Pedagogy in the Novels of J.M. Coetzee: The Affect of Literature 9781138039001, 9781315176192

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Pedagogy in the Novels of J.M. Coetzee

Critically analyzing the representation of pedagogy in the novels of J.M. Coetzee, this insightful text illustrates the author’s profound conception of learning and personal development as something which takes place well beyond formal education. Bringing together critical and educational theory, Pedagogy in the Novels of J.M. Coetzee examines depictions of pedagogy in novels including Age of Iron, Elizabeth Costello, Disgrace, and Childhood of Jesus. Engaging with Coetzee’s varied literary use of pedagogical themes such as motherhood, maternal love, and the importance of childhood interactions, reading, and experiences, chapters demonstrate how Coetzee foregrounds pedagogy as intrinsic to the formation of human actors, society, and civilization. The text thereby aptly explores and broadens our understanding of education - what it is, what it achieves, and how it can affect and shape human existence. This text will be of great interest to graduate and postgraduate students, academics, researchers and professionals in the fields of pedagogy, postcolonial studies, educational theory and philosophy, and English literature. Aparna Mishra Tarc is Associate Professor of Education at York University, Canada.

Routledge Research in Education

This series aims to present the latest research from right across the field of education. It is not confined to any particular area or school of thought and seeks to provide coverage of a broad range of topics, theories and issues from around the world. Recent titles in the series include: Challenging Perceptions of Africa in Schools Critical Approaches to Global Justice Education Edited by Barbara O’Toole, Ebun Joseph, and David Nyaluke Legacies of Christian Languaging and Literacies in American Education Perspectives on English Language Arts Curriculum, Teaching and Learning Edited by Mary M. Juzwik, Jennifer C. Stone, Kevin J. Burke, and Denise Dávila Critical Explorations of Young Adult Literature Identifying and Critiquing the Canon Edited by Victor Malo-Juvera and Crag Hill Dance, Professional Practice, and the Workplace Challenges and Opportunities for Dance Professionals, Students, and Educators Edited by Angela Pickard and Doug Risner Pedagogy in the Novels of J.M. Coetzee The Affect of Literature Aparna Mishra Tarc

For a complete list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge. com/Routledge-Research-in-Education/book-series/SE0393

Pedagogy in the Novels of J.M. Coetzee The Affect of Literature

Aparna Mishra Tarc

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Aparna Mishra Tarc to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-03900-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-17619-2 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

“To whom this writing, then”: A Preface A Note on Citation

vii xiii

Introduction: Novel Pedagogy 1 1

Rereading an Old Foe: Significant Pedagogy and the Novel 17

2

Mrs. Curren in Age of Iron: Address of the Mother 33

3

Elizabeth Costello in Elizabeth Costello. Eight lessons: Those Who Can’t, Teach 53

4

David Lurie in Disgrace: Post-Education of the Teacher 72

5

Simón in Childhood of Jesus: Learning to Live, Again 92

Conclusion: “Things to Learn”: Pedagogy and the Novels of J.M. Coetzee 111 Bibliography Index

131 141

“To whom this writing, then” A Preface

I learned to read through my mother’s grief. Gifted in the art of making beauty from loss, our mom, Chhaya Mishra, was my first teacher. Her first lessons were songs and poems by Tagore. She then gave her children Bengali lessons, to our dad’s chagrin. Because she was denied harmonium lessons, she made us learn to play classical piano, mostly Bach and Mozart. At the early age of 3, she taught me to read by singing Dr. Seuss’s books. My kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Loney, mistook my precocity in reading for brilliance. I was just an exuberant singer. Our dad, Anu Mishra, supplemented my mom’s reading teachings when he introduced me to the Guelph Public Library, which remains for me a magical time and place. I borrowed books from the library every Saturday morning until I left home to go to university. I was given an incredible education in letters. From birth, I engaged in every form of language imaginable. Born in the magical height of print, television arrived in my childhood. It was only for those who could afford it, and we could not. My siblings, Bob and Krissy Mishra, and I had to make do with our imaginations, music lessons, and borrowed books. I have passed on this musically oriented literary pedagogy to my own children, Gabi, Ana, Rebecca, and James, whose important, exuberant, and insightful singing and readings of the world astound me. I have learned much about reading from observations of my children and other people’s children. I have also recently learned from Ollie, our puppy, that a dog can be a teacher of reading. The teachings of these animal and child creatures invariably find their way into my theory of intra- and intersubjective reading that traverses words into the world. For all they teach me to teach my children, I thank my parents. Their pedagogy of song and the book sustain me for all of my life. I also thank Betty and Andy Tarc for sharing their love of books and libraries, and encouraging it in their child, who passes this love on to me and our children. In the early child-free years, Paul and I made Saturday morning trips to bookstores, the way I had with my father as a child. In a sense, our union is as much fictional as it is real. Our love of shared and sharing readings continued when we met Professor Glenn Eastabrook, who welcomed us into his home with Shirley and lent (really gave) us his

viii  “To whom this writing, then”: A Preface books. Paul is the first person to tell me “read Coetzee” as he handed me his well-read copy of Disgrace and then Lives of Animals. And I was never the same. As our parents grew old, and the world of childhood falls apart, Paul remains steady and certain in the goodness of love, people, and the world. I thank you for entertaining, to my endless frustration and delight, my wild readings and for engaging me, despite all reservations, to bring them to writing. I thank you for taking me out of books to go outside. I am indebted to you Paul, my faithful book-mate. In the spring of 2015, a student circulated to me a call for papers for a conference on Coetzee’s Women. Held in Italy, I would have to overcome my growing fear of flying alone and venture a transatlantic trip I stopped going on after giving birth to the first of my children. I decided not to go. But after speaking on the matter with Paul, he said what I knew to be true. You must go. So, I went. The conference in Prato was like no other. Italy is a dream. I was greeted like an old friend by people in the streets wherever I roamed. Colleagues arrived from all over the world. Though we were all strangers, I felt as if I already knew them. It did not matter that I am not a Coetzee expert because we were all readers. We engaged in lively dialogue and debate around the deeply complex and fraught social bonds between women and others, as depicted in his novels. I was happy to spy the author across the room many times as he incredibly, generously, anonymously sat amongst us for every keynote and ordinary session. I was even happier to be among those joyfully breaking out in memorized recitations of Coetzee’s passages, proving my feeling that literary bonds can be as strong as familial ones. Memorable was Coetzee’s reading of his then new novel Schooldays of Jesus. As he read, I was gripped by an odd sensation. I knew his voice before I heard it. I recognized the sound, the cadence, the grave and lilting quality as it reverberated through me. I realized with a start: This is how I felt his voice for years, reading to me silently inside myself. For me this is a rare occurrence, that a writer in person, whether it be an academic or novelist or friend, sounds exactly the way I heard and pictured their presence writing in my mind. It is rare, except it is not: Every infant imagines, feels for, and falls in love her mother’s voice before she actually hears it for the first time. The Prato conference, organized by Sue Kossew and Melinda Harvey, that I went to on impulse continues to give from its bounty of thought. From this event, I have gained lifelong companions in reading, a small gathering of thinkers from all over the world. We are teachers, activists, lovers of life, who meet via Skype to talk about novels but also about what it means to live a life of letters in a world diminished by thoughtless words and wracked by social hatred and violence that our failure to recognize the humanity residing in every person produces and maintains.

“To whom this writing, then”: A Preface  ix I began writing this book before I went to Prato. Although these words are my own, it takes stock of the brilliant literary insights generated by my dear colleagues, Michael Deckard, Jana Giles, Lucy Graham, and Agata Sczcezak Brewer. We formed the Prato reading group to create a space where reading to teach can be the primary activity of academic study—again, the reason each of us became scholars in the first place. But beyond this, each of you has nourished my mind and soul in ways I can never express. Supplementing these engagements are readings by Coetzee’s best interlocutors: David Attridge, David Attwell, and Carrol Clarkson. For me, each of you models the best of the professoriate by exhibiting in person and writing scholarly and pedagogical generosity to all. When I was a girl, my mom had to continuously remind me to get my head out of the book and pay attention to the world. I was born too sensitive and unable to fend off the world’s meanness with anything other than words that I learned from reading. I used to revel ecstatically in my joy of words, but these days, I have little time or desire for frivolous or careless uses of language. These days, my words can be hard and cutting, like peeling the skin off the flesh. But I do not know how else to tell the truth than to just tell it, as Toni Morrison says; to do words justly, as Mario Di Paolontonio does; to bear witness to the good and bad news that truth brings, as Warren Crichlow always hopefully pursues. Theresa Shanahan teaches me that letters may be the only things that hold human conduct to account. Nombuso Dlamini helps me to stand tall and hold fast to others. Celia Haig Brown has stewarded me into the scholar I have become. Didi Khayatt taught me the power of holding on to love in strong winds. Naomi Norquay is the kindest and best colleague to have. Anna Zalik and Stefan Kipler have shown me what it means to act in the service of justice with courage and conviction. I will never forget how you both held me and made me strong. I thank all of these colleagues at York University for showing me that there is great courage and strength in the smallest of numbers. I am always grateful to Tom Loebel for saving me from running into the fire and helping me put out so many. David Gillborn, words can never thank you for leading the way for so many of us; your commitment to a fair world carries me on. Nicholas Ng Fook’s support and laughter has made all the difference. I thank Stephanie Springaay, who always knows when I need her. Brain Casemore is a lifesaver. Thank you, Nathan Snaza and Sam Rocha, for recognizing my mind. Sandro Barros, for your deep sensitivity, humor, and enthusiasm for my work, I am so grateful. Binay Subdedi, when our paths cross, I am always renewed. Hannah Spector, Karen Pashby, and Sarah Truman, I learn so much from you all. To Nirmala Everelles, Stephanie Daza, Michelle Bae Dimitridadis, Nina Asher, Kakali Bhattacharya, and the imitable Jeung Eun Rhee, may our fierce par desi sisterhood continue. And finally, Jane Kenway, for holding me

x  “To whom this writing, then”: A Preface without fail—you can never know what your support has meant to me. I thank these kind colleagues for being in my world, accepting my difference, and giving me the words to speak it. My students past and present are among the very best thinkers and people I know. I am grateful for all of you, too many to name. You have sustained me through it all, and there is no way to thank you for all you give to me. I greatly appreciate the support of Elsbeth Wright and the editorial team at Routledge for staying with the stops and starts of this project. Every writer thinks their last book was the hardest to write because of the particular blocks and breakthroughs that writing it permits. Ellie has been a kind and insistent editor, and her encouragement, presence, and above all patience has made all the difference in seeing me persevere to completion, despite having more to revise. Thank you, Saharsh Saxena and Manikandan Kuppan, for your assistance with my work. I thank Peter Lang Publishing for their permission to draw on my very first publication as a tenure track professor, which happened to be on Coetzee’s novel Disgrace. I am grateful to Roland Sintos Coloma, who included my chapter “Postcolonial studies as re-education: Lessons from J.M Coetzee’s Disgrace” in his edited collection Postcolonial Challenges in Education. A revised version of this work finds its way into Chapter 4 of this book. I could not foresee the rapid change in theory over the last ten years, such that reeducation and post-colonial studies would become nearly irrelevant in our post-education, post-humanist time. But where theory falters, the pedagogical insights remain. For you, for your support, Roland, I am always grateful. This past year has been excruciating for me. My father is at the end of his mind. I no longer recognize him or the world in which I live. As the university turns lean and mean, we colleagues forget our vocation and turn on each other. Fighting for truth, for students, for children, for the world is a lonely pursuit that has made me unable to relate to my humankind. I have felt like Elizabeth Costello many times this year, shouting out accusations to a world where no one can hear, but everyone knows what is happening, especially to our children. I am uncertain for the first time about human goodness, thinking maybe death is winning over life, and hate is winning over love. And in this terrible time, in my and our world, it is literature that has kept me afloat, reminded me that there have been other times in history where human beings have failed and survived, faltered and kept going, hurt each other and reconciled. Indeed, as the world goes bad, my mom reminds me, and often, it has been worse; it can be way, way worse. And she also insists: We will fight. I hear her saying, keep fighting smiley girl. But I am no longer so sure we can prevail. Every word I write is a reading of a word given to me through literature. So, the only language I have left is literary. In this sense, I resonate

“To whom this writing, then”: A Preface  xi with Coetzee’s late turn to literary language as his main public recourse to speak. It makes sense that in a world gone mad and bereft of truth, again, we search for a world that we know did exist because we felt it, imagined it, lived the goodness of it. We hold faith in a story of a just and fair world given to us by our mothers. I like to think we have good mothers, good enough ones for sure, who absorbed to survive, the unspeakable times they lived through for the good of their children. That torrid transference that I know I feel when I fall into Coetzee’s books is one that incomprehensively recognizes something of a rare and unintegrated beauty that needs to be heard and cries to get out. I have learned from reading Coetzee’s novels that perhaps our greatest human need is realized by someone that gets us inside, gets our human problem. If Coetzee has grown weary of critics and readers of the dominant global hegemony, I understand why. Still, I insist that a reading (rather than criticism), like each of our first readings, is held deep inside. It knows no time or place, or political and historical condition; it is pedagogical, one of being deeply affected by the other’s words held indelibly in the mind. I do hope my readings do some bit of justice to the horizons of being that this writing gifts me and so many millions of unknown readers without occasion to say how or why. This preface is also posted to someone I do not know but whose words affect me profoundly. Thank you, J.M. Coetzee, for your gift of words, giving my mind a place to rest, retreat, repair, and restore. For teaching me that the truth of our existence, the beauty of the singular case, no matter how tiny, is tied up in hearing the significance in the other’s words. And for showing that intimate revolt against our (m)others, education, and history is the only way to fight for, repair, and renew our sorry selves, and move forward in this world that we love and share with each other. Even if the author is a figment of the reader’s imagination, I am so grateful for these words and for you. “To whom this writing, then?” For all the children. All the (m)others. You.

A Note on Citation

In this book, I use APA style for my overall engagement of scholarly texts and the bibliography and notes. I observe MLA style for my inline citations of novels. I wish to show that there is a difference between citing research/theory and literature. I view citation practice as delivering the sources for my reading. To create new readings is to break form with old ones. This is how I understand the work of citation in this book: As a new reading of an old practice. I use abbreviations for novels discussed in the book, where necessary. For one-word titles, no abbreviation is necessary. AOI: Age of Iron COJ: Childhood of Jesus EC: Elizabeth Costello. Eight lessons HOC: Heart of the Country -amt

Introduction Novel Pedagogy

You must take a stand—J.M. Coetzee In December 2012, the Nobel Prize-winning author J.M. Coetzee received an honorary doctorate at the University of Witwatersand in Johannesburg, South Africa. As is customary on such an auspicious occasion, Coetzee (2012) gifted students with a statement urging them to take their place in a waiting world. The address is curiously titled “Of Men in Education.” Sparing no preliminaries, Coetzee directs his remarks to students, particularly to “the young men”: I want to appeal to the idealism of those young men who are already contemplating a career in education, and suggest that you think seriously about going into – I don’t know what the correct term is nowadays, in my day it used to be called primary education – into the teaching of young children. Coetzee’s calling of young men to the vocation of primary education seems ludicrous in this spectacular age of media, markets, science, and technology. Many expected a more transformative message from the Nobel laureate. Still, in typically pained fashion, Coetzee gave the students little more than an insistence: What the world needs more than ever is young people who will commit to, what Hannah Arendt (1968) deems as, the special adult duty of leading children into an old and broken world (p. 193). Met with derision from the cultural intelligentsia, critics were quick to cry afoul with Coetzee’s uninspiring advice. Reporting for The Daily Maverick, Richard Poplak (2013) characterized the brief statement as a “postmodern” ruse. Coetzee “humiliates” himself, he implies, by giving such an out-of-touch statement. Coetzee’s urging to students to the call of teaching is pressing and compelling. His words exhibit generosity in the most hopeful of academic lectures. He steers clear from clichéd statements: For example, that of the late technological wizard Steve Jobs (2005), who summoned students to “stay hungry, stay foolish.” Rather, Coetzee holds fast to an

2  Introduction: Novel Pedagogy old idea of the convocation statement as one occasioning disputation delivered to young people set to go out into the world. Deliberate is Coetzee’s provocation to young people, and particularly young men, to teaching in the early years. In a world increasingly void of concern and care for children, his speech casts the pedagogical pillars of authority, knowledge, truth, responsibility, care, morality, ethics, and judgment as vital existential resources. Most needed in the world right now, Coetzee softly insists, are not more celebrities, businessmen, or even novelists, but responsible adults entrusted to care for the challenges that await children, the most vulnerable, impressionable newcomers to an old and weary world. Coetzee’s enduring concern with the child is echoed by the eminent writers of our time. Unsurprisingly, it is the novelist, rather than the academic, helping professional, or the educator, with the felt capacity to mine the interior and political recesses of human social thought animated by the fiction and figure of the child (Steedman, 2009). In their novels, writers think through the eyes of children as new people wholly impacted by the folly of humanity that precedes their entry. In a sense, novelists fictionally provide a hearing for the child to engage the most difficult and persistent of human problems. Toni Morrison’s God help the Child investigates the racial formation of a child in the pedagogical practice of her mother subject to American racism. In The Children Act, Ian McEwan considers the legal tendering of children adults make supposedly in their best interests. And Kazuro Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant traces the journey of two aged and demented protagonists who set out on a quest to find their lost children written out of their lives and history. We1 might ask ourselves: Why this intense focus on the child, on childhood, on children, and why now? Coetzee anticipates this question in three recent books on childhood, The Childhood of Jesus, The Schooldays of Jesus, and The Death of Jesus. As Coetzee reiterates time and time again in his essays, memoirs, and novels, sensitive, pliable, and unassuming children have little control over the forms of knowledge and culture in-forming and forming their subjectivity. Children have little say over their future or the politics guiding it. If the child is unconsciously at the forefront of world affairs, it is in the form of adult desires, projections, memories, perversities, and abuses rather than as a person in their own right. Carolyn Steedman (2009) demonstrates that a primal and primary mistaking the child as projection, property, and production founds adult politics and institutions. Failure to see how and when adult invocation of the name and figure of the child impacts on the lives of actual children continually sets the adult community into a collision course with traumatic human history. Particularly in times of world strife, the child finds herself thrust into the spotlight of adult affairs. Unlike many, Coetzee does not place blame for world woes on the unique existences of children—he instead

