 1, 13, 56, 93 n. 7, 143, 150, 175 n. 62, 178, 180–1, 187, 190–1, 193–6

Habermas, Jürgen 144–5 Haeming, Anne 231 Hallberg, Garth Risk 84 n. 72 Hämäläinen, Nora 99 n. 43, 129 n. 10 Hamann, Johann Georg 163, 165 Harcourt, Edward 129 n. 10 Harman, Graham 145 n. 10 Harrigan, Pat 74 n. 21 Harvard University 216 Hayes, Patrick 1–14, 67, 149 n. 27 Hayot, Eric 73, 74 n. 17 Hegel, G. W. F. 41 n. 24, 110 n. 20, 183–4 Heidenreich, Stefan 217 Heise, Ursula 74 n. 18 Herbert, Zbigniew 202 Herder, Johann Gottfried 163, 165 Hill, Nathan 84 n. 72 Hobbes, Thomas 163, 166 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 161–2, 167–9, 173 Houghton Library 216 Howarth, Guy 218–19 Humboldt, Alexander von 163–74, 176, 179 Hume, David 3 Hunt, Lynn 154

La Guma, Alex 201 Lacan, Jacques 11, 14, 54, 180–96, 213 n. 63, 220 see also Dovey, Teresa; Rabaté, Jean-Michel Lamarque, Peter 127 Lanchester, John 84 n. 72 Latour, Bruno 73–4 Lazarus, Neil 63–4 Le Corbusier 71, 84 Le Goff, Anne 97 n. 25 Le Rider, Jacques 160, 162 n. 7 Lear, Jonathan 6, 110 n. 14, 115 n. 37, 116 n. 43, 158, 180 Leavis, F. R. 6 LeClair, Tom 75, 84 Lefort, Claude 195 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 3 Leist, Anton 1–2, 97 Lemaire, Anika 181 Levinas, Emmanuel 91–4, 96, 99–100, 102, 174–5, 177 ‘event’, the 100–6 Lewis, Wyndham 185 Lighton, Reginald 206 n. 31 literary criticism archives 215–31 attuning with philosophy 35–51 boundaries/limits of 2–3, 5, 7–8, 11–12, 17–88, 106 comparison of nature with philosophy 35–7 deconstruction 59, 63, 184, 196, 215, 223 demystification 60, 144, 147, 150–2, 156–7, 225, 228 ‘distant reading’ 149 distinction from popular literary reception 149 ethics, see Attridge, Derek; Best, Stephen; Felski, Rita; Levinas, Emmanuel; Marcus, Sharon genetic criticism 216, 219–20, 223–4 hermeneutics of suspicion 187–8 ‘living reading’ 153–4, 177–9 Marxism (including ‘materialism’) 8, 10, 60–1, 63, 66, 69, 185, 194, 220 New Criticism 4 postcolonialism 60, 62–6, 69, 200–14 post-structuralism 55, 57–8, 60, 62–4, 69, 127–8, 184, 217, see also Barthes, Roland; Derrida, Jacques; Foucault, Michel; Lacan, Jacques; Man, Paul de Practical Criticism 4 n. 7

irony 4, 9, 11, 20–1, 25–6, 29–32, 46, 78–9, 82, 87–8, 119, 133, 143, 172–3, 184, 190 Ishiguro, Kazuo 215 James, David 72 James, Henry 97, 189, 217 James, William 190 Jameson, Fredric 184 Janik, Allan 160 John, Eileen 9, 12, 107–22 Johns Hopkins University 148 Johnson, Samuel 48 Jones, Joseph 218–19 Jose, Nicholas 218–19 Joyce, James 6, 14, 17, 39, 150, 160, 186, 196 Jung, Carl 184 Kafka, Franz 17, 45 n. 42, 84, 87, 161–2, 167, 183 Kannemeyer, J. C. 3 n. 4, 6, 55 n. 16, 147 n. 19, 150 n. 31, 159 n. 73, 206 n. 31, 216 n. 8, 226 Kant, Immanuel 2–3, 96 n. 22, 101–2, 120 Karpik, Lucien 76 n. 31 Kierkegaard, Søren 94, 101 Kittler, Friedrich 3