Introduction: Novel Pedagogy  3 reserves his special brand of soft critique for the (male) adults entrusted with their well-being and care. Implicating the adult community in the child’s plight is curious, given that the tendency in educational and social thought is to pose children as the problem and salvation of the world (Grumet, 1986, 1988). Queer theorist Lee Edelman (2004) is among those who attack the idea of the future as in “the Imaginary form of the Child.” (p. 14). The move might be radical if he held the figure of adult to account for a future invoked in the child’s image. Instead, in No Future, Edelman cites reproductive futurism as holding the adult community captive to the imagined needs of children rather than be free to exercise and act on their own desire. Further, he finds that child-free queer desire holds possibility for a future non-centered around the figure of the Child. 2 Edelman’s (2004) myopic thesis rests on what he terms the “fascism of the baby’s face” helplessly holding the adult world in its grip (p. 75). He cites examples of this fascism in the fictional figures of orphan Annie; the waif in Les Mis and, strangely, the real child on the internet (p. 29). Of these figures, Edelman (2004) calls on the adult community to: “Fuck3 the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized” (p. 29). The sensational statement churns with untold resentment, one that drives Maggie Nelson (2015) to counter Edelman in his own words: “Why bother fucking this Child when we could be fucking the specific forces that mobilize and crouch behind its image?” (p. 76). Put another way: Why blame this Child and not the specific Adult (white, male) forces that organize such a vicious social order? Responding in a previous decade to another white man’s complaint over his silenced desire, Spivak (1990) adds: Why not develop “a certain degree of rage against the history that has written such an abject script for you that you are silenced?” (p. 62). And as Madeline Grumet (1986) also finds in decades past, the figure of the child destined to save the world is a lie men tell to displace their inadequacies figured in the child made to save what ails them: “Transformed by his knowledge, derived from acting in the world that surrounds him, the child’s bones and breath and beliefs belong both to him and that of the world we would have him save” (p. 90, emphasis added). As these scholars suggest, men and their enablers and handlers ought not keep lying to themselves and begin to seriously examine in whose interest does the figure of the Child actually lie. Feminists have long pointed out that Western theories of human reproduction and development are made by white men observing (their own) children in and as the image of themselves (Walkerdine, 1984, 1990). They also note that most of the world’s problems are blamed on over-population attributed to women of the global South and their nonwhite children (Spivak, 2009). The proper figure and name of the Child, apprehended by scholars of childhood and education alike, is drawn by white men in their image. Along with blaming human reproduction

4  Introduction: Novel Pedagogy (and thus women and children) for what ails humanity, the dichotomy Edelman and others set up between desire and reproduction is false: Each is akin to the other. In this regard, Nina Power (2009) finds that “far from being a rallying call towards some subversive celebration of a pleasure that destabilizes and yet subtends the political order, [this pleasure] has been the very ordering principle of our recent political reality” (p. 2). Edelman’s position, Power (2009) adds, repeats the self-gratifying logics of colonial and consumptive capitalism, where the self is encouraged to indulge itself of the world with no regard for other lives and ways of being. Jacqueline Rose (2014) further points out that as the fons et origio, mothers take the blame for what ails one in the world. Blaming mothers (and their children) is endemic of the adult male’s incapacity to face a trembling and dependent self (the child and mother inside himself). In this regard, Edelman’s No Future (2004) repeats the colonial and patriarchal strategies of his white male predecessors putting man’s failings on the figure most vulnerable to its projection: The unnamed, a-historical Child. Rather than make another figure out of the child in the figure of the fascist (a-historical) baby’s face (not yet child), in his late-human novels Coetzee suggests that this strategy, figuring the child, has exhausted itself to the height of human and non-human destruction. Instead, his latest works “looks behind” the specific affective forces gripping the Adult male’s ongoing use and abuse of the figure of the child to justify his desire and existence (Nelson, 2015, p. 76). He does this by figuring these affective forces in the words and bodies of characters faced with the fact of Others.4 As his Nobel Prize Adjudicators (2003) put it, “In innumerable guises, [Coetzee] portrays the surprising involvement of the stranger.” The affect of the Other (animal, baby, other) mutely features in these involvements. His fiction demonstrates that the unnamable yet potent affect of the unknowable other on self can and does materialize in unthinkable social acts, policies, and experiments that defy all good sense, civil relations, and reason. For Coetzee, every other’s face grips us because the Other reminds us that our existence is dependent on someone that is not ourselves (Lévinas, 1969). This reminder—that our existence is not our own—feels compelling and threatening, and produces in one’s self strange effects and desires one acts out toward others (Derrida, 1978a). In other words, the fascism of the Child’s face that affectively grips us is the Adult problem that plagues his existence. The tyranny of the Child, we also are, does not go away if we imagine a world untethered to children. A future of no children does not increase our capacity to enjoy or liberate sexual desire repressed in and by our own childhoods. The fascism of our own baby face is internalized in and as the stranger inside ourselves (Kristeva, 1991). The baby’s not yet human face to whom

Introduction: Novel Pedagogy  5 we feel beholden surfaces hateful inadequacies unremembered and reimagined as the other. As we were all once children, we cannot wish the Child away. Coetzee’s counterintuitive call to young men to take up care-giving of children recognizes this and makes one think: What if we lived in a world where young, virile men were summoned to raise children rather than to socially constructed desires: Sexual and capitalist conquest, and other adolescent5 forms of violent militancy, sport, and ideology? (Kristeva & Mock, 2016). What might this collective, committed, and concerted cohort of responsible young teachers bring to children in an old world now endangered by human beings, by men? In his suggestion to the young people who might consider teaching young children, Coetzee addresses a new generation of adults with their potential to contribute newness to a world in dire need of existential and planetary sustainability. Taking young men symbolically into his arms, Coetzee whispers a dreamlike future of teaching to young people, like a mother with her child, sharing his dream of a person’s potential in the big wide world. And he summons young people to teaching to bring actual children to the forefront of intellectual, political, and social life and endeavor.

Pedagogy: To Lead a Child Coetzee’s audacious call to teaching is telling. Pedagogy, I argue throughout this book, is radically at the forefront of Coetzee’s literary thought in his essays and fiction. Leaning back onto the etymological meaning of pedagogy as an adult guide to the child’s formation, pedagogy is figured in the narrative thrust of Coetzee’s novels. The offstage narrator becomes a kind of pedagogue, leading our thoughts into places we did not entertain until we entered the ruins of the world as uniquely depicted in a Coezteean novel. According to the Oxford dictionary, the word pedagogy originates from the Greek word pedagogue. Pais is the word for boy, where agogos means guide. Paideia refers to childhood education and the general and/or worldly knowledge needed to bring children into civic life in the co-construction of a learned and engaged citizenry for the common good, for the good of the commons. To raise children to be engaged adults, teachers need continual education in the humanizing activities in and of the time, society, and political orders. Pedagogues in the polis adopted the character of the forced and voluntary servant entrusted with the vocation of leading young boys to school, the house of knowledge. Literally, pedagogy means to lead or guide the child into a world. Without explicating a theory of pedagogy, Coetzee is drawn to paideia’s humanizing force, at once repressing and liberating. Coetzee’s

6  Introduction: Novel Pedagogy concerns with children’s education, Xiaoran Hu (2018) finds, is particularly pressing in his work of late: In Coetzee’s writing during South Africa’s transitional decade, his endless skepticism of the precariousness and instability of textual practice – including his own novels and his critique of colonialist and neocolonialist forms of power – become gradually associated more with the trope of the child and the issue of children’s education. (p. 7) This book shows that education in the context of personal formation is Coetzee’s enduring concern. It is one I find deliberated6 in his first works7 and as early as In the Heart of the Country. In this novel, Magda is not simply a mad woman but “made” mad by her vicious and sexually abusive father’s home-schooled education. Captive to her father’s brutal treatment of women, the tale told of Magda’s mad character is taught and learned. Trapped in her dreamlike out of mind and body state, we cannot rely on Magda’s fragmented and warring version of events. The story as told cannot account for what happened. It cannot give reasons for Magda’s adult formation. Yet, Magda is trying to tell something terrible about how she has learned to be. The educational horror of Magda’s upbringing rings inexplicably true for readers with little idea of what she has unspeakably endured from childhood. Coetzee characterizes immeasurable qualities of memory, desire, silence, care, language, violence, relation, as key to the internal operations of pedagogy. In his characters, Coetzee depicts pedagogy as an interior problem where one’s desires for knowing clash with those of others. In this seductive sense, pedagogy is already invested in making its subject. Various figures of teachers populate Coetzee’s novels. Memorable among these is Elizabeth Costello, writer, celebrity lecturer, and mother featured in a number of his books. Elizabeth Curren from Age of Iron and David Lurie of Disgrace are both former professors. The teacher figure of three of Coetzee’s recent novels features the pedagogue in the character of the scholar-guide Simón. In the latest novels, the maternal teacher, Simón, characterizes the ancient ideals of paideia. He takes on the humanizing duty of responsibly guiding his young orphaned charge through a post-apocalyptic world ruined by hubris, violence, and folly. One might argue that a version of the fraught pedagogical relation of Simón and David of his latest novels appears in all Coetzee’s novels. Each relation is contingent on particular social, historical, educational, and personal circumstances. Through these depictions of pedagogy, ordinary and profound, Coetzee steadfastly holds to the humanist idea of paideia. Although his characters never use the term, pedagogy, as being affected by the other’s truth, the relation is present in each of the novels.

Introduction: Novel Pedagogy  7 Pedagogy, for Coetzee, is not schooling (Giroux, 2010). It does not refer to the didactic or allegorical moral lessons of some literary works. Coetzee is not a writer of Aesop’s fables, although, in my reading, post-colonial allegory plays a leading role in the narrative operation of his work (Slemon, 1987). Coetzee’s pedagogy is also not of the enlightened intellectual but tends to resonate with Rancière’s (1991) story of the ignorant schoolteacher. Coetzee’s narrative construction of pedagogy does not cite scholars of education or composition scholars (Gallop, 1995). If his depiction of pedagogy provocatively deliberates Jane Gallop’s (1995) erotics of the teacher’s knowledge, his novels do not celebrate it. In this regard, Coetzee’s novels seem to question the folly of teachers8 who over-play their students’ ordinary love; worse is to fall for it, “loving” their students beyond the mandate to educate. The character of David Lurie offers a disturbing example of a narcissist teacher who deliberately confuses his young student’s desire for his knowledge with her sexual desiring him, twisting his authority into serial abuses of power with female students. The novel depictions of pedagogy also critique the hallowed narrative of personal and social change, driving the educational narratives of missionaries, Marxists, and colonialists. Elizabeth Costello’s failed yet noble Animal Rights mission enacted “to save my soul” exemplifies a skepticism toward teaching that revolutionizes, saves, rescues, or converts others (EC 86). In the many failed teaching missions of his characters, the narrative critiques discourses of supposed transformative educational projects as the panacea of our times (Nussbaum, 2010). Rather than invoke ideal or disparaging educational discourses, Coetzee refigures pedagogy’s potential in the useless service and care of the lowly teaching servant entrusted to bring young children into the world. For this he leans on Hannah Arendt’s (1968) claim that “natality is the essence of education” (p. 196). The fact of being born, she (1958) writes, marks “one’s capacity to begin” (p. 247). Natality does not refer to one’s nature nor does the accident of birth determine the outcomes of one’s life. Instead, for Arendt (1958), natality marks the ontological event and potential of being born someone in the “world as strangers” (p. 9). This most radical sense of newness, embodied in the event of a birth of an infant is, for Arendt (1958), an auspicious occasion for pedagogy. And yet, Arendt too-hastily qualifies natality in terms of education rather than paideia. As with her ancient predecessors, she leaves pedagogy out of her thoughts on education. Similarly, after the ancients, little philosophical consideration is given to pedagogy for its leading role in subject formation in social and political life. Coetzee’s novel return of pedagogy to education is as it arises in a relation of teaching and learning between self and other. In this book, education refers to the socializing project making the child fit for adult society while pedagogy refers to the vital adult-child relation forming

8  Introduction: Novel Pedagogy one’s personhood. With this distinction, education pedagogically begins at birth in the arms of the mother and with significant existential and actual pain for both. Without adequate resources, the physically and emotionally weakened mother is put upon through word and labor to bring the dependent, clamoring, unintelligible creature into existence. Arendt (1958) implicitly credits the family, the maternal environment, with giving the child her first experiences of learning to grow up in a strange world: Because the child must be protected against the world, his traditional place is in the family, whose adult members daily return back from the outside world and withdraw into the security of private life within four walls. (p. 186) When a child goes to school, her formation in the family is altered.9 Learning to read and write her existence in a language not her own reforms and renews her self in the world (Derrida, 1998). Caught in between the family and school, the question the child will continually face is: Who are you? (Arendt, 1958, p. 178). Coetzee’s novels are fictionally in pursuit of this existential question tied to education. In his latest novels, the question “who are you” is persistently posed to the child by the adults and/or teachers entrusted to guide the tiny migrant’s way into the world. Reorienting the question of the other’s existence in questions of one’s own, his novels highlight the vital tie between self and other, such that there can be no formation of subjectivity that is not learned from the other (Derrida, 1998). Who are you is dependent on Who am I and a question even more difficult to wrap one’s mind around: Who are we to each other? The bildungsroman of self-learning in Coetzee’s novels is of self-other conflict. Coetzee’s pedagogical experiment with the novel as witness to conflicted self-formation provides the reader with unprecedented access to the other’s fraught interior recesses of learning. Coetzee’s extraordinary and incisive rendition of the other’s intense affect on the self’s formation provides the reader with a novel lens for thinking through the vicissitudes of human existence. This basic human experience of being affected by others via the lives of fictional characters steers Coetzee’s novel pedagogy. Deeply affecting forms of pedagogy, in the words and experience of Elizabeth Costello, “contribute a change” in us rather than instruct us (EC 160). Or as David Lurie comes to reluctantly learn: “the one who comes to teach learns the keenest of lessons, while those who come to learn learn nothing” (Disgrace 5). If there is student learning in Coetzee’s novels, it is beyond the teacher’s intention. This holds true for all teachers, whether it be of a parent, child, or complete stranger. These insights on

Introduction: Novel Pedagogy  9 not knowing how and if a character learns make reading Coetzee’s novels a stunning experience. As with a memorable teacher, Coetzee’s novels remain in mind long after we have left their acquaintance. Reading Coetzee’s convocation speech in the context of his oeuvre, one finds his concern for children’s education to be shared by many and, especially, actual teachers in schools across the world. In Coetzee’s novels, the child’s potential for living depends on the way she is pedagogically brought into a world. Education by way of pedagogy (rather than schooling) provides the impetus and meaning for living well and better with others in the world. Of course, as with anything forming subjects, there are no guarantees. In light of the author’s long commitment to pedagogy, ironic is Poplak’s (2013) damning remark that “Coetzee humiliates himself.” Rather than to be avoided, humiliation is faced in the author’s aesthetic of humility delivering truthful insight to young people. His lyrical delivery of hard truths, his friend and poet Ariel Dorfman (2003) finds, strip bare the human contemporary condition. He explores the very bleak landscape of the human soul in our times and does so with, I would say, radiance, luminosity, tenderness. […] He doesn’t lie about the human condition. He doesn’t lie about his characters. He goes to the depth of what we are as human beings: Men, women, beggars, princes. Going to the depth of what we are, Coetzee’s writing can make one feel humiliated or feel, as Arendt10 (1994) says, in a different way and historical moment: “ashamed of being human. This elemental shame, which many people of the most various nationalities share with one another […] has not yet found an adequate political expression” (p. 131). If humiliation has no adequate expression in politics, it does in both pedagogy and writing literature. No other vocation, except perhaps birthing babies, mothering, nursing, and sex work, makes one feel as humiliated as teaching and on a daily basis. Or, as Lurie also says, “He continues to teach […] because it teaches him humility, brings it home to him who he is in the world” (Disgrace 5). In Coetzee’s literary world, humiliation takes many forms, even in a convocation speech, following the word’s etymology. “Humiliation,” Wayne Koestenbaum (2011) reminds us, “means to be made humble. To be made human?” He goes on to say, “Human; and ‘humiliation,’ do not share an etymological root, but even in Latin the two words — humanus and humiliatio — suggestively share a prefix” (p. 1). Rather than yield to the pejorative sense of Poplak’s meaning, Coetzee’s convocation speech lifts up humility to bear humiliation on part of our kind as necessary to re-finding humanity, ironically as a return to learning who we are in teaching others. Humility, as Coetzee tells it, seems to involve entering

10  Introduction: Novel Pedagogy into the elemental, maternal wellspring and care-giving profession of the pedagogue. From this life-giving relation, both teacher and student and student and teacher gain humility from each other in a chance to review the sentient and sensitive people we still might be. Still, despite holding on to pedagogy, dismal is Coetzee’s own history with the teaching profession as a former university professor. For him, teaching is anything but ideal. In an interview with David Atwell, Coetzee discloses his trouble teaching and relating to his students: “The students I taught in my composition classes might as well have been Trobriand Islanders, so inaccessible to me were their culture, their recreations, their animating ideas” (in Atwell, 1992, p. 51). Echoing these sentiments, in the fictional biography Summertime, the author is posthumously reported to claim: The truth is, he does not really want this job. He does not want it because in his heart he knows he is not cut out to be a teacher. Lacks the temperament. Lacks zeal. (Summertime 207) And, echoing the words of the dead author, David Lurie, his most infamous and disappointed fictional teacher character, finds after decades of teaching the Romantics, that: Because he has no respect for the material he teaches, he makes no impression on his students. They look through him when he speaks, forget his name. Their indifference galls him more than he will admit. Nevertheless he fulfills to the letter his obligations toward them, their parents, and the state. (Disgrace 4) It is precisely these unbearably real depictions of teaching that urge on my engagement of it in his novels. After all, as Freud (1937) also notes, education is the most vexing of professions (p. 149). It is with this particular agony that the teacher characters are made to contend. In Coetzee’s depiction, the vocation of teaching feels the way teachers experience it: With despair, anguish, violence, insecurity, resentment, and deep depression. And yes, at times, teaching feels utterly humiliating. Education in Coetzee’s novels resembles little of the theories of the good, justice-seeking, and honorable profession we revere. Still despite the author’s trouble with education, in his novels we are given glimpses of grace, fleeting moments of pedagogy’s life-altering force. As I will show throughout this book, through his depiction of everything it takes to teach others, readers receive an inside view of it and what teachers feel they are trying to do. More often than not, the character of the teacher fails others terribly and sometimes beyond reproach. Still the teacher

Introduction: Novel Pedagogy  11 keeps going stirred on by a child’s boundless love, the other’s love for (her) knowledge.

Outline of Book In this book, I bring the ideas of contemporary critical and educational theorists to Coetzee’s depictions of pedagogy. In affective readings, I generate new thinking on education’s role in the “just” formation and reformation of our humanity, lives, and societies. Pedagogy provides the profound lens to recognize humanity, one’s own and that of the other. It takes form in and as a spoken word, aesthetic address, circulation of power, generator of knowledge, and reparative action. Pedagogy, I argue, is the arbitrator of Coetzee’s fictional ideas of human existence. In this sense, pedagogy takes a keynote in the novel deliberations of human kind and cruelty in the fictional worlds of the elusive author. I suggest that it is Coetzee’s aesthetic and novel use of pedagogy rather than scenes of rape, violence, repression, and race that, as argued differently by many academic scholars, spark intense engagement, helplessness, and suffering from readers and critics of his texts. Mining the sense of its ancient and humanist meaning as paideia, Coetzee looks to adult-child relations as the somewhat impossible means by which a thoughtful and gentle, a good enough humanity might be fostered. The humanity in question is curiously not of the child or the other in Coetzee. The humanity at stake is of the parent, teacher, adult, the author, colonizer, the one presuming to know better than those captive to his word, act, and deed. In the chapters to follow, I examine Coetzee’s construction of the unique figure of the failed teacher to expand on the claims of pedagogy I make in this introduction. In Coetzee’s novels, the teacher is figured in and by the one she is entrusted to teach. Following the shape-shifting figure of the teacher, this book qualifies a version of pedagogy as our infancy of existence rethinking some of the most difficult social problems facing our humankind in the shaky times we live. I open the book with Coetzee’s invocation to pedagogy and his mother made in his Nobel Address in Geneva. In his reading of the relationship between Defoe and Friday, and between Defoe and Robinson, the characters and the author, Coetzee delivers novel pedagogy that is affective, maternal, literary, and aesthetic. Following his depiction, I discuss pedagogy as a self-other relation that instantiates and sustains the lifelong formation and reformation of the subject. I suggest that the self-altering, affecting, and authorial operations of the maternal relation give pedagogy its initial and lasting force. Chapter 2 turns to Coetzee’s novel Age of Iron to situate a maternal theory of pedagogy in the words and actions of the fictional teacher, Mrs. Curren. Reckoning with her cancer diagnosis, Mrs. Curren is caught in the troubles in schools in South Africa when her housekeeper’s

12  Introduction: Novel Pedagogy sons seek uninvited refuge in her home. The novel takes place during the township uprisings against Apartheid as black children left school to participate in armed, adult resistance. My theorization of maternal pedagogy emerges from my reading of Mrs. Curren’s long-form address of her estranged child generating a firsthand report of personal and historical events. Faintly articulating the teacher’s too-late sense of responsibility and duty for the black children under her care, the novel offers insights into how the white teacher painfully comes to “unlearn”11 colonial and racist teachings that do harm to her own and other people’s children (Spivak, 1990). Chapter 3 follows Elizabeth Costello’s pedagogical mission to save her and human souls. Using the figure of the failed teacher as it appears in her lectures on the “Lives of Animals,” I suggest that profound learning can occur for the teacher when she breaks down and finds herself unable to communicate what she means to others. In Chapter 4, I turn to Coetzee’s most troubling teacher figure, Professor David Lurie, main protagonist of the Nobel Prize-winning novel Disgrace. My reading of this novel follows the post-education of a humiliated David Lurie. I also focus on the role the female figures play in the novel’s narration of disgrace and in my analysis of Lurie’s posteducation. The unrelenting pedagogy of the novel moves the main character and, with him, the reader to reconsider what it has meant to be human in South Africa for those who are deemed non-human. In Chapter 5, I turn to Coetzee’s explicitly educational novels in his recent Jesus Trilogy. In this chapter, I read the first of the three books, Childhood of Jesus, in the maternal and pedagogical relation of a man and a boy who is not his son. In a post-apocalyptic and amnesiac world, two migrant figures seek refuge in a supposedly socialist society passively hostile to their foreign presence. The pedagogical themes of adult authority, mutuality, responsibility, judgment, and care are structured in relation to the boy’s dependence, vulnerability, unknown traumatic circumstance, and coming into literacy under a total stranger’s care. Embracing the bind of the adult-child relation, the teacher learns a new way to live in and with the world from the child. In the final chapter, I return to the figure of the novelist as teacher through my lyrical rendition of the pedagogical moments arising in and for the teacher characters in all the novels. I return to a childhood story initiating Coetzee’s life in letters. And I suggest Coetzee’s novels generate a mindful space of pedagogical freedom where readers can singularly and collectively contemplate other ways of learning to be someone. From pedagogically mediated depictions of human life that make us wonder, think, and imagine differently, we (can) act in the world. In this sense, to act as a pedagogical subject is to serve with felt deliberation in and of the world with others.

Introduction: Novel Pedagogy  13 In this book, I think with Coetzee’s narrative action as it swings through the thoughts and experiences of his failed and failing teachers fumbling to deliver news of humanity in a broken world. Infinitely sensitive and perpetually reeling by the political circumstances of his upbringing and the times and finding little hope in political or intellectual leaders, Coetzee has repeatedly turned to literature, free enquiry, and the opening of the mind, the hallmarks of humanistic academic study, as the last vestige of hope for thinking in a world driven by thoughtless death and destruction. As he (2016b) maintains in a letter to Professor John Higgins at University of Cape Town: But in the end, I believe, you will have to make a stand. You will have to say: we need free enquiry because freedom of thought is good in itself. We need institutions where teachers and students can pursue unconstrained the life of the mind because such institutions are, in ways that are difficult to pin down, good for all of us: good for the individual and good for society. (p. 9) Tellingly, Coetzee places the domain of free enquiry in the life of the mind generated by paideia, the pedagogical humanist aims to produce well-read individuals that contribute to the common good and wellbeing (Nethersole, 2015). He situates this aim in self-other relations rather than in the sole and expert purview of intellectuals, academics, entrepreneur, politicians, artists, novelists, or even dreamers. Responding to the good professor’s concern with the relentless neoliberal attack on the life of the mind in the humanistic university, Coetzee wagers free enquiry on pedagogy. Here, pedagogy is characterized as the vital need of young people and children of their teachers, “to pursue unconstrained the life of the mind” in big dreams and ideas that bring universal meaning and good to all of our lives. Despite the human’s incredible capacity for self-implosion and world destruction, pedagogy’s soft force, Coetzee (2016b) counsels, will remain between us long after the university, free society, and the world fall, as it did in Poland: In institutions of higher learning in Poland, in the bad old days, if on ideological grounds you were not permitted to teach real philosophy, you let it be known that you would be running a philosophy seminar in your living room, outside office hours, outside the institution. In that way the study of philosophy was kept alive. Something along the same lines will be needed to keep the humanistic studies alive in a world in which universities have redefined themselves out of existence. (p. 10)

14  Introduction: Novel Pedagogy Pedagogy—that which facilitates our existence in the symbolic relation between self and other—is the fictional stuff of our dreams, great thinking, humanity, and lives. And last is pedagogy, left to stand and pick up all our broken human pieces wrought by what men do. The birth of a child survives all catastrophes of thought and limb. This futile but dogged hope reminds us that we will still rise to the occasion of a child’s birth feeling for the other’s merciful and meaningful sustenance. With this chance of newness the baby begets, we are given the capacity to think; reason; love; act; and, above all, live well and anew in feeling for our tiny and fleeting lives beholden to others.

Notes

Introduction: Novel Pedagogy  15

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ideological fervor, the adult community needs to hear what the adolescent’s dire need to believe (in religiosity, in theory, in political ideology, and other cultish and/or closed-text endeavors) is saying (as they say different things at different historical times to different people). Not only do adults need to hear our young but to pedagogically respond in and with opening and softening vehicles of thought, experience, and suggestions, in the way that I feel Coetzee models with the young men with his convocation address. My educational reading of Heart of the Country is summoned by and indebted to a note my colleague Lucy Graham (2016, in personal communication) uncovers in her archival research. Dated on 21 October 1974, the fragment of a thought reads, “the dull and ordinary childhood of someone who by subsequent action (e.g. Hitler, saints lives) renders the story justifiable” (Graham, 2016, in personal communication). Four decades later, in The Childhood of Jesus and its sequel The Schooldays of Jesus, the story of a child’s dull and ordinary childhood is told. (Will justifications of David’s story come in the final book of the Jesus trilogy?) Perhaps, the stories of a child’s formation delivered in the Jesus books first germinate in the author’s jot-note deliberating the character of Magda. I am grateful to Lucy Graham for alerting me to his note. Our discussions of pedagogy in the context of fascism (rough notes, 2016) took place while I was writing this book. Graham’s deeply informed and sensitive thoughts continue to guide the trajectory of my own. I am also grateful to fellow readers Lucy Graham, Michael Deckard, Jana Giles, Agata Szczeszak-Brewer, of the Prato reading group, for their ongoing contributions to my educational theorizing of literature. In the #Metoo era, much of the recent debate on students, sex, and the professor focuses on the issue of consensual sexual relations between adults. Little attention is placed on the sadistic, cruel culture of the professoriate that continues to uphold the idea that the professor’s superior knowledge grants one the right to do whatever one wants to their students. As disturbing for me as the abuses themselves is the professoriate’s enabling defense of such abuse committed by themselves and colleagues in the name of brilliance or non-normativity, as if this somehow absolves one of one’s mistreatment of students. The academic and institutional enablement of power abuses, under the cover of expert knowledge and/or perverse desire, is a subtext of Lurie’s collegial tribunal adjudicating his “misconduct” with his student Melanie. Arendt (1968) fails to theorize this alteration to the child collapsing the private sphere of the family with the school, as if the child’s transition from domestic life with her mother to the public life of school is seamless. If school is supposed to be a domestic sphere separate from political interference, it is one unlike the family as education lies in the public domain and is overseen by the state. In Age of Iron and Childhood of Jesus, Coetzee depicts this private/public conflict as part of the child’s education that involves children becoming subject to and of adult politics. Arendt (1994) says this in response to Germans who approach her after the Shoah to express their shame in being human. Coetzee aesthetically implies that humility, generosity, and service to others is required to pedagogically express this elemental shame of what we humans do to our children, to others. Shame is perhaps lost on politics, the shameless profession, and can only be pedagogically addressed. The sense of unlearning is not decolonial, as put forth by Spivak (1990). One has to work through to loosen one’s passionate attachments to vicious social orders advancing one’s existence in order to “unlearn one’s privilege as one’s loss.” Loss here involves engaging a sustained felt and studied deliberation of

16  Introduction: Novel Pedagogy one’s history, securing one’s place in the world at the expense of others—not to assign blame but to take responsibility and perhaps, chart a new way (as does Lucy in Disgrace). Like Coetzee, over her oeuvre, Spivak (2012) identifies literary reading, garnered by an aesthetic education in the humanities, as affording students with the means of developing renewed human relations doing justice to others. Following her, my view is that this practice of reading is one of feeling for the situation of others that begins with the infant’s aesthetic experience of her (m)others (and not literature). The maternal relation precedes and orients the pedagogical one in the humanities and ought to ground an aesthetic and attuned education.

1

Rereading an Old Foe Significant Pedagogy and the Novel

But to return to my new companion. I was greatly delighted with him, and made it my business to teach him everything that was proper to make him useful, handy, and helpful; but especially to make him speak, and understand me when I spoke; and he was the aptest scholar there ever was-Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe. (Coetzee, 2003b)

The epigraph to J.M. Coetzee’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech contains a thought of pedagogy. Entitled “He and his man,” the address depicts the pedagogical relation of two men estranged by history. In his telling, pedagogy precedes and exceeds what happens in school or education writ large. Teaching and learning form the intimate relation of knowledge and non-knowledge held between self-other. Pedagogy emerges in a character’s re-finding significance the other’s knowledge can hold for a self across a lifetime. The question of education, what it is, does, and can do to a person, persists across Coetzee’s literary investigations of human existence. Pedagogy places a heavy toll on both teacher and student. Pedagogy is shown to be a fraught endeavor, operating on an uneven economy of desire, knowledge, and social difference. The words opening Coetzee’s lecture are not his. They are written by Daniel Defoe, author of the renowned English children’s book Robinson Crusoe. Globally exported and read by millions of British Commonwealth children, the seminal colonial text tells the story of a young Englishman, Robinson, and his adventures in the South Seas. On an unnamed Southern island Robinson encounters Savages. He befriends one whose tongue slave owners cut off. He re-names the man Friday. Friday is no ordinary slave and as such Robinson takes Friday under his wing. He makes him his manservant, a step up from his formerly enslaved status. The patronizing endearment My man serves as Robinson’s attempt to elevate Friday from his unknowable past. In the Nobel lecture, Coetzee delivers a reading of a new story of the relation of men caught in the distinctly onto-epistemological problem of needing to know the unknown other. The author’s fantasy of

18  Rereading an Old Foe companionship exceeding the circumstances of colonial contact is hinged on education. Robinson characterizes the teacher’s desires for the student: “to teach him everything that was proper to make him useful, handy, and helpful” and “to make him speak, and understand me when I spoke.” Teaching is what the teacher wants for his pupil, what he wants him to be and know. The teacher’s conflicted feelings for Friday rests on Robinson’s1 desire to make him human like him. To be him, his teacher requires of Friday an education of and from his colonial master. What the silenced and silent Friday already knows of his self is anyone’s guess. A fundamental inequality between himself and Friday lies at the heart of Robinson’s educational aims: With no tongue, Friday cannot speak his desire or knowledge. As his servant, Friday is forcibly subject to his teachings. With no say and no liberty, Friday lacks sovereignty. He is totally at Robinson’s mercy. Robinson tells him what he knows, what he needs to know, what he wants to know, where he is to live, who he is, and who he can be. Colonial history furthers their difference. Formerly enslaved, Friday’s former existence is untold. What is known of Friday takes its basis in what Robinson wants for him to be—a properly educated Englishman like him. Robinson’s desire to know Friday, to teach him, characterizes the libidinal structure that grounds pedagogy. We first gain a sense of this fraught feeling for wanting to know our (m)others when we are infants, born inhuman, as Lyotard (1991) terms it. Immobile, dependent, and ripped into a world without words to render legible our existence, we are beholden to a mother2 to tell us who we are and what we need to know leading us into ourselves and the world. To become human then, as Lyotard (1991) insists, requires education: If humans are born human, as cats are born cats (within a few hours), it would not be … I don’t even say desirable, which is another question, but simply possible, to educate them. That children have to be educated is a circumstance which only proceeds from the fact that they are not completely led by nature, not programmed. The institutions which constitute culture supplement this native lack. (p. 3) In his stress of the word led, Lyotard implies that education is a circumstance that requires the supplement of pedagogy. Education rests on the case that children can be led; they have the capacity to become other than they are. Pedagogy, as Coetzee depicts in writing, operates on the child and the teacher’s capacity to be significantly impressed upon, altered, and renewed. This is how teacher and student come to asymmetrically know the truth of each other’s existence in the world. Pedagogy is formal in the literary sense: A child is literally being formed and figured by language as she learns how to communicate.

Rereading an Old Foe  19 The  storying of selfhood begins with our parents. Words our parents attribute to our being, like girl and healthy, fair and dark, pen significant narrations of ourselves. Words that qualify a lived existence begin to tell the story of a self, subject to discourse, a story that historically narrates our entry into the world. As we grow, our singular being is further subject to other social and cultural discourses of being. As they benignly purport to deliver knowledge to us, discourses of our existence secure how it is we can think and be in the world. Coetzee’s depiction of the intersubjective, affective workings of pedagogy, as I theorize in this book, challenge common understandings of education as theorized and enacted in Western philosophy, research, and practice. Situating pedagogy in the subject formation of the infant, I date the time of pedagogy to infancy. Pedagogy, I argue, is activated at birth, when one’s natal existence is given over to the (m)other. This intimate time with a (m)other we never forget but cannot remember deeply affects us. This primary relation we hold with our mother affectionately mediates knowledge of self and other, and the worlds of difference that lie between each. Pedagogy, thus theorized, is an intra- and interrelation instantiating the subject. The idea of subject instantiation and formation comes from Michel Foucault (1982). The subject, Foucault reminds us, is both the speaking person and the person spoken for, as power is mobilized under culturally charged dominant discourses. Power, Foucault (1982) writes, is: a total structure of actions brought to bear upon possible actions; it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; in the extreme it constrains or forbids absolutely; it is nevertheless always a way of acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action. A set of actions upon other actions. (p. 220) In his description of a subject that both acts and is acted upon, Foucault invokes pedagogy. The words Foucault uses to describe power, incite, induce, seduce, also qualify the soft force of pedagogy as it enigmatically circulates between self and other. “There are two meanings of the word ‘subject’”: Foucault (1982) claims, “subject to someone else by control and dependence; and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to” (p. 212). The inner and discursive making of the subject is distinctly pedagogical, informing and forming a person. My conceptualization of pedagogy is from the position of an educational scholar who observes, studies, describes, analyzes, and qualifies intra and relational processes of teaching and learning in infants and