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Index psychoanalysis, see Dovey, Teresa; Freud, Sigmund; Kurtz, Arabella; Lacan, Jacques; Rabaté, Jean-Michel stylostatistics 5, 56 ‘surface reading’ 81, 221, 228 ‘symptomatic reading’ 221 Locke, John 42, 163, 166, 170, 176 Lowry, Elizabeth 71, 80 Lozier, Claire 226–7 Lukács, Georg 8, 10, 75, 201, 204 McDonald, Peter 14, 37 n. 8, 42 n. 30, 160–79 McDowell, John 44–5, 49, 97 n. 25 McEwan, Ian 215 McFall, Lynne 41 Macintyre, Alisdair 41 Mackie, J. L. 113 n. 31 MacKinnon, Catherine 38n Mallarmé, Stéphane 60 Man, Paul de 55, 57, 59–60, 184 Mannoni, Oscar 181 Mao Zedong 201 Márai, Sándor 161–2 Marais, Mike 70 n. 1, 155 Marcus, Sharon 81 n. 56, 221, 228 n. 63 Markovits, Benjamin 85 Marx, Karl 144, 194, see literary criticism, Marxism mathematics 3–4, 165–7 Childhood of Jesus, The, counting in 23–6, 30–1, 72, 79, 134, 136–41, 157 Mauthner, Fritz 14, 160–79 Max, D. T. 215 n. 2 Mendieta, Eduardo 150 n. 34 metafiction (includes ‘self-reflexivity’) 12, 38, 51, 73, 80, 82, 87, 126, 143, 182, 199, 214 Miłosz, Czesław 140 modernism 1, 17, 62, 72, 84, 87, 130 n. 14, 185, 204, see e.g. Beckett, Samuel; Joyce, James; Kafka, Franz Moi, Toril 36 More, Thomas 79 Moretti, Franco 75, 149 Mulhall, Stephen 1, 11, 17–34, 45 n. 42, 52–3, 55, 72, 97–8, 114 n. 34, 146 n. 15 Murdoch, Iris 146 n. 15 Musil, Robert 152 n. 42, 157, 161–2 Nabokov, Vladimir 184, 225 Nagel, Thomas 12, 52, 97–8, 108–14, 151, 154, 196 National Endowment for the Arts 147 n. 20 Newton, Isaac 165–8 Nietzsche, Friedrich 9, 41 n. 24, 60, 152, 183 Nixon, Mark 219 n. 22 Novalis 41 n. 24, 183 Nozick, Robert 112 n. 25 Nunberg, Geoffrey 48 n. 55

251

Nuremberg Trials 42 Nussbaum, Martha 10, 36 n. 4, 49–50, 116–17 n. 46, 129 n. 10, 147 n. 20 Oates, Joyce Carol 42 Ogden, C. K. 160 Olsen, Stein Haugom 127 O’Neill, Onora 97, 127 n. 5 Osterhammel, Jürgen 73 n. 17 Parfit, Derek 145 n. 12 Parks, Tim 180 Partridge, Eric 48 Pascal, Blaise 41 n. 24 Peperzak, Adriaan 94 n. 11 Pfister, Oskar 191 philosophy: analytic philosophy 1, 107, 127–8, 129 n. 10 ethics, see ethics justice 1, 19–21, 38, 41–2, 65, 91, 152–3, 195 moral philosophy 1–2, 8, 10, 12–13, 99, 145–6, see eros, moral life moral realism 111, 145–6, 152 see e.g. Aristotle; Cavell, Stanley; Derrida, Jacques; Levinas, Emmanuel; Nagel, Thomas; Nietzsche, Friedrich; Plato; Rorty, Richard; Socrates; Wittgenstein, Ludwig Pippin, Robert 3, 148 n. 26 Plachta, Bodo 223 Plato 7, 9, 18, 19–21, 25–6, 28, 30–2, 79, 108, 181 n. 6, 193, 195 Meno 25 parable of the cave 9–10, 21, 138 Phaedrus 9, 114–15, 116 n. 46 philosopher-kings 9, 20–1 Republic, The 1, 9, 11, 18–21, 28, 115 n. 39 Symposium 110, 115–18 Poe, Edgar Allan 184, 189 Posner, Richard A. 127 n. 5 postmodernism 61, 63, 84, 88, 184, 190 Pratt, Mary Louise 200 n. 6 Princeton University 106, 152 Proust, Marcel 6 Pynchon, Thomas 184 Rabaté, Jean-Michel 13–14, 180–96 Ransom, John Crowe 4 Raphael, D. D. 127 n. 5 Raulff, Ulrich 217 n. 15 Rawls, John 41 Richards, I. A. 4 n. 7 Ricoeur, Paul 220 realism 1, 6–7, 13, 17–19, 30–1, 60–2, 71, 125–41, 143–59, 204 reason (includes ‘rationality’) 1, 11, 19, 41, 43, 45, 47–9, 69, 95–6, 135, 138, 146–7