20  Rereading an Old Foe very young children. Pedagogy, I find, is a highly affective and transferential space mediating subjectivity in the two ways Foucault (1982) claims. “Learning is a [psycho]social relation,” I write, “that occurs between two, between object and learner, between past and present selves, between person and person …” (Mishra Tarc, 2013, p. 388). As an intra and interpersonal relation, pedagogy inserts itself in the affective and affecting processes of subject formation that precede discourse and ground literacy. In Coetzee’s novels, pedagogy is not explicitly described or discussed but felt to operate significantly in the narrative. We incredibly feel impressed upon in our readings of fictional characters. As the driver of plot, the reader experiences pedagogy in Coetzee’s literature through the aesthetic force of suggestion, insight, and knowledge. It is an affective force of literature that provokes learning and can and does contribute a change to one’s ideas and existence (EC, 155). Although Coetzee’s novels feature actual teachers and often failed ones, what is salient in his depiction of educational scenes is the lasting affect the other makes in the self. Highly charged scenes of teaching in his novels are wrought out from the inner life of the teacher. One’s capacity to learn and not learn is characterized as the self’s inner concession and revolt with the other. These intrasubjective conflicts in learning mediate and remediate knowledge of self and other. It is the rare case in Coetzee’s novels that the one subject to learning is depicted as doing so. In his story of pedagogy, teaching is depicted as insight generated from learning and not learning: It is the author that is made to learn from character, parent from child, teacher from student. In the lecture, this converse learning is depicted by “Robin,” the teacher: “How are they to be figured, this man and he? As master and slave? As brothers, twin brothers? As comrades in arms? Or as enemies, foes?” Here, Coetzee both invents the question and provides the impetus for rethinking the (im) possibility of humanizing the unequal relation of two men, an authorial and pedagogical problem that plagues Coetzee, years after first fictionally wrestling with it in Foe. Still, despite the author’s sustained puzzling out the relation of Friday and Robinson, it eludes him still. The authorial problem of two characters Coetzee fictionally poses is deeply pedagogical: How are they to be figured? Despite his expert command of writing, the author, like Robin (Defoe’s character), has not “figured out” how to write of the other in terms of his self. Although a literary puzzle in Coetzee’s telling, I read the desire to figure3 out the other as pedagogical: “figuring out” is key to Coetzee’s post-humanist understanding of education. Figuring out drives his literary pursuit of the human’s bad habit of projecting actual breathing and living subjects into figurations of the self rather than let them be themselves: Sovereign subjects inquiring into stories authored in their own right. Coetzee’s

Rereading an Old Foe  21 figuring out involves unraveling the literary figure to gain insight into the historically consolidated and political and social forces behind figuring the other in all its myriad animal and human animal forms, relation, and being. For this, he fictionally returns the figure to the maternal scene of pedagogy where political and social force is not yet channeled. Force is affectively registered resembling the aesthetic lure of ethics and art. Discourse, enabling epistemic authority, gives force its authorial, rhetorical, persuasive, and material power. As Derrida (1992) explains in “Force of Law”: For me, it [force] is always a question of differential force, of force  as difference of force, of force as différance (différance as a force différée-différante), of the relation between force and form, force and signification, performative force, illocutionary or perlocutionary force, of persuasive and rhetorical force, of affirmation by signature, but also and especially of all the paradoxical situations in which the greatest force and the greatest weakness strangely enough exchange places. (p. 929) Derrida’s definition of force is multifold and paradoxical. Force is deferred and differentiating. Force informs and forms. Force marks the space where its greatest and weakest potential exchange combine to gather strength or disarm. Despite these difficulties in pinning force down, it is important to note that force is diffuse: It is an informing rather than pre-forming mechanism of subjectivity. The instantiating of the subject in the maternal scene of pedagogy is by force not yet power. If power is inherent to knowledge in its textual forms, in our natal states force takes pedagogical form in affect: Transference, sway, and influence. Power impresses as it represses within the maternal relation. Force arises in the mother’s incoherent response to infant before and as it commits a child to the symbol, the epistemic plane enforcing the repressive power of men. As unknowable, Derrida (1982) argues, force affects the self’s difference. Re-spelling différence with an “a,” Derrida (1982) traces the (m)other’s affect as already giving citation to interiorities differentiating herself from the mother. Différance, Derrida writes (1982), is not, does not exist, is not a present-being (on) in any form; and we will be led to delineate also everything that it is not, that is, everything; and consequently, that it has neither existence nor essence. It derives from no category of being, whether present or absent. In other words, one cannot speak of différance. It is not. (p. 6)

22  Rereading an Old Foe Following Derrida, and as operating in the novels of Coetzee, I characterize pedagogy as negative force in its softest, superlative, and perhaps most insinuating and gestational form, as not, not yet word, not yet knowledge, not yet formation. If the philosopher-man Derrida (1982) refuses to name that sway of affect a-priori to symbol as anything other than “a,” the feminist and literary scholar Julia Kristeva speaks of the infant’s différance in and as revolt. The distinctly infantile dissent and dissatisfaction with one’s existence, impressed upon by mother, are expressed by revolt. Revolt, claims Julia Kristeva (1996) in The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt, is inherent to one’s pedagogical formation. Revolt produces selfhood in concert and counter to normative ones, conferring the child’s assent to the social assignation of proper names telling one’s being. Anyone heeding the wordless cry of an infant has felt the force of pedagogy and submitted to the baby’s drive to know (m)other. Without needing to know why revolt forces mothers to a baby’s side. The baby’s revolt appeal to as it reverberates in mother her will to live not only in infancy but across her life. Mental life is the only body of life that grips one at birth. This initial (and last) life of the mind, Kristeva (2014) explains, “knows that it will only be saved if it gives itself the time and space of revolt: to break, to remember, to re-do” (p. 3). Pedagogy in the instantiation and subsequent formation of the subject forcefully expresses the infant’s will to live. Intimate revolt, as Kristeva (2014) terms it, is critical to “keeping the psyche alive” (p. 7). In the infant’s inner and unspeakable revolt with the agonies circulating in the mother’s care (Kristeva, 1996), the child will constantly labor to find and lose a self. And in this psychical in-mind and recursive process of formation and reformation, of losing and finding a self, a child becomes someone over and over again. Characterized as and in the renewal of self and worlds, intimate revolt is pedagogical and as such pre-political (Kristeva, 1996). Not immune to politics or social maneuvering, pedagogy none-the-less generates a refuge of interior self and (m)other relation that is a creative resource and response to knowledge of one’s conditions of the world. In Psychic Life of Power, Judith Butler (1997) brings Foucault’s version of power to the idea of inner life that seems to vitally acknowledge infancy. But once again, and like Foucault, she absences from the epistemological scene, the ontological and pre-verbal, the not knowable and non-remembered time of the infant. Although Butler (1997) makes distinct internal from external life, she fails to theorize the latter in terms of the pre-verbal and unknowable state of the infant. As such she collapses the inarticulate and non-known realm of infant ontology into her need to attach to the knowable, epistemological realm of adult exteriority: “The child does not know to what or whom he/she attaches; yet

Rereading an Old Foe  23 the infant as well as the child must attach in order to persist in and as itself,” she claims (Butler, 1997, p. 8, emphasis added). How does one know if and how the infant attaches? How does one know that the infant does not know the (m)other to whom she is bound? As infancy is forgotten, there is no way for Butler or anyone to know what it is an infant senses and feels at infancy. Derrida (1982) only goes as far as to mark that affective knowing with a lowercase letter “a” that initiates the beginning of an alphabetic, symbolizing system. But to say the infant does not know her own affectedness and attachment highlights the limits of adult-centrism. Declaring the infant does not know describes adult ignorance of and refusal to acknowledge and hear what it is an infant can and does know.4 The fact is that the adult does not know how and what the infant knows. It is this not knowing that plagues the adult supposed to know. The baby knows enough to cry out her presence, to make herself known to others at birth. As Klein (1952) insists, if we cannot comprehend the baby’s expression, it does not mean knowledge does not exist. But because adults equate knowledge with intelligible speech, they fail to account for knowledge that is unspoken or hard to hear. As Coetzee’s Mrs. Curren describes, the newborn baby’s bodily knowledge of existence is condemned as unheard: But have you ever seen a newborn baby? Let me tell you, you would find it hard to tell the difference between boy and girl. Every baby has the same puffy-looking fold between the legs. The spout, the tendril that is said to mark out the boy is no great thing, really. Very little to make the difference between life and death. Yet everything else, everything indefinite, everything that gives when you press it, is condemned unheard. I am arguing for that unheard. (AOI 146, emphasis added) In Coetzee’s literature, the indefinite appears as affect, it does not speak what it is says. Affect is, as Lyotard (1991, 2002, 2006) describes it, mute.5 And for both Mrs. Curren and Lyotard, affect defies words. To hear what affectivity says, not in words, requires the renewed capacity for incredible infantile intelligence, for felt reading wrought by not knowing what we feel. It requires felt training of aesthetic experiences rendered in and by the face of the (m)other, literature, the arts, terror, and the beautiful. Writing of Lyotard’s debt to thought, Kirsten Locke (2012) insists: […] [A]esthetic affectivity is described as infancy because of the affective state of inarticulacy and muteness that occurs before meaning and signification. The affective state of infancy means that

24  Rereading an Old Foe art exists, and no system or apparatus of the law can harness that creativity as energy precisely because this mute infancy lies outside the ‘adult’ world of articulation. The infant already knows and activates what the adult has forgotten but registers through feeling, none-the less. The infant deploys this deeply affecting aspect of knowledge outside the adult world of articulation in her dire need to draw her mother’s attention to her existence. We forget how to feel out knowledge in this way (for the insides of the mother). As we acquire language, words overtake what the child feels to know is true and cannot be said out loud. But some experiences in adulthood remind us what it meant to feel for knowledge lost for words: Falling in love, birthing a child, learning a new language, witnessing one die. The problem of how and what the other knows, which Coetzee sets up through the inarticulate Friday and silent others,6 saturates the maternal relation. Constantly subject to the relation and care of mother, the infant is an exemplar of pedagogical subject formation. Immobile, reaching out, and without words, she is radically dependent on (m)other and as such completely subject to her. At the same time, at this earliest stage of existence, she is wholly subject to her unspeakable hallucinating interiority. She is totally dependent on inner forces of feeling to survive. In her mind, an infant is already trying to get away from her mother. Nearly autistic,7 somehow and despite every obstacle, in feeling for the mother the infant builds up internal resources to revolt, to make herself known to and apart from her. This affective transference of self-other expression and counterexpression is at the heart of my novel conception of pedagogical relations. Language mediates but does not alleviate the teacher’s problem of not knowing if and how the student learns from the teacher. Evidence of the student’s learning only provides proof that an aspect of teaching has produced some related response in the form of a sentence, a word, a book, a proof. But the teacher has no idea of the impression and significance imbued in the student’s intangible learning. Butler’s (1997) making a politics of psychic life through the analogy of childhood dependence fails to account for the child’s a-political, anti-social, pre-verbal infantile knowledge of selfhood. The experience of dependence (terror, incomprehension, unintelligibility) institutes the infant’s need of intelligibility that cannot yet be articulated. Instead her feelings for self find a correspondent in the mother’s symbols that are always already normative. Or as Foucault (2003) explains, “The norm is not at all defined as a natural law but rather by the exacting and coercive role it can perform in the domains in which it is applied. The norm consequently lays claim to power” (p. 50, emphasis added). The norm’s coercive claim to power is brought about, I add, by maternal delivery, by force. It is not so much that the child “desires the conditions of one’s own

Rereading an Old Foe  25 subordination […] to persist[s] as oneself,” as Butler (1997) claims (p. 9). Rather, subordination is part and parcel of the affectionate conditions of selfhood offered to the baby by the mother. The baby persists in selfcapitulation to make her self known to the (m)other because she needs the (m)other’s love to live. Being an inwardly and unrecognizable human in need of the other’s love subordinates the self to the will of others. Our existence is totally dependent upon the other’s pronunciation to hear and express the self (Derrida, 1998, p. 9). Derrida (1998) brings our dependence on the other home when he claims, “I have a language. It is not mine” (p. 6). The baby’s drive to know rests on the mother’s personal and social desires for her: The other’s affectively felt desires populate the infant being from infancy. The mother’s voracious desire installs in the baby a pedagogy of the self that is bound to the delivery of the other’s care, words, and treatment. Missing from the metaphysical explanations of external power is a pedagogical one in-forming the subject. This pre- and intrasubjective force of self-other relation coalesces in the anti-social drives of a self to uniquely become someone. Personhood might be thought as produced from a psychical dialectic between one’s anti-social drives and the other’s socializing norms the baby introjects mediating a self. Pedagogy in the scene of attachment acknowledges a learning to become someone that operates from the inside out. Self-mother pedagogy is first experienced as hallucinatory feeling, what child psychoanalyst Melanie Klein (1928/1984) calls phantasy. Feelings for mother animate the infant’s hallucinatory space of self and other interiority. Affective meanings, circulating between the two, visually activate inside the baby’s mind and body and sensationally deliver messages of and to each other. And these feelings for mother archived within, Klein (1936/1984) suggests, leave a lasting imprint on the baby’s personhood: Infantile feelings and phantasies leave, as it were, their imprints on the mind, imprints which do not fade away but get stored up, remain active, and exert continuous and powerful influence on the emotional and intellectual life of the individual. (p. 290) Thus, pedagogy generated by the infant’s transference with mother instantiates and sustains the infantile and then the slowly (de)humanizing social subject. Made from the inside out, we are inherently pedagogical subjects. Care/knowledge is engaged wherever there is the desire to teach the other. As such pedagogy is not simply between adults and children, although that particular relation exemplifies its conflicts and (ab)uses of desire more intensely than others. From the onset, a parent teaching a child refusing to learn experiences a clash of desires. The parent

26  Rereading an Old Foe Simón wages constant pedagogical battle with the revolting child David in Coetzee’s Schooldays of Jesus; their relationship exemplifies the contested grounds of education. This unspoken conflict of desire characterizing pedagogy, Coetzee doggedly pursues in literature. Xiaoran Hu (2018) notices that, in Coetzee’s novels, pedagogy is situated in the scene of care, one that resembles the maternal/parental relation by which it is enacted and performed: The ways in which Susan Barton takes care of Friday in Foe, the Magistrate takes care of the barbarian girl in Waiting for the Barbarians, and Mrs. Curren takes care of Vercueil in Age of Iron, are depicted in parental terms. Friday and the barbarian girl are also repeatedly described as childlike. Such parental responsibility and care stripped of the authority of biological birth becomes the metaphoric illustration of Coetzee’s notion of charity, the one possible ethical action to bring an end to the endless skepticism in the secular world. (p. 9) Hu’s use of the phrase the ways in which signals the pedagogical relation. Where she characterizes the ways of care outside familial bonds as illustrative of charity, I see all forms of care as taking their basis in these very maternal bonds. We care for others the way our significant others cared or did not care for us. We learn care and how to care from our others. As such all relations of care are pedagogical and bring about significant learning from the other. Still, Deborah Britzman (2009) reminds us, care, like learning, is not easy. Structured by a fundamental “inequality,” the one cared for is at the mercy of the one who cares. “The word care,” she instructs, is rooted in the old German word ‘cara’ and signifies grief, lament, and the acts of grieving. Its heritage brings us to the ancient world of Greek Tragedy, Aristotelian catharsis, and fate of moving from carelessness to becoming human with other humans and thus a fall into the emotional world of identification, ambivalence, love, and hate. If this etymology lends clues as to what is so difficult about care for both the one who gives and the one who receives, care must tell a story of what Freud (1917) called ‘mourning and melancholia,’ of a self who has lost love and who is lost to the world. This lost other figures predominately in both the psychic life of the caregiver and the one in need. (p. 780) The force of our (m)other’s care grounds pedagogy. Our dire need of care grants us with our first unfair experiences of learning the other.

Rereading an Old Foe  27 Care is bound up in an uneven process of mourning, more precisely, grief, grievance, and reparation, of and between two. But no one, not even the mother, can care for us in the way we need. Learning involves a certain reconciliation of loss to the self as an opening to the other. As such, education is a grief-stricken and reparative enterprise for both mother and child, and teacher and student. Pedagogy inserts itself into Robinson’s maternal desire to care for and raise Friday up by way of teaching. Contra Hu (2018), I find it is not the author or Coetzee’s novels that depict Friday and other subordinate characters as childlike but Robinson, who, by virtue of assuming the position of Friday’s teacher and colonizer, cannot help but view him as such. As Derrida (2000) points out in his sole essay on pedagogy, along with being a character, teacher is an institution, one regulated by the Western law of in locos parentis. As already normatively tied to the maternal relation, family scene, and letter of the law, he writes, “There is no neutral or natural place in teaching. Here, for example, is not an indifferent space” (p. 85). Pedagogy, Derrida (2000) insists in his sole essay on it, is impossible as already affected by the social, libidinal, legal, and charged-up politics governing adult-child relation. The structure of parent-teacher-child transference is baked into pedagogical relations. Despite its impossibility, and as I find Coetzee’s novels unwittingly depict, pedagogy does transcend the patronizing, colonizing, and projective dynamics of the parenting relation. Revolting and breaking free from the constraints of familial knowledge gives pedagogy its life-altering force. In his agonizing depictions of teaching and learning, “[w]hat Coetzee has to offer,” Regina Janes (1997) finds, “- and it is not something everyone will want - is the recurrence of loss, stretched along and through the sentence, an attenuated aching, a wound that refuses either to close or to suppurate sufficiently to impel amputation” (p. 105). In these moments of loss to and of self, the teacher-character is offered, what I term, “pedagogical insight.” Or, as David Lurie finds in losing and letting go of the parental role and fostering a new, albeit grief-stricken, relation to his child, “there may be things to learn,” things critical to each and all our existence (Disgrace 218).

Pedagogy and the Novel: Reading Coetzee In his novels, Coetzee delivers another story of human being. His novels tell this story in the way of a provocative teacher who raises questions without knowing the answers. Pedagogy of the novel leads us on—it seduces us to taking in the character’s knowledge as significant to our own. As author Colm Tóibín (2014) remarks, “I don’t read fiction or poetry to learn; nonetheless, it often happens as though by implication.” Somehow and not knowing why we are affected in the real time of reading as our actual life is passionately gripped by literature.

28  Rereading an Old Foe Coetzee makes his aesthetic and epistemological appeal with painstaking precision. Like any good teacher, he knows pedagogy is all about the delivery. As Elizabeth Lowry (1999) explains: Coetzee’s own style is sometimes parodic, sometimes allegorical. He  has made free use of destabilising narrative devices such as mock appendices and fake forewords, and has a marked taste for open-endedness, sudden authorial interventions and abrupt truncations. He is, in other words, preoccupied with narrative voice and form, with the means by which the fictional illusion is created and by which it can be disrupted. Coetzee’s pre-occupation with voice and form, I argue, gives way to his novel delivery of existential predicaments eliciting philosophical, political, and personal provocation in both character and reader. In turn, like a character, the reader feels put upon, obliged to engage in what Derek Attridge (2005) terms the “event” of reading the novel. As event, literature operates “as a verb rather than as a noun: not something carried away when we have finished reading it, but something that happens as we read or recall it” (Attridge, 2005, p. 9). And because the reader can feel the novel happening to us, we find ourselves reacting while reading a made-up story. Janes (1997) argues that Coetzee’s authorial intent for his novel is negatively directive. Withholding the self-other knowledge that the reader vitally wants makes them want to know more: Coetzee chooses to make choices that appear to multiply choices (meanings) rather than reduce or focus them. He thus offers readers a liberty that is as painful as it is specious. Readers are controlled as firmly and as deceptively as the child whose parents says, ‘You must make your own decisions. These are your alternatives, choose one,’ show me who you are. The authority of the authors seems undermined, given over to the reader, but in fact the author’s authority extends even further in the reader than it otherwise would. The reader, like the child, may call it freedom, but that is only to be oblivious to the full extent of authorial or parental manipulation. (Children are less like to call it freedom than readers, who use authors to replace parents). The reader or child aware of manipulation still has no choice but to choose, even as he knows unhappily that the choice is his own, but not his desire. (p. 113) Authors of some novels, Janes insightfully notes, perform the pedagogical function of parents or teachers who purport to offer up a world of difference only to steer children toward particular desires or ends.

Rereading an Old Foe  29 The best pedagogues, and Coetzee is one of the best, teach in the distance of the self from their student, resisting, however tempting, the impulse to project one’s desire for the student (both benign and potent) onto the student. This approach requires the teacher to know themselves or at least to reflect on what one knows and cannot know of the self through what Jonathan Lear (2004) terms “therapeutic action”:8 Meditation, journaling, memoir, reflection, or analysis. Coetzee’s method for awareness is autre biography, his invention of a creative mode of observing the self in the third-person view of a character in a story. And he has told three stories of this, often estranged, character he makes of his self, in Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime. Autobiographical writing attunes our self to desires we hold for others. To resist projecting one’s desire onto others, as Coetzee also marvelously shows in these three fictional deliberations, the teacher has to first and somewhat impossibly know or at least sense what one’s desire feels like and/or imagine what it might be. In his return, once more, to Robinson Crusoe at the occasion of receiving a Nobel Prize, Coetzee pedagogically subjects his audience to a collective and studious act of rereading. It is one they did not ask for but await in the way children eagerly anticipate a bedtime story. And, like any parent, he counts on a good re-telling of the story in a speech designed to keep his readers engaged. At the very least, this new and revised version of an old story will cause them to wonder: What it is an acceptance speech supposed to do? And what in the world is Coetzee talking about? After hearing the address, some readers will return to Foe and Robinson Crusoe in search of meanings untold in the text and hinted at by Coetzee. Some will forget the words and go on their merry way. In this sense, and like a teacher’s pedagogy, literature reserves the right and indeed the freedom to be engaged or left behind. Still, as Kristeva (1982) reminds us, what is left stirs us on despite our wanting to abandon its call (p. 202). Pedagogy in Coetzee’s novels mobilizes this provocation to thinking, one that can stick to and inside the reader. In the coming chapters, I affectively reread pedagogy in the lives of characters as depicted by Coetzee. In each chapter, I depict what is meant by transference in reading as I examine conflicts in desires circulating between characters and the reader’s emotional response to the text. At times, I engage this affective reading in those of critics like Poplak (2013), whose particular charged-up response furthers my engagement with characterized and felt moments of pedagogy in the novel. In our post-reality time, it seems critical that pedagogy be at the forefront of human concerns, as we find human thought abandoning reason and sinking further and further into hallucinatory and violently mad and made up states of mind. If we take the human relationality of pedagogy into every aspect of one’s learning to be someone in a place in time, historically and politically, we can begin to consider how

30  Rereading an Old Foe critical informal and formal, unspoken and untold acts of teaching and learning are to the formation of thoughtful and thinking human beings and society. How did the evolving knowledge of Robinson Crusoe carry the singular life of John Coetzee? How did this particular colonial adventure render a tiny self existentially conflicted? My pursuit of pedagogy in the novels of J.M. Coetzee lodges itself in a conflict, an ambivalence that I read out of the text. It is one never explicitly expressed by the author as such. I call this reading affective, borrowing a bit of Derrida’s (1978b) deconstruction to pinpoint moments where the text cannot hold, one marked by breakdowns in authorial and readerly meaning. My affective reading is lodged between the impact of word and reading, and as such also psychoanalytic, attuned to the processes of transference felt circulating in the text. Elsewhere, I call this kind of reading “attending to the reader’s transference,” what Coetzee (in Attwell, 1992) characterizes as (auto)bio graphically traced in text,9 where reading inexplicably presses a reader to mutedly fall back onto parts of her own story to fill in parts of the other’s (Mishra Tarc, 2019). I, like, Mrs. Curren, am alert to the unheard felt clamoring in beings and text. This is a questionable, non-empirical, internally evident, deeply subjective practice. Some might object to this subjective way of responsively reading novels, and yet unspoken vital knowledge between self and other is only delivered by way of transference. Affective reading pursues meaning by way of feeling, driven by narrative, as I show in the chapters to come. The untold story of the novel is what we feel driving an acceptance speech. In his recitation of Defoe, Coetzee will remind the audience that writing is not the author’s alone: In and from the other (the thought of) pedagogy arrives. We are inexplicably affected by our first and formative readings of world, as Coetzee (2018) is still beholden to a story of “He and his man,” delivered by a man he does not know in a children’s book first given to him by his mother.10 Everlasting is the hold a childhood story has on the esteemed grown-up author. Perhaps as remarkable is this: In a speech addressing an author’s gift of writing, all thoughts lead back to (m)other.

Notes 1 In his reading of the essay, Gareth Cornwell (2008) writes: He and his man seems not to be about Crusoe and Friday, but Crusoe and Defoe (p. 99). My own feeling is that one cannot think Crusoe apart from Friday or Defoe apart from both characters. As such the authors’ (Defoe & Coetzee) figuring out of relation between men is what I feel is at stake in the lecture. 2 Across this book, I refer to mother when speaking of the historically gendered female person that gives birth to a child knowing that any significant adult/other who cares for a baby is also a mother. In his own use of mother, D.W. Winnicott (1960) refers to her and the parental unit as an environment

Rereading an Old Foe  31

3

4

5

6

rather than a sovereign person. I use (m)other to refer to the other of the transferential relationship, where (m) of other, the significant others of childhood, silently haunt new relations we can make to people and things. Capital O, Other refers to radical alterity of ethical philosophy. In literature and my readings, the mother is a character and, like any other, not real (but not without real effects). Without explication, Coetzee seems to fictionally hold figures of speech responsible for the dehumanizing creation of real human beings. The figure of the child is one such deformation of actual human existence that is subject to adult projection in the fictional production of political and social life. To unravel these figures is an immense task, one that involves understanding how the less conscious figment of imagination becomes categorically a marker of distinct and singular being. Out of all the teacher-characters, Costello attempts to deconstruct figures of animal, child, women, but her mission to do so fails when it rubs up against the material realities of these figures. See Chapter 3 for Costello’s serious attempt to unravel the logics of metaphysical being distinguishing the human by figuring the animal as non-human being. Of the infant, Butler (1997) claims: “No subject can emerge without this attachment, formed in dependency, but no subject, in the course of its formation, can ever afford fully to ‘see’ it” (p. 8). My position is that if the baby cannot afford to see it (no baby can see anything, born blurry-eyed at birth), she vitally affords to feel it. It is in feeling that a subject pedagogically arises from dire need of and attachment to mother. Affect and other condemned and unheard aspects of human existence are often qualified by the discourse of disability, which attests to its disabling yet potent force rather than character. Unspeakable affect is often qualified as and through disabling characteristics because, as Lyotard (1991) acknowledges, we feel affect most viscerally in disabled states of human existence. Although not the subject of my reading of Coetzee’s literature, the figure of the disabled (animal, child, female, maimed, or diseased adult) is one that recurs throughout his novels, as much as the silenced one or the other in the most moving and compelling of forms. In his novels, the discourse of disability and the disabled operates in accordance to what is most affecting about being human rather than stand in for what is now denigrated categorical existence. Having said this, the latter designations of disability remain tied to fictional attempts to rethink and distinguish categorical being (mental, physical, racialized, gendered, child-driven) from our constantly disabled states characterizing our precariously felt condition of being human from our infancy to death. Critics, like Benita Parry (1996), puzzle over the deafening silence of various and mostly other and subaltern (Spivak, 1988) characters that appear in Coetzee’s novels, particularly at times that seem to require their speaking. Attridge (2004a) attributes non-speaking to an ethics of the other steering Coetzee’s novels. Janes (1997) quite radically suggests silence fictionally operates in and through Coetzee’s characters to generate and attribute political authority to subaltern subjects where there is none. Riffing on Attridge and Janes, my own feeling is that muteness in Coetzee’s novels offers readers access to the affect of the other that disarms, destabilizes, and breaks down one’s reading of the speaking character’s superior and/or authoritative sense of oneself. Following Mrs. Curren, I argue that mutedness, as it is depicted differentially in major and subordinating characters, bears witness to an uneven and unheard affectivity operating in pedagogical relations and producing significant knowledge.

32  Rereading an Old Foe

2

Mrs. Curren in Age of Iron Address of the Mother

In Age of Iron, the author’s thoughts are of his mother. Written in the wake of Vera Coetzee’s death, the novel also runs “parallel to the state of emergency declared by the Afrikaner government in 1986, after what Elizabeth [Mrs. Curren] calls ‘the trouble in the schools’” (Neau, 2011, p. 11). These life-altering events, one personal and the other historical, confront each other in the narrative. “Right from the beginning of the novel,” Françoise Neau (2011) finds, “external war and private death thus appear interrelated, for both the author and the narrator” (p. 11). The book acknowledges all who died during those troubles “between 1985–1986” including the author’s significant losses of family members and country (Neau, 2011, p. 11). As was Coetzee, the novel’s main protagonist, Elizabeth Curren, is caught privately and politically in states of crisis. Devastated by a terminal bone cancer diagnosis, Mrs. Curren is forced to leave her privileged life to re-enter a world she no longer recognizes. There, in South Africa’s burning townships, the former teacher crosses the paths of black people and children of whom she has claimed to know nothing up until this point. Regina Janes (1997) finds that the author turns to fiction to address the recurring personal and political crisis of his homeland: “Coetzee wrote his way through the continuing crisis of the 1970s and 1980s into the 1990s, when the government began to reconsider and reformulate its relationship to the black majority” (p. 109). Age of Iron “is contemporaneous with the fall of apartheid” and a mother’s dying days (Neau, 2011, p. 11) As such, David Atwell (2016) poignantly notes, “[t]he drafts are filled with grief”: The writing agonizes over the fact that the mother’s views on South Africa and her place in its history were plainly unacceptable. It circles back repeatedly to the contradiction between love and ethical misgiving, as if Coetzee understood that the novel would have to be a family row in some sense. He would also have known that to transform this material into something less personal would be a struggle. (p. 383)

34  Address of the Mother Attwell (2016) finds traces of this struggle archived in a note the author jots down while writing the novel: “Write the story of my life for Gisela, and the story of my mother’s life. Because we are all going to die in Africa” (p. 383). This inner conflict with maternity, love, ethics, and history slips through the mother’s address writing the novel. I read the novel and education more generally as a “family row” over how best to raise other people’s children. My reading attends to Mrs. Curren’s turmoil as her passionate attachments to humanist education are tried and tested by the black characters’ repudiation of it as Apartheid’s leading racist instrument. As Louis Althusser (1970/2001), after Marx, once wrote, the ideological state apparatus of school and not tanks is central to a nation’s political maintenance of systems of stark inequality. The trouble in schools at the heart of the novel’s plot is yet to be read as a comment on humanist, public education and its discontents. Unable to imagine education as anything other than a universal good for children, Mrs. Curren is hung up on her housekeeper’s refusal to force her children to attend school during the violent uprisings. Mrs. Curren carries on this fight over the children’s schooling with Mr. Thabane, Florence’s teacher-brother fighting again the state for the children’s “liberation before education.”1 Facing the lives of black children, parents, and teachers, Mrs. Curren witnesses firsthand what South African public education is and does to the lives of children for whom it is not meant, for children who are not white. Mrs. Curren’s advancement of education is fortified by ethnocentric mothering and her former vocation of teacher and professor of Latin. Her privileged life of letters cements a European colonial view of humanist education as for all. The children’s contestations of her views force Mrs. Curren to revisit the role of maternal and public school pedagogies in upholding racist and unequal systems of education. Debates waged by the characters on the repressive role of school in reproducing social and economic inequality resemble longstanding educational ones discussed by social-justice scholars in racially divided multicultural societies (Freire, 1970; Savage, 1991; McCarthy & Crichlow, 1993; James, 1995; Davis, 2003; Delpit, 2005; Gillborn, 2008, Tarc, 2013). Chief among the narrative concerns is the daughter’s conflicts with her mother for subjecting her to a racist education and childhood. Racism, Toni Morrison claims, is schooled: is a scholarly pursuit […] I’m talking about racism that is taught, institutionalized. Everyone remembers the first time they were taught that part of the human race was Other. That’s a trauma. It’s as though I told you, your left hand is not a part of your body. (In Angelo and Morrison, 1989, p. 25) Specifically, in the novel, the child holds the mother responsible for her role in teaching her “that part of the human race was Other.” The child’s

Address of the Mother  35 ongoing grievance with the mother is implied, unspoken, and finally and clumsily redressed in the mother’s long letter. Given only the mother’s cryptic version of the deep rift, the reader infers from her unreliable words, confessions, and memories what the child’s heavy silence is trying to say. The letter also bears real-time witness to untold cruelties committed to children during the fall of Apartheid. In his essay “Racism’s Last Word,” Derrida deems South African Apartheid to be a “concentration of world history” of racist human on human cruel treatment (p. 297). New readings of this world history of anti-black racism are necessary he insists, to bear witness to the more unthinkable aspects of racism’s traumatic operation. “[W]hat resists analysis,” Derrida (1985) finds, “also calls for another mode of thinking” (p. 297). The arts, Derrida (1985) suggests, pedagogically compel us to read the unthinkable, just as Picasso’s painting Guernica spoke to the horrors to humanity that took place in Spain: Guernica denounces civilized barbarism, and from out of the painting’s exile, in its dead silence, one hears the cry of moaning or accusation. Brought forward by the painting, the cry joins with children’s screams and the bombers’ din, until the last day of dictatorship when the work is repatriated to a place in which it has never dwelled. (p. 338) Age of Iron enacts such a new reading denouncing “civilized” anti-black racism. The character’s silence, including that of Mrs. Curren’s own child, attests to Apartheid’s untold and ongoing effects. Although it is now an old novel, it continues to express its unsayable contents and perhaps in the Jesus trilogy. 2 These new readings are arguably and still repatriating Apartheid’s old horror to another time, world, and place, as racism continues to run the world and all our relations in it. The novel takes the form of a letter a dying mother pens in response to her child’s implication of her in racist childhoods. The mother’s conflicted response is as much for the author as it is for the reader, as much for herself as it is her child, as much for the white teacher as it is for the black children for whom she is suddenly charged to care. Writing the story of the maternal relation caught in personal and political history, the novel invests in the necessary human problem of rereading Apartheid in a world reeling from it still.

Maternal Pedagogy: The Child and the Epistolary Form Enveloped in the epistolary form, the novel transfers a mother’s dying message to her long-lost child. Self-exiled from South Africa in 1974, the daughter vows never to return until its leaders are “hanging by their

36  Address of the Mother heels from the lampposts” (AOI 75). Alone and in need of constant care, Mrs. Curren solicits a vagrant squatting in the “alley down the side of the garage” to live with her and be her companion (AOI 3). Observing the homeless man Vercueil, where her child once was, the mother is overcome with feeling: How I longed for you to be here, to hold me, comfort me! I begin to understand the true meaning of the embrace. We embrace to be embraced. We embrace our children to be folded in the arms of the future, to pass ourselves on beyond death, to be transported. That is how it was when I embraced you, always. We bear children in order to be mothered by them. (AOI 5) With this needy maternal summons, the reader is offered the beginnings of Mrs. Curren’s theory of educating children. It is one teeming with sticky affect: how I longed for you! […] your body blood-warm, your breath milky, to take you in my arms in what we called ‘giving Mommy a big hug,’ the secret meaning of which, the meaning never spoken, was that Mommy should not be sad, for she would not die but live on in you. (AOI 5–6) In the transfer of maternal contents—breath, milk, hugs, living, dying— the mother’s address bears the heavy weight of unspoken expectation that all children feel, even adults ones, to heed her cry. With this deceptively sweet delivery of a long message, Mrs. Curren folds her child in her story. Epistolary, from the Latin epistola, means letters. In her letter, Mrs. Curren claims to deliver “Home truths, a mother’s truth: from now to the end that is all you will hear from me” (AOI 5). The truths are manipulated in the over-idealized terms of mothers: “You are my life” (AOI 6) and “I love you as I love life itself” (AOI 6). The mother’s truth is met with deafening silence telling the child’s truth. Still, and as with every child, the silence she tells of herself is caught up in the words of the mother. The mother’s long-form letter, Coetzee reminds us, by aesthetically inserting the reader into one, we all faintly remember. Of all literary forms, letters internally operate by way of the maternal dynamics of pedagogy. The two-in-one, held in-mind and memory letter resembles muffled infant-mother communication. The one who composes the message does with the other in mind. The receiver replies to the other’s post in kind. No spoken words pass between them. Still, the jumbled up