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

252

Index

reason (cont.) animals 91–106, 175, 177 eros, see eros mathematical reasoning, see mathematics philosophical reasoning 2, 6, 12, 41, 91–106, 112–13, 126, 133, 152, 158, 174, 178, 213–14 psychoanalysis 185–91 secularity 143–59 Regan, Tom 96 n. 22 Rich, Paul 61, 63 Richardson, Samuel 188 Ricks, Christopher 48 Rilke, Rainer Maria 161–2 Romanes, George 165 Rorty, Richard 13, 99, 145–7, 151, 159 Rosati, Connie S. 113 n. 31, 114 Rose, Jacqueline 181 Roth, Joseph 161–2 Roudinesco, Élisabeth 185 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 41 n. 24, 57–60 Santayana, George 32–3 Sapir, Edward 165–6 Sargent, Michael G. 223 Sartre, Jean-Paul 8, 207 Sayre-McCord, Geoffrey 145 n. 11 Schafer, Roy 184 Schulz, Bruno 161–2 Scott, Walter 43 Sebald, W. G. 193 Seltzer, Mark 73 n. 12 Senghor, Léopold Sédar 201 Shafer-Landau, Russ 113 n. 31 Shakespeare, William 32–3, 46, 49 Sheridan, Alan 181 Showalter, Elaine 181 Silberstein, Eduard 191 Singer, Peter 1–2, 52, 98, 110 n. 14, 119 n. 53 Skerl, Jennie 161 n. 3 Slote, Michael 41 Smith, Adam 146 Smith, Wilbur 37 Smith, Zadie 125 n. 1 Socrates 1, 6, 9–10, 12, 19–21, 25, 30, 79, 114–16 Spinoza, Baruch 183 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 59, 62–4, 66–7, 74 n. 18 Sprat, Thomas 166 State University of New York at Buffalo 6, 7 n. 14, 55, 201 Stichweh, Rudolf 74 n. 17 Sturgeon, Nicholas 109 n. 11 stylostatistics 5, 56 surrealism 182, 185–6

Svavarsdóttir, Sigrún 113 n. 31 Svevo, Italo 161–2 Swift, Jonathan 25–6 Tajiri, Yoshiki 85 Tausk, Viktor 183 Taylor, Charles 163, 165–6 Taylor, Gabriele 41 n. 26 Tiberius, Valerie 41 n. 26 Tolstoy, Leo 6, 57, 157 n. 67 Toulmin, Stephen 160 Trilling, Lionel 128 Trotter, David 185 Turgenev, Ivan 6, 150 Underhill, James 166 University of Cape Town 3, 6–7, 55, 92–3, 143, 145, 180, 218, 227 n. 56 University of Chicago 3, 6–7, 144, 148 n. 26, 149–50, 153, 158 University of Texas at Austin 4, 55–6, 218–19 see archive (for archival materials and Harry Ransom Center) Van Hulle, Dirk 163 n. 14 Van Wyk, Christopher 210 Vattimo, Gianna 145–6, 151–2 Vaughan, Michael 61, 63 vegetarianism 21, 103–4, 159, see also animals, eating animals Venturi, Robert 71, 84 Vice, Samantha 119–20 n. 53 Vorster, John Balthazar 211 Walker, Margaret Urban 114 n. 33 Walkowitz, Rebecca 169 Wallerstein, Immanuel 73 n. 17 Wardrip-Fruin, Noah 74 n. 21 Watt, Ian 125 n. 1 Weil, Simone 41 n. 24 Weiler, Gershon 160, 163 n. 10 White, Duncan 71 Whorf, Benjamin Lee 165–6, 173 Wicomb, Zoë 208 Wilden, Anthony 181, 184 Williams, Bernard 41 n. 27, 113 n. 31, 158, 211 n. 53, 212 n. 62 Wilm, Jan 1–14, 70, 78 n. 40, 81 n. 56, 85 n. 76, 155, 215–31 Winnicott, Donald 181, 187 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 28, 31–2, 41 n. 24, 72, 79, 99, 138, 158, 164, 178 Big Typescript, TS 213 141 n. 53 Blue Book, The 140 Philosophical Investigations 4, 11, 13, 18, 21–7, 138–41, 160 private language 23–7, 33, 80, 137–8, 141

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Index Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics 22 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 14, 160, 166 Zettel 22 see mathematics, Childhood of Jesus, The, counting in Woessner, Martin 13, 98–9, 143–59, 215–16 Wolfe, Cary 98, 214

Wood, James 126 n. 1, 129 Woolf, Virginia 129 Wordsworth, William 91, 97, 130, 176 Yeats, W. B. 39 Yule, George Udny 5 Žižek, Slavoj 194

253