Address of the Mother  37 message manages to one-sidedly get across. And so a letter goes shuttling back and forth between self and other in a faulty exchange of meaning dependent wholly on the delivery. Coeteze’s use of the long letter pays homage to mothers, to her post3 delivery of our lives. At and before our birth, the mother posts us with cryptic messages. We receive these in a lifelong struggle to feel for, read, and comprehend her words. Each of us, in our own way, also addresses our self to a (m)other, history, and the world. It is not that all our problems with our self and the world lead back to mother, as the Freudian joke goes. Instead the mother’s message never leaves us: We hold court and play with her long-form writing (inside) us for all of our lives. The maternal address is more than its meanings: It is a leading internalized structure of mind, knowledge, and selfhood. Every mother inserts into her child an address that “enigmatically” stays with her long after the child leaves the mother or the mother leaves her (in Caruth & Laplanche, 2013). Child psychoanalyst Melanie Klein (1928/1984) fashions the mother’s address as a key mechanism by which the baby’s internal drive to know is activated and formed. She terms this drive to know the (m)other the epistemophilic instinct. And she radically puts the drive to know between Freud’s binary and opposing drives of life and death. The drive to know pedagogically mediates the infant’s drives for life and death. The epsitemophilic instinct, Klein (1928/1984) observes, softens the conflict between the opposing ones, Eros and Thanatos, overwhelming her helpless existence. To combat intense sensations coming at her from all sides, the infant “concern[s] itself with the mother’s body […] wishes to appropriate the contents of the body […] begins to be curious what it contains, what it is like, etc.” (p. 188). The words “concern,” “appropriate,” “curious” characterize the baby’s vital and ordinary interest turning to the mother to get outside herself. The baby’s preliminary lessons of the world outside herself are of her mother. The child’s first clashes with knowledge takes place in a maternal scene where the infant’s education begins. The felt contents transferred to infant from mother will form a frustrated basis for one’s shaky sense of self in relation to others. At first, when a child cannot speak or symbolically comprehend words, the content of messages feels in pieces. All the child has to go on is the mother’s sensational delivery transferring untold messages that instigate the baby’s frustrated feelings to and for her. The (m)other’s confused feelings directing one’s own signals transference. The term transference comes from Sigmund Freud (1905/1953). Freud (1905/1953) coins the word transference to describe intrasubjective conflict he experiences when analyzing his patient, Dora. Transference qualifies the inexplicable personal conflicts he felt hers transfer to him. Arising in her trouble with him are “newly revised editions” of

38  Address of the Mother remembered conflicts held with significant others and things (p. 116). Transference, Freud (1905/1953) finds, acts as both a bridge and an obstacle to meaning when stored away feelings unwittingly influence our subsequent efforts to engage with new people and things. Analyzing the play of young children, Klein (1952) finds all things, animate and inanimate, instigate transference in the self. To relate to others and/or objects in the first place, the infant invests them with good and bad affects she feels for and from them. As such, infantile affects do not simply screen prior memories, Klein claims, but re-call, in bits and pieces, feelings in memories we transfer on to new objects to make sense of them. I hold that transference originates in the same processes which in the earliest stages determine object-relations […] the early interplay between love and hate, and the vicious circle of aggression, anxieties, feelings of guilt and increased aggression, as well as the various aspects of objects towards whom these conflicting emotions and anxieties are directed. (p. 435) Every attempt to make relations with a new object or person relies on archaic feelings and attachments we hold for significant ones. The mother and then the father4 hold vast significance for a person. Our transference to these people never leaves. These significant feelings are figured into our new relations with others. Accordingly, transference signals unconscious feelings at timeless play in our present reading of all people and things. More than any other symbolic form, literary letters aesthetically mine the overwhelming in-mind, two-in-one situation of baby and mother. Stuck in a novel, we can find ourselves drowning in feelings. When we engage strong feelings triggered by the author’s words, we experience transference of our real lives to our reading. These strong feelings take readers out of the book and into their real-life memories. When we find ourselves really affected by fictional events, we experience transference in reading. Transference, as Salman Rushdie (2005) attests, also occurs between authors and characters when writing: Moment by moment in the writing, things would happen that I hadn’t foreseen. Something strange happened with this book. I felt completely possessed by these people, to the extent that I found myself crying over my own characters. There’s a moment in the book where Boonyi’s father, the pandit Pyarelal, dies in his fruit orchard. I couldn’t bear it. I found myself sitting at my desk weeping. I thought, What am I doing? This is somebody I’ve made up.

Address of the Mother  39 Although the characters are made up, they are shown to arrive from a repository of transference people straight out of the archive of Rushdie’s real life. This momentary crisis of Rushdie’s self while re-reading, where one’s sense of self bleeds into the character, depicts intensely the emotional push and pull of literary transference. Transference in reading and writing novels taps into the personal and social histories of authors and readers, if not in the same way. As readers, we have no way of knowing the autobiographical content traced in an author’s writing. Carrol Clarkson (2009) refers to the transferential aspects of Coetzee’s novels as “the possibility of forms of communication that do not depend on language, and that extend beyond intersubjective human relations” (p. 121). This acute sensory communication produces an “intra-text” between author and reader fabricating the event of reading. Coetzee’s pedagogical use of the long-form letter in Age of Iron deploys transference summoning authorial and readerly feelings of child-parent relations. The form of Mrs. Curren’s letter, Neau (2011, p. 11) claims, is modeled on one used by Franz Kafka in Dearest Father to air his childhood grievance with his father. Unlike a son’s reallife letter, the fictional one addresses a yet to be faced grievance that a mother feels and imagines her child holds toward her. As with Kafka’s father, 5 Costello’s child (and Coetzee’s mother) never receives the message. By the time the novel is published, real and fictional mother are dead. Regardless of the failed postings, for all three authors, the letter is authored and sent, written and published, received and now read in public and for the record. All letters depend on the post, regardless of receipt. Attested to in the liberation tradition set forth by James Baldwin’s (1963) Letters to his Nephew, the epistolary functions as a scholar, teacher, or priest might deliver a lecture or lessons without knowing how or if it is received. Still, Coetzee’s maternal take signals a subtle critique of his male predecessors. The narrative cautions adults against imposing their (expert male) experience of the world onto the child. Instead in maternal form, Mrs. Curren is the hearer and poster of her conjured-up child’s message. Rather than offer the child news of her world, the adult is made to imaginatively hear and post the child’s message of her existence in her world.6 Sensing the aporia of addressing the child she imagines she knows, but actually never did and no longer does, Mrs. Curren begins to pen the letter, uncertain “To whom this writing” is for (AOI 6).

White Mother, Black Children Education features prominently in the long letter Mrs. Curren pens for her daughter. Much of the letter reports on the mother’s utter dismay and despair with the degenerating state of her dying body, cruelly mimicking

40  Address of the Mother that of South African schools and society. To deliver her message, she enlists Vercueil, a man with whom she shares no kinship and no history. She instructs him to send the letter “if I die” and only “after the event” (AOI 31). Of few words and no children, Vercueil balks at the morbid request: “Can’t you ask someone else?” he insists (AOI 31). Mrs. Curren replies her last wish is that he be the messenger of her death. Resigned to her death wish, Vercueil agrees to “post her parcel” to her lost daughter (AOI 33). The letter Vercueil hears and promises to deliver bears witness to Mrs. Curren’s last days wracked by death and disease. The killing Apartheid state creeps closer to her diseased body when Florence’s older son Bheki and parentless friend John unexpectedly seek asylum in her home. At first, Mrs. Curren is reluctant to let the boys7 stay with her. Still, she cannot ignore Florence’s appeal to her boys’ stark reality: “It is safer for them here. In Guguletu there is trouble all the time, and then the police come in and shoot” (AOI 53). Mrs. Curren’s reluctance to get involved takes its basis in her claims to know nothing about the vicious race war waging on and in schools: “Of trouble in the schools the radio says nothing, the television says nothing, the newspapers say nothing” (AOI 39). In truth, she knows quite a bit about “events in Guguletu […] solely on what Florence tells me and on what I can learn by standing on the balcony and peering northeast” (AOI 39). Given her daily reports, Florence finds reprehensible Mrs. Curren’s posture of ignorance in the vicious times the children are living. In response to her employer’s continued feigned ignorance of the mortal danger the boys are in, the housekeeper quietly explodes: “You must not ask me, madam,” she declared, “why the police are coming after the children and chasing them and shooting them and putting them in jail. You must not ask me” (AOI 54). The mothers’ fights over the children highlight the onto-epistemological breech bitterly dividing the interest, labor, and role of each in a racist society. Their separate lived realities inform each mother’s moral and practical meanings of how to raise children in an unequal society. These starkly different realities cause friction between them. When Mrs. Curren criticizes Florence for letting the boys mistreat the daily drunk Vercueil in the backyard, Florence turns her critique back on Mrs. Curren: “But who made them so cruel? It is the whites who made them so cruel! Yes!” (AOI 49). Feeling the historical weight of Florence’s certain accusation, Mrs. Curren responds: Can parents be recreated once the idea of parents has been destroyed within us? They kick and beat a man because he drinks. They set people on fire and laugh while they burn to death. How will they treat their own children? What love will they be capable

Address of the Mother  41 of? Their hearts are turning to stone before our very eyes, and what do you say? You say, ‘This is not my child, this is the white man’s child, this is the monster made by the white man.’ Is that all you can say? Are you going to blame them on the whites, and turn your back? (AOI 50) With “no interest in debating her” mischaracterization of her mothering, Florence registers her dissent: “No […] That is not true. I do not turn my back on my children.” She adds, “These are good children, they are like iron, we are proud of them” (AOI 50). Unable to comprehend these children, Mrs. Curren falls back on a child she knows, hers: “My only child […] thousands of miles away.” Unable to bear Florence’s children’s reality, she is glad for her own child’s “safe” one, far from the parentless childhood she witnesses: “when childhood is despised, when children school each other never to smile, never to cry, to raise fists in the air like hammers” (AOI 50). Mrs. Curren’s8 remarks to Florence eerily re-call those of Hannah Arendt charged against black parents at Little Rock at the height of the American public school desegregation movement. Arendt, Pam Ryan (2005) helpfully notes, serves as a nemesis and ally for thinking in Coetzee’s novels, particularly those with a strong female lead. In these novels, “Coetzee seems to be in conversation with Arendt on the issues of evil, banality and thinking” (p. 283). The author also seems to be in conversation with Arendt on the issues of education, childhood, and responsibility to children (Arendt, 1961). Uncanny are the positions held by Arendt and Mrs. Curren on the strikingly similar troubles in school taking place in the US and South Africa. Despite taking place on separate continents, at different times, with distinct political circumstances, the events are historically enjoined by white supremacy still upholding institutions of Apartheid and/or post-slavery America (Derrida, 1985). Both events involve abhorrent white police and/or adult attacks on black children that are still an everyday and ongoing fact of their lives in both nations. Arendt’s reflections on Little Rock are made as she views, with dismay, the photo of a racist and jeering mob of white adults closing in on a black girl child. Outraged, Arendt (1959) finds it totally unacceptable to: burden children, black and white, with the working out of a problem which adults for generations have confessed themselves unable to solve […] Have we now come to the point where it is the children who are being asked to change or improve the world? And do we intend to have our political battles fought out in the school yards? (p. 50)

42  Address of the Mother Arendt’s outburst is echoed in the one Mrs. Curren unleashes on Florence in their disputes over her sons. Despite the fact that in Little Rock and Guguletu the white adults’ ugly racist violence is at issue, as with Mrs. Curren, Arendt (1959) takes both “white and black citizens” to task for failing in their “duty to see the Negro [sic] children to school” (p. 49, emphasis added). Deliberating on Arendt’s conclusions, Seyla Benabhib (2000) finds that she obtusely overlooks the “racially based condition of social slavery that marks relations between white and black peoples in America” (p. 153). Rather, Benabhib (2000) suggests, Arendt’s overlays her memory of protected childhood from anti-Semitic persecution onto the real lives of black children under racist adult attack. In transferring black children’s lives into her personal9 ideal of protected childhood, Arendt negates the fact of black children’s lives already under threat born to parents “brought to this country forcibly, under conditions of inhuman violence, whose culture, villages, histories, and identities in Africa were decimated by slave catchers and their helpers” (Benabhib, 2000, p. 155). Without historical context or experience of transgenerational, severed black family life under America’s exceptional racism, Arendt’s comments on black parenting and/or teaching are terribly ill-informed. In an interview with Robert Penn Warren, Ellison (1965) finds Hannah Arendt’s comments “to fly way into left field in her Reflections on Little Rock” (p. 343). In a private letter to Ellison, Arendt will admit her misstep and lack of “understanding” for the black parent’s “ideal of sacrifice.” She offers a rare admission of non-comprehension of the “element of stark violence, bodily fear in the situation” of parents fearing imminent attacks on their children’s lives (in Benabhib, 2000, p. 154). But the truth is that Arendt has no idea what black parents feel and fear for their children’s lives. And worse, she never retracts her remarks nor issues a public apology to black parents10 for her racially prejudiced statements made for the public record. In Mrs. Curren’s dissent with Florence’s teacher-brother, Mr. Thabane, Coetzee revisits Arendt’s egregious remarks to reveal a third dynamic at play, one glaringly overlooked in Arendt’s report on Little Rock. The adults that Arendt leaves out of her judgment are white teachers. The novel takes the white teacher where Arendt cannot go: To her responsibility for black children as a teacher and academic entrusted to care for all children. The maternal transference of responsibility occurs when Florence forces Mrs. Curren to protect her sons seeking refuge from the white Afrikaans policemen tracking them down. At first, Mrs. Curren deeply resents the imposition: “I cannot turn my home into a haven for all the children running away from the townships,” she tells Florence, who counters, “But, why not […] Why not?” (AOI 54). With Florence’s

Address of the Mother  43 words, “Why not,” ringing through her mind, Mrs. Curren reluctantly lets the boys stay (AOI 54). When the situation with the police worsens, Florence flees for the lives of her daughters, Hope and Beauty. With no adult left, Mrs. Curren has no choice but to look after the boys. Lacking in maternal credibility, Mrs. Curren struggles to know how to look after them. She falls back on teacher authority to try to get the boys to go back to school. “What is school for?” Bheki counters. “It is to make us fit in the apartheid system” (AOI 67). His question, “What is more important, that apartheid must be destroyed, or I must go to school?” (AOI 68) unnerves Mrs. Curren. She is still unable to grasp what the child knows: His child existence is threatened by grown white men. Rather than try to feel for the untenable situation of the boys, she consoles herself with more bearable thoughts of her own adult child, safe and far from harm’s way: I say to myself: I have brought a child into the world, I have seen her to womanhood, I have seen her safely to a new life: that I have done, that can never be taken from me […] ‘I am so thankful,’ I want to say, from a full heart. I also want to say, but never do: ‘Save me.’ (AOI 72–33) Still, faulty memories of her protective mothering fail to persuade. Where Bheki, an actual child, possesses the adult responsibility to fight and protect his mother, her own adult child shows none. The safe choice the mother lauds also terribly grants her adult daughter total leave of responsibilities to her aging mother. Though unsaid, Mrs. Curren’s daughter resents her shielding her from the brutal truth of their country, so much so she vows never to return to it and the mother. Hearing her mothering regrets, Vercueil urges Mrs. Curren to “Tell her right now. Phone her in America. Tell her you need her, here” (AOI 74). To which Mrs. Curren curtly replies, No […] Let me remind you, this is not a normal country […] My daughter will not come back till things have changed here. She has made a vow. She will not come back to South Africa as you and she and I know it. She will certainly not apply to—what can I call them—those people for permission to come […] She is like iron. I am not going to ask her to go back on her vows. (pp. 74–75) To which, Vercueil counters: “You are like iron, too.” (AOI 75). “A silence fell between us. Inside me something broke,” Mrs. Curren notes to her daughter in the silence and mid-conversation (AOI 75). “Something broke inside me when you said that,” Mrs. Curren then  tells

44  Address of the Mother Vercueil without knowing why (AOI 75). But she does know why. These words are not theirs. They are words Florence uses to describe her sons. They attest to Florence’s iron-strong mothering and teaching rather than Mrs. Curren’s weak, failed, and irresponsible own.

Other People’s Children: The White Teacher in South Africa In her remarks on Little Rock, Arendt never places adult responsibility for black children on the white teachers entrusted with their care. But in Mrs. Curren’s belated responsibility for Florence’s sons in the warring townships the novel does. When white policemen attack John leaving him severely wounded, Mrs. Curren is the one who cares for him despite admitting she would rather not: I did not like him. I do not like him. I look into my heart and nowhere do I find any trace of feeling for him […] This boy is not like Bheki. He has no charm. […] He is one of those boys whose voices deepens too early, who by the age of twelve have left childhood behind and turned brutal, knowing. A simplified person, simplified in every way: swifter, nimbler, more tireless than real people, without doubts or scruples, without humor, ruthless, innocent. While he lay in the street, while I thought he was dying, I did what I could for him. But, to be candid, I would rather I had spent myself on someone else. (AOI 78–9) The hateful words are hard to hear. Yet, black children are routinely subject daily to these sentiments exhibited by their white teachers at school. Lisa Delpit’s (2005) ground-breaking study of white, middle-class, female teachers in the US reveals that many are “afraid of the black kids” in their classrooms (p. 168). Delpit finds that the white teachers’ fear is produced by their upbringing in racist political systems and white cultural representations deeming other people’s children as less human than their own. Swathed from childhood in anti-black racist representations and ignorant of the cruel indignities the black boy is routinely made to endure, Mrs. Curren characterizes John in what she learns to know he is not: Like her child—innocent, charming, childish, and immune to the harshness of the world. Racist stereotypes of black children slam up against her learned and personal experiences of proper children as innocent, desirable, and white. Attending to the nearly dead child in the hospital bed, Mrs. Curren is perversely struck by the maternal desire to care for John: “For your mother, who is not here” (AOI 79). Attempting to touch him, she feels

Address of the Mother  45 John “stiffen, felt an angry electric recoil” (AOI 79). Aloud, she pleads with the child, “Be slow to judge,”11 a plea that sinks her into crisis: Be slow to judge: what did I mean? If I did not know, who else could be expected to? Certainly not he. Yet in his case, I was sure, the incomprehension ran deeper. My words fell off him like dead leaves the moment they were uttered. The words of a woman, therefore negligible; of an old woman, therefore doubly negligible; but above all of a white.12 (AOI 79) Flinching from “the white touch as much as he does” (AOI 80), Mrs. Curren drops the fake mother routine and “tries again” as his teacher: “I was a teacher,” she says to regain authority with the child and her skeptical witness Vercueil, “I taught at the university” (AO1 80). She proceeds to obtusely treat the barely conscious child to the teachings of Thucydides on what happens to “our humanity in time of war” (AOI 80, emphasis added). The heavily sedated John offers no response. Slighted, Mrs. Curren thoughtlessly likens his non-response to her inapropo lecture to his general response to education: “He knew and he did not listen, as he had never listened to any of his teachers, but had sat like a stone in the classroom, impervious to words, waiting for the bell to ring, biding his time” (AOI 80). Like Arendt, like the white female teachers in American classrooms, Mrs. Curren cannot get it: No child can learn with an existence constantly under threat by the teachers supposed to teach them. If the threat is not explicitly expressed, a child can feel it. As such, the white teacher’s loveless morality teaching to a dying black child is unconscionable. In other words, and as Mrs. Curren struggles to learn: A humanist education given to children denied their humanity commits the gravest of offences to their existence. The black child’s revolt is not only against the racist systems but also against the white teachers who enable and enact its cruelty. This revolt is dually expressed in John’s impenetrable stance toward Mrs. Curren’s maternal and pedagogical ministrations. In their refusal of Mrs. Curren’s loveless humanism, we find Bheki and John know all about the hateful mortal threat to their existence she and her teachings deliver. When again a child’s life is threatened, and this time it is Bheki’s (the child she likes), Florence again demands that Mrs. Curren act on a black child’s behalf. Accompanying them is her brother, Mr. Thabane, a teacher fighting alongside the children in the townships. Driving through the burning streets, Mrs. Curren is horrified by the deathly state of the township. When they arrive at their destination where the killing is taking place, Mr. Thabane warns her to stay in the car. She refuses and predictably becomes overcome by all the brutal death she is made to

46  Address of the Mother see. Mr. Thabane berates her back: “You have seen enough,” he taunts, adding, “And you want to go home? […] But what of the people who live here? When they want to go home, this is where they must go. What do you think of that?” (AOI 97). To her response that she has “no answer […] It is terrible…,” Mr. Thabane informs her: It is not just terrible […] it is a crime. When you see a crime being committed in front of your eyes, what do you say? Do you say, ‘I have seen enough, I didn’t come to see sights, I want to go home?’ […] What sort of crime is it that you see? What is its name? (AOI 98) In the midst of her horror and feeling tricked by his speech, Mrs. Curren oddly remembers: He is a teacher […] What he is doing to me he has practiced in the classroom. It is the trick one uses to make one’s own answer seem to come from the child. Ventriloquism, the legacy of Socrates, as oppressive in Africa as it was in Athens. (AOI 98) With their pointless dispute hanging over her, the harrowing search for the boys continues. When they finally find Bheki, Mrs. Curren faces the unthinkable lesson the black teacher wants her to get: Her rescue mission is for nothing. The child is dead. Viewing Bheki’s thin body strung out on the ground alongside four nameless others, Mrs. Curren is rocked by grief and inadequacy. “Must they lie there in the rain?” she cries out. The teacher responds, “Yes, they must lie there. So that everyone can see” (AOI 102). In an act of collective witness, Mr. Thabane teaches all to feel, see, the utterly criminal and senseless death of black children gunned down by white policemen with bullets “[m]ade in South Africa. SABS approved” (AOI 103). For the first time in the novel, Mrs. Curren’s first thoughts are not of herself but of Bheki: I thought of the boy’s open eyes. I thought: What did he see as his last sight on earth? I thought: This is the worst thing I have witnessed in my life. And I thought: Now my eyes are open and I can never close them again. (AOI 102–3) Reeling, she cries to the black teacher, “It lives inside me and I live inside it.” But having “grown ugly” with grief over his nephew’s death, Mr. Thabane will have none of it (AOI 103). Feeling herself also “grow uglier by the day,” Mrs. Curren turns to thoughts of her child to console

Address of the Mother  47 herself: “flesh of my flesh, my best self, I ask you to draw back. I tell you this story not so that you will feel for me but so that you will learn how things are” (AOI 103). But once again, her teaching is for nothing. Her daughter already knows how things are. Consequently, she has long since refused to read with sympathy for the mother (AOI 103). With her child’s silence as stinging as Mr. Thabane’s rebuke, Mrs. Curren is left to reckon with her deeply sorry self. Taking Responsibility for Children Stricken by the children’s deaths, Mrs. Curren determines to fight for the only child left. Harboring John in her child’s bedroom, she summons love she holds for her daughter to hold love needed to fight for him: “I love you, but I do not love him […] Yes, you reply, he is not lovable. But did you not have a part in making him unlovable?” (AOI 136). The revelation makes Mrs. Curren feel “ugly.” She cannot bear dying in her present “state of ugliness” and longs for “salvation” (AOI 136). She wonders, in the first place, if she is even capable of loving anyone because she cannot find it in her heart to love this child. But she also is struck to the core of her being with the insight her realization brings: Love is not like hunger. Love is never sated, stilled. When one loves, one loves more. The more I love you, the more I ought to love him. The less I love him, the less, perhaps, I love you. (AOI 137) Her wounded breakdown of maternal love leads her to two revelations: “Not wanting to love him, how true can I say my love is for you?” (AOI 137) and “I cannot live without a child. I cannot die without a child” (AOI 139). When the policemen come again for John, Mrs. Curren calls again for Mr. Thabane but not without railing at him first: “[A]s for this killing, this bloodletting in the name of comradeship, I detest it with all my heart and soul. I think it is barbarous. That is what I want to say” (AOI 149). Sick to death of her understandings, Mr. Thabane finally lets her know what he thinks. I don’t think you understand very much about comradeship […] When you are body and soul in the struggle as these young people are, when you are prepared to lay down your lives for each other without question, then a bond grows up stronger than any bond you will know again. That is comradeship. I see it every day with my own eyes. (AOI 149–50)

48  Address of the Mother The black teacher’s words replay Ellison’s (1965) rebuttal to Arendt on the ultimate sacrifice required for a people’s liberty. Still, and unlike Arendt, Mrs. Curren will not leave it at sacrificing children. Holding “death driven male” comradeship responsible for the death of the boys, she makes her final appeal to the fellow teacher: “I have no sympathy for this comradeship. You are wrong, you and Florence and everyone else, to be taken in by it and, worse, to encourage it in children” (AOI 150). Abandoned by all, Mrs. Curren is the last adult left. She vows to fight with the child for his life, “Open the door, my boy […] I won’t let them hurt you, I promise,” knowing this is a lie. “Go away,” she screams to the policeman. “I am watching you […] I am watching everything you do. I tell you, he is just a child!” (AOI 152–3). As the explosion of guns goes off, she childishly curses the men: “If you have hurt him I will never forgive you” (AOI 156). Again, Mrs. Curren’s responsibility for John comes too late: The white policemen murder another black child under Mrs. Curren’s watch and witness. Despite fighting with her life for John and beside herself with grief, the mother clings, but not in the same way, to the Arendtian idea: “I still detest these calls for sacrifice that end with young men bleeding to death in the mud” (AOI 163). Sacrificing children for any adult cause and struggle, she concludes, is essentially a “war of the old upon the young” (AOI 163). The question of where responsibility for the death of children lies plagues our reading. But Mrs. Curren gets the final word: “Freedom or death! shout Bheki and his friends. Whose words? Not their own. Freedom or Death!, I have no doubt, those two little girl are rehearsing in their sleep. No! I want to say. Save yourselves!” (AOI 163).

Pedagogy of the Children: “For Whom This Writing, Then?” In the end, the child she does not love remains in and with Mrs. Curren. John’s face fills her dreams as together they, “face, first he, then I, the great white glare” of death (AOI 176). The mother she envisions is no longer white or herself but Florence with her daughters, “holding Hope by the hand and carrying Beauty on her back” (AOI 177). Crushed by her boys’ deaths, Florence has no choice but to go on: For the sake of daughters, she must survive the untimely deaths of sons. The black mother’s unending grief is the arbitrator of the soul, as Mrs. Curren images it,13 laying everlasting condemnation on the white adult community both mothers hold totally responsible for the deaths of Bheki and John. In her last days, the ideals of innocent childhood are also crushed. Mrs. Curren is forced to admit that her own child and her grandchildren, to whom she thought she was writing, are lost to her and only in memory.

Address of the Mother  49 The children she holds onto are not her own but “the two boys” she fleetingly cared for, the present ones “whose lives have brushed mine” (AOI 195), the ones for whom she is too late to take responsibility, the children who are dead. Still, Mrs. Curren confesses to her child, to children: “I still believe in your love” (AOI 197). As she “releases” her daughter from “this rope of words” (AOI 197), a story of a child’s love told in a long letter is all that remains. It will take many more readings to unravel. If her child and the boys cannot receive the message, maybe Mrs. Curren’s grandchildren and Florence’s remaining children can. Maternal love pathetically, indelibly lives on, with its profound impulse and impetus to care for others, to make every humanity recognizable and thus relatable. Above all, the (m)other’s love urges us to live fight on for the felt, curious, beautiful creature a child once was and still is. Age of Iron alerts us to the force of pedagogy circulating between a mother and child that characterize every act of teaching and learning between self and other. Coetzee’s delivery of the epistolary form immerses us in the address a mother gives to her child at birth. In the wake of the mother’s death, we are still unsure “to whom her writing, then”—the mother, the teacher, the author, the reader, the children— to whom? (AOI 6). Perhaps all are summoned by the mother’s griefstricken messages. At the end of her life, Mrs. Curren has finally learned to die, an insight she inaudibly whispers to “My daughter, my child” (AOI 197) held now in mind and memory. Take responsibility for me, for (our) history. Facing one’s place in history, bearing witness to it, testifying to it, as Mrs. Curren does, is perhaps a way back to go forward, a way forward to go back. In this recursive sense of the maternal pedagogy, education renews a story of an old world for which the child learns to bear and take responsibility. The question the novel delivers of education, what it does in and to the life of a child, is as devastating as telling, critical to anyone with the special duty to teach and carefully lead children into the world. As Arendt (1968) reminds us: Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin, which except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world. (p. 193)

50  Address of the Mother History is key to our education because it is the narrative container in which one’s grief with the world delivers knowledge of what we think happened. The disputes over children and history waged between two mothers and again between two teachers are educational, leaving us with a question that begins before the first page is turned: How do we love our mothers for raising us in their unhabitable world, wracked by horrific and brutal human history? But maybe there are no real answers to this unbearable question. Only silence. We just do love our mothers as we do love the world. And, as Age of Iron heartbreakingly demonstrates, in spite of everything that happened, our love for our (m)other, for the world she creates, survives everything, even her. When read as an address to us from the author, the novel offers readers a second chance to repair our unspeakable love for our mothers and hers for us. Despite all we are made to suffer in the world at the hands of each other, this most profound and pedagogical force of maternal love inseparable from the love of a child remains stirring and calling us anew to each other. Pedagogy then is a call of the other, “to you but not to you; to you in me” (AOI 6) that beseeches us again and again to read and reread our mother’s words forming, living, breathing, surviving (in) us.

Notes



Address of the Mother  51

52  Address of the Mother

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of her supposedly safe and saved child far from harm’s way. It also keeps her far away from her and every adult’s responsibility to care for all children. Shameful is Arendt’s behind-the-scenes apology to Ellison, given her prejudiced and very public repudiation of black parents. Mrs. Curren’s educational ideas depict the best of Arendt’s educational ideals while exposing a glaring limit to these in action. Along with her anti-black racism hinted at by Ellison, I think the practical limit to Arendt’s political thought is also due to her lack of personal experience of infants and teaching of actual children. Arendt exhibits an unexperienced and barren moral aesthetic telling parents how to properly raise their children common to the “white” teaching profession. Despite rhetorically professing to love children, through their zeal to raise proper children, many teachers display no real love for children, even their own. The British edict that children be seen and not heard, for example, is appalling to non-British parents who reject that particularly loveless aesthetic. Mrs. Curren exemplifies the teacher’s failures to lovingly raise her own child, which she projects out on her need to tell Florence how to properly raise hers. Proper child-raising also raises the standards of mothering and teaching to heights of perfection that no mother or teacher or child can meet. It is in failing our children daily that we learn to mother, learn to teach. Grossly ironic is Mrs. Curren’s request to the black child to treat her with slow judgment, a courtesy that she has time and time again not afforded to him. Again, the novel lays bare the privilege of forgiveness white people expect to receive for their loveless acts toward others. It lays bare the tendency of white adults to place the burden of atoning for their untold crimes against black children on the children themselves. John’s refusal of Mrs. Curren’s ambivalent care can be read as his refusal to absolve the white teacher of her wrongdoing toward him. Rather than redeem her, John’s unloved face haunts Mrs. Curren in the last days of her life. Seeing herself from the contempt she imagines in the child’s eyes causes her to think: “I, a white. When I think of the whites, what do I see? I see a herd of sheep (not a flock: a herd) […] the same bleating call in a thousand different inflections: ‘I!’ ‘I!’ ‘I!’ […] red-eyed, the savage, unreconstructed old boars grunting ‘Death!’ ‘Death!’” (AOI 79–80). In other novels, sheep are likened to white people. Mrs. Curren again shows the limits of her capacity to take responsibility for her place in history by leaving it to Florence’s judgment rather than bear her failures with children. It is this collective yet uneven social ruin that requires concerted responsible and redress to generate the humanizing and loving ends of education in the lives of each and every child.

3

Elizabeth Costello in Elizabeth Costello. Eight lessons Those Who Can’t, Teach

Elizabeth Costello. Eight Lessons feature the educational adventures of Coetzee’s most enduring character. First making her appearance in an invited lecture on Realism for the Ben Belitt Lecture at Bennington College (Attridge, 2004b), she again appears in the author’s delivery of the Tanner lectures at Princeton University on human values. Along with imparting significant knowledge, Costello’s lessons depict relational aspects of knowledge I discuss in this chapter. Given by an important thinker, the Tanner lectures offer “educational and scientific discussions relating to human values.” The discussion that Coetzee has been invited to give addresses animal existences. Coetzee’s tripart lecture, entitled “Lives of Animals,”1 follow conventional academic form, except it is Elizabeth Costello, a fictional character, and not he who delivers them. The unanticipated switch takes the audience by surprise. Reporting from the lecture room, Derek Attridge (2004b) notes, Although I do not recall any audible reaction from the audience, there could be no doubt about the surprise produced by Coetzee’s words, spoken in his grave quiet voice: ‘He is waiting at the gate when her flight comes in.’ The felt but inaudible reaction to Coetzee’s delivery is critical to my reading of the lecture. Elizabeth Costello’s character, I suggest, is emotionally drawn. Heartfelt insistences and strong opinions comprise her argument and other’s response to it. And as with her creator, Costello’s delivery of lessons always manages to startle and surprise. Since the publication of the book, Costello makes multiple, unexpected appearances in Coetzee’s writing. She features in short stories for literary journals and weirdly appears in the novel Summertime. Critical reception of the authorial function of Costello in Coetzee’s literature is mixed. Pankaj Mishra (2005) finds that the character “spout[s] nonsense.” James Meek (2009) claims that in his use of Costello, the author “has moved away from naturalistic, storytelling fiction towards other forms—essays, polemic and memoir, or a composite of all three in a

54  Those Who Can’t, Teach fictional framework.” This strikes me as a rather odd way to read the stories of lectures2 in Coetzee’s novel. I argue that the format, essay, polemic, or memoir delivering the story is the story. In this metafictional telling, literature is an event, “one that,” Attridge (2005) claims, “involves the performing of its meanings and feelings, and that what has been traditionally called form is central to this performance” (p. 9). Coetzee’s recent work stories the performance: There is no authorial rationality from, no outside of affect, no reliable narrator. All we have to go on is the delivery. As such, and like a lesson, the event of literature is pedagogical. In literature, pedagogy comes by way of the narrative’s aesthetic and formal delivery. Affect delivering Coetzee’s novel compels readers to take in and consider what narrative is saying, not only in words but in feeling. Each of Costello’s lessons stands alone. Still, to gain deeper meaning of what she means requires reading the stories together and against Coetzee’s other work. The themes of the animal, human cruelty, salvation, and sympathy raised in Lives of Animals, for example, are redressed in “The Problem of Evil” and Disgrace. Her ideas on humanizing and humanist education reach back to Age of Iron, Foe, and even perhaps Heart of the Country. This intra-textual3 dialogue Costello holds with Coetzee’s writing mirrors the intertextuality distinctive of his layered prose. Acclaimed and critically read for the latter, literary critics pay less attention to the former. Intra-textuality conveys Coetzee’s struggle to communicate some of the harder contents of human being his novels take on—social hatred, sexual violence, torture, and abuse. Intra-textuality, readings inside and between Coetzee’s text, documents the author’s inner struggle to address these hard themes. Costello’s lecture might be read as taking the author’s philosophical deliberations where academic discourse cannot go. Except that she uses academic discourses to go there, confusing her and our thoughts on any given matter. Despite her wild academic delivery, Costello overwhelmingly embodies Coetzee’s (2012, 2016) “last stand” for pedagogy called for in his convocation address and letter to Professor Higgins. Literature is the aging Costello’s pedagogical medium. Literary modes, and in this case poetry,4 she argues, develops one’s sympathetic imagination of the lives of others. But, as Spivak (1999) cautions, the force of literature is also used to colonize or incite others. Costello learns of the dangers of her literary delivery when traitorous aspects of her metaphorical and figurative animal speech turn her audience against her. As with any pedagogy, the delivery can colonize and devastate, provoke and shutdown, punish and liberate, confuse and illuminate. In Costello’s usage, the combined aesthetic lures, pedagogical and literary, combust in mid-sentence. I follow Costello’s charged pedagogy in

Those Who Can’t, Teach  55 her mission to “save my soul” by advancing the lives of animals (EC 86). Costello is not a public intellectual, although her peers view her as such. Her intention, as David Attwell (2006) notes, is not to change minds nor is she “speaking truth to power” (p. 26). Instead, he finds Costello serves as a “compromise” and a “surrogate” of the author (p. 33). Costello’s character, I find, serves Coetzee, just as Plato serves Socrates as his midwife, 5 more pedagogically deployed than either of Attwell’s characterizations permits. I further find that, in and through the character of Costello, Coetzee generates a deliberative space of transference that offers insight into the internal drama driving his character’s unwieldy delivery of knowledge. The transference effects of Costello’s lessons are depicted by those hearing her arguments. Audience members are taken aback by her sensational and shocking remarks. Where they come from is anyone’s guess. But as one reads on one learns the inside story to Costello’s teaching woes. Family secrets insinuate the backstories to the lecture. Valences of egoism ricochet off her interactions with family members and colleagues. Overwhelming feeling for the animals causes Costello to misjudge what she says to her audience and vice versa. Costello’s ability to rouse conflict and outrage in others personifies transference, as Janet Malcom (1980) describes: The phenomenon of transference—how we all invent each other according to early blueprints—was Freud’s most original and radical discovery. The idea of infant sexuality and of the Oedipus complex can be accepted with a good deal more equanimity than the idea that the most precious and inviolate of entities—personal relations—is actually a messy jangle of misapprehensions, at best an uneasy truce between powerful solitary fantasy systems. Reading Costello as an invention of the author’s early and unknowable blueprints, her character takes on new meanings of authorship, text, and reading. Feeling our way through her off-putting arguments feels disorienting. Even for a fictional character, her words are unbelievable. And all the intense feelings she provokes signal transference. In my discussion of the novel, I consider the fraught delivery of author and character writing and delivering an address of the animal as their combined efforts to act as a pedagogical subject. The pedagogy each delivers to the audience operate in tandem but not with the same desires or aims or ends. How do we know which aim delivers the novel, one might ask? It depends on who and how one is reading. Because it is not my habit to use the author’s extra-textual remarks to interpret his text,6 my reading strategy is to follow the lines of feeling tracing out the outline of Costello’s lecture as it delivers its message

56  Those Who Can’t, Teach to those in her midst. If the author’s ideas are muffled in her words, they exist in a trace of meaning (Derrida, 1982). “Always differing and deferring,” Derrida (1982) claims, “the trace is never as it is in the presentation of itself. It erases itself in presenting itself, muffles itself in resonating, like a writing itself, inscribing its pyramid in différance” (p. 23). As such, affect muddles its way through Costello’s cascading thoughts delivering her message. I report on her outbursts overwhelming her delivery and interrupting one’s reading. I follow her pedagogy as it takes the talk into arenas of the other’s engagement she did not anticipate. Taking in her feelings, I show how her pedagogy can and does get away from her in the lecture.

Like a Performing Animal: Human Projection The opening pages of the novel describe Elizabeth Costello as: a writer born in 1928, which makes her sixty-six years old, going on sixty-seven. She has written nine novels, two books of poems, a book on bird life, and a body of journalism. By birth she is Australian. She was born in Melbourne and still lives there, though she spent the years 1951–1963 abroad, in England and France. She has been married twice. She has two children, one by each marriage. (EC 1) Critically acclaimed for her work House on Eccles Street, a revision of James Joyce’s character in Ulysses, Molly Bloom, “there has grown up around her a small critical industry” (EC 1). As such, the literary author is regularly asked to give talks on the literary academic circuit. Costello’s academic invitation to speak is procured by the fictional Appleton College, where her son John works as assistant professor of physics and astronomy. Invited to give the annual “Gates Lecture and meet with literature students,” John accompanies her to and from the venue. As John attends her talks, he reports on the event (EC 60). For the three-part lecture, John notes, his mother is “electing to speak, not about herself and her fiction, as her sponsors would no doubt like, but about a hobbyhorse of hers, animals” (EC 60). He elects not to “broadcast his connection with Elizabeth Costello because he prefers to make his own way in the world” (EC 60). He is not “ashamed of her,” he insists, “despite the fact that he and his sister and late father are written into her books in ways that he sometimes finds painful” (EC 60). The relationship John holds with his mother is affectionately ambivalent. Complicating their relation is his wife’s derision of his mother’s celebrity lecturer status. Having yet to secure an academic position, Norma resents her mother-in-law’s foray into her area of expertise, philosophy

Those Who Can’t, Teach  57 of mind. Costello is also no fan of her daughter-in-law. Unspoken “hostilities are renewed almost at once” (EC 60) between the two women during the lectures and around the grandchildren’s meat-eating. Costello’s lecture is marked by personal, Oedipal, professional, and family strife before it is delivered. As such, she opens her talk defensively: ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ she begins. ‘It is two years since I last spoke in the United States. In the lecture I then gave, I had reason to refer to the great fabulist Franz Kafka, and in particular to his story ‘Report to an Academy’, about an educated ape, Red Peter, who stands before the members of a learned society telling the story of his life — of his ascent from beast to something approaching man. On that occasion I felt a little like Red Peter myself, and said so. Today that feeling is even stronger, for reasons that I hope will become clearer to you. (EC 62) John is unsurprised by her stunted opening: “His mother does not have a good delivery. Even as a reader of her own stories she lacks animation” (EC 63). Along with her lack of levity, her opening remarks are neither “lighthearted” nor “ironic.” Instead, “It means what it says. I say what I mean. I am an old woman. I do not have the time any longer to say things I do not mean” (EC 62). With this overdetermining disclaimer, she then assures her audience that she does mean to be understood: I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical [. . .] It is the language of Aristotle and Porphyry, of Augustine and Aquinas, of Descartes and Bentham, of, in our day, Mary Midgley and Tom Regan. It is a philosophical language…. (EC 66) Costello’s greatest conceptual problem with her talk, she complains, is she is caught between two desires: To speak and be taken seriously, like the great thinkers in past and present days, and to speak like and for the animal. Refusing to use academic orientations to knowledge that in the first place mistreat the animal, she cannot use philosophical discourse in the conventional way. Speaking in the way of the animal leaves her no choice but to abandon conventional procedures of reason. Costello’s fabulous animalizing philosophical discourse is deliberate. The style of storying the lecture, Gareth Cornwell (2008) suggests, speaks to Coetzee’s problem of having to use discourses that “flatten” rather than open up thinking the animal (p. 98). Supposed to be generative, in Costello’s delivery, academic discourse is shown to be anthropocentric, constraining what can be thought of the animal in human terms.

58  Those Who Can’t, Teach To speak of the animal, Costello, like her creator, has no choice but to speak in: stories7 rather than given lectures because they enable him to say things that cannot be said any other way, things, moreover, that remain unsayable—do not exist, cannot exist—outside of the story in which they are embedded and from which they cannot in the end be separated. (Cornwell, 2008, p. 98) Costello’s story is one of man’s poor metaphysical treatment of the animal, justifying his actual cruelty to animals. In Costello’s re-version, she mistreats the human to rethink the animal: “I will pay you the honor of skipping a recital of the horrors of their lives and deaths […] reminding you only that the horrors I here omit are nevertheless at the center of this lecture” (EC 63). Skipping over the story of animal suffering we already know, she moves on to a lesser known one. It is one of man and the unspeakably cruel effects his superior thinking poses for all living things. To tell this story, Costello makes an animal analogy of the human being. ‘They went like sheep to the slaughter.’ ‘They died like animals.’ ‘The Nazi butchers killed them.’ Denunciation of the camps reverberates so fully with the language of the stockyard and slaughterhouse that it is barely necessary for me to prepare the ground for the comparison I am about to make. The crime of the Third Reich, says the voice of accusation, was to treat people like animals. (EC 64–5) But likening crimes of humanity to those of stockyard animals is hard to make and take. Metaphors of the animal to characterize the unthinkable archive of human suffering are obscene. And her conclusion that the inhumane Nazi crimes of human on human atrocity find a precedent in the maltreatment of animals feels dead wrong. Still, and although, the argument is stunning, it (badly and unpreparedly) resounds the one made by Jacques Derrida in “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy.” In this seminal essay, Derrida (1974) argues that human discourse is saturated in the mythology of whiteness designed to exalt the European man’s reasoned-out existence as universal to all. What is metaphysics? A white mythology which assembles and reflects Western culture: the white man takes his own mythology (that is, Indo-European mythology), his logos-that is, the mythos of his idiom, for the universal form of that which it is still his inescapable desire to call Reason. …. (p. 11)

Those Who Can’t, Teach  59 Costello invokes Derrida’s positions to argue that man’s razing the animal from the metaphysical text grounding Reason is the first offense he commits to other: White mythology comes after the animal erasure. In making an already hard case, Costello refuses to use the philosopher’s anthropocentric reason familiar to her audience to make a case for the animals. Rather, she confusingly turns the metaphorical procedures of this logic on itself to advance animals. To take man’s reason apart, she deploys Derrida’s (1974) deconstructive one returning to human reason the felt and sensational(animal) qualities the philosopher effaces to make certain its faulty claims (p. 270). Costello’s speech literally returns metaphoric animal language to human speech to powerfully overwhelm our sense of reason. Her “animal aping” aims to undo reason’s anthropocentric logos. Barking out points, she attempts to charge the audiences senses. And she gives two wild human analogies to back up her claims for animal existence. The first example she gives carries on from her off-putting opening remarks and is modeled on Kafka’s short story “Report to an Academy.” As already stated, Costello intends to give her report on an animal subject to human education. Unlike Red Peter, it is not her own education she is reporting on. Instead, she reports on the human education of a real animal straight from the archives of psychological animal experiments.8 As Costello claims, the real story of Sultan the Chimpanzee bears uncanny resemblance to the fictional one told by Kafka of a fictional ape’s human education. Sultan is an Ape who is subject of and to the animal experiments of Dr. Wolfgang Köhler working from 1912 to 1920 at the Prussian Academy of Sciences (EC 71). Professor Köhler’s research is “devoted to experimentation into the mental capacities of apes, particularly chimpanzees” (EC 71). Like Red Peter, Sultan is “captured on the African mainland by hunters specializing in the ape trade and shipped across the sea to a scientific institute” (EC 72). According to Costello: At the educational institute, “Both Red Peter and Köhler’s apes then underwent a period of training intended to humanize them” (EC 72). Köhler’s real banana experiments, Costello claims, used food and punishment to examine the human possibilities of educating the apes. Instead of examining evidence of Köhler’s supposed cruelty toward the animal as archived in the study, Costello’s reading creatively responds to the animal’s suffering plight as she imagines. To put herself in the animal’s position, she abandons Köhler’s actual findings by advancing her own. Sultan knows: No one is supposed to think. That is what the bananas up there are about. The bananas are there to make one think, to spur one to the limits of one’s thinking. But what one must think?

60  Those Who Can’t, Teach One thinks: Why is he starving me? One thinks: What have I done? Why has he stopped liking me? […] The right thought to think is: How does one use the crates to reach the bananas? (EC 72–3) Reflecting on the human educational experiments conducted on animals, Costello finds the human: … sadistic games that are played around food here, leads him [Sultan] to ask questions about the justice of the universe and the place of this penal colony in it, a carefully plotted psychological regime conducts him away from ethics and metaphysics toward the humbler reaches of practical reason. (EC 74) Costello concludes that the researcher’s design to humanize the Ape has the opposite effect—not only do they make the animal less animal, but they make the animal less human. In her Kafkesque-like conclusion, it is hard to figure out who the story speaks for and to—the animal or the human. Her efforts to reason out what Sultan must be thinking collapses into her all-too-human feelings of animal cruelty. Rather than stay with the animal as described in the experiment, she imagines the unwritten story of animal thought in distinctly human terms, theories, and experiences. Costello means to offer the animal’s viewpoint. But these suspiciously resemble the human’s own, or rather the human child’s own. Children share with Sultan a certain incomprehensibility and sense of injustice with being made to perform and suffer in school. It is human children plagued with thinking: Why do adults behave this way? And although they do not have Sultan’s supposed (and suspect, given Kafka’s writing on them) understanding of penal colonies, children liken their time in school to being in jail. Subject to schooling’s regimes of discipline, children, above all (even Kafka) are made to feel like performing monkeys. Claiming to speak as an animal, her efforts to do so creep into her human and/or childhood experience. Costello’s animal point cannot account for the real animal whose actual and unknowable existence she, like Kafka, remakes in their very human feelings for the animal. The story Costello tells is not about Sultan or Red Peter but the profound ethical effect that reading the animal experiments has on their very human authors.9 The examples of Sultan and Kafka, animal and human have one thing in common: Western education bound up in the capacity for reason subjects children and animals to mean psychological experiments that demean both. Feeling herself losing her line of thinking, Costello abruptly leaves the made-up animal situation to turn back to the second and more difficult

Those Who Can’t, Teach  61 animal analogy she mentions in her opening remarks. Returning to the death camps, she means to hammer man’s cruelty to the animal home to an already skeptical audience: … [D]espite a humanity shared with their victims, the killers treated them like lice. That is too abstract. The horror is that the killers refused to think themselves into the place of their victims, as did everyone else. They said, ‘It is they in those cattle cars rattling past.’ [...] They did not say, ‘It is I who is in that cattle car […] In other words, they closed their hearts. (EC 79) Abandoning reason, Costello dramatically calls for an education of the “seat of the heart,” sympathy, or feeling for others (AOI 79). To feel for animals requires imagining their lot, the way she does for Sultan and Kafka did for Red Peter (who she conveniently forgets is not a real animal but a fictional character). Citing her felt capacity to write literature as proof of the potential of feeling for the animal, Costello dramatically declares: There are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination […] If I can think my way into the existence of a being who has never existed, then I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with whom I share the substrate of life. (EC 80) With no such sympathetic capacity to feel for the lives of animals, goes Costello’s argument, we are as complicit in the decimation of animals as German bystanders are to their human siblings in the death camps. Therefore, as long as we stand by and allow the slaughter of animals, we are all like the Germans who stood by and did nothing as their fellow citizens, neighbors, and human beings were sent to death camps. Incensed by her dangerous arguments and feeling her conclusions to be wrong, Norma tells John: “She can’t just be allowed to get away with it! She’s confused!” (EC 81). John begs his wife to leave his mother alone: “She’s old, she’s my mother. Please!” (EC 81). The confusion Norma and others feel emerges in their resistance to the error in Costello’s untenable comparisons of human atrocity in inconceivable animal terms. Unsure of what Costello is saying, Professor O’ Hearn, a leading philosopher, asks her to “clarify” her reasons: Are you saying we should close down factory farms? Are you saying we should stop eating meat? Are you saying we should treat animals more humanely, kill them more humanely? Are you saying we

62  Those Who Can’t, Teach should stop experiments on animals? Are you saying we should stop experiments with animals even benign psychological experiments like Köhler’s? (EC 81) Feeling him missing the point, Costello refuses to respond to his question, which asks her to “enunciate principles […] If principles are what you want to take away from this talk, I would have to respond, open your heart and listen to what your heart says” (EC 82). Costello’s unprincipled yet pedagogically humanist response, listen to your heart, runs counter to the reasonable dialogue she wishes to engage. It incites rabid responses from others. Further, the talk leaves her son John “wish[ing] his mother had not come […] If she wants to open her heart to animals, why can’t she stay home and open it to her cats?” (EC 83). Others like the philosopher Norma and the poet Abraham Stern are pushed to their moral and reasonable limits. Stern refuses to “break bread” with her at the faculty dinner, finding her comparisons of animal slaughter to Nazi atrocities committed to Jews “trades on the horror of the camps in a cheap way” (EC 94). Norma finds her arguments fall into “easy shallow relativism that impresses freshmen. Respect for everyone’s world-view, the cow’s world-view, the squirrel’s world-view, and so forth. In the end it leads to total intellectual paralysis. You spend so much time respecting that you haven’t time left to think” (EC 91–2). Costello makes clear “she means what she says.” However, on moral and philosophical grounds, others cannot hear out, let alone entertain her sayings. Her thoughtless projections of her feelings for animal existence on her human colleagues are wrong and morally suspect, taking cheap shots at those who fall victim to “barbaric”10 human conduct. As a result, Norma, Professor Stern, and others feel put upon and accused by her meanings rather than edified. Klein (1946) coins the term “projective identification” to conceptualize the felt process by which one makes relations to others by projecting felt bits and pieces of herself on them. The process first begins in infancy as the child makes identification with her mother through an unspoken economy of projected feelings. Feelings arise when the baby feels frustrated with the mother. Feeling frustrated feels bad. To rid herself of bad feelings, the baby attributes them to the mother: Much of the hatred against parts of the self is now directed toward the mother. This leads to a particular form of identification which establishes the prototype of an aggressive object-relation. I suggest for these processes the term ‘projective identification’. (p. 102) Distinctions made between herself and others come by way of bad infantile feelings. Animated by transference, projective identification allows

Those Who Can’t, Teach  63 one to make distinctions between self and other by putting one’s irrational bad feelings on them. And notably, social hatreds like misogyny and racism operate by distinguishing the goodness of the self by way of attributing one’s bad feelings and qualities of self on others. According to Derrida (1974), the metaphoric means by which words assign and carry meaning is also projective. Reason sheds discourse of its projective qualities (ornamental and effusive significations) and yet this foreclosed meaning still moves meaning. Grinding down the genealogical, historical, and unconscious significations of words, he (1974) writes, philosophers efface and sharpen words to blur their meanings. As tools of distinction, words are faulty because its rich communicative matter is effaced or reorganized in transference. Words are also always metaphorical, carrying meanings and associations excessive to their historical, literal, and/or correspondent meaning. And it is, as Derrida (1974) shows, the philosopher king, Aristotle himself, who discusses the dangerous and metaphorical qualities common to all and every language. Metaphor (metaphora) consists in giving (epiphora) the thing a name (onomatos) that belongs to something else, the transference being either from genus to species (apo tov genous epi eidos), or from species to genus, or from species to species, or on grounds of analogy (Aristotle, Poetics, I457b6-9). (in Derrida, 1974, p. 50) Metaphor dangerously gives a name to beings of a similar kind or species to distinguish them from other beings. Speciesism, Pete Singer (1975) argues, generates “a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species” (p. 6). Speciesism assigns a name to similar kind of beings (i.e., mammals) to make them distinct to each other. The human/man is to metaphorically make distinct from the animal, man from woman, adult from child, black from white. No words actually mean what they say. But unlike Derrida (1978b), who deconstructs to detangle metaphorical meaning from the signifier to expose the truth of its saying, Costello designs to take words to the limits of their logic through her literal rendition of what she feels they are saying. Infusing common discourse used to reason with animal imagery and analogy, she offers a strange yet recognizable way to say what she feels words mean. But because she wants to appear reasonable when speaking of the animal, she is caught between feeling and reason: “If I do not subject my discourse to reason, whatever that is, what is left for me but to gibber and emote and knock over my water glass and generally make a monkey of myself?” (EC 68). Her audience is also caught between two sides of her warring internal argument. Stuck between reason and gibberish, human language is found totally wanting and inadequate to speak of the animal.

64  Those Who Can’t, Teach Costello’s is a risky method; to transcend reason by being unreasonable, to speak of animals like an animal, to compare humans to animals, to blur metaphorical and categorical distinctions of humans and animals, to mix up animal and human atrocities seem unlikely to work with her unprepared audience. And yet, in her slightly mean projections of her imagined animal (non)reason spoken in her emotive, full body self, she intends to make her learned colleagues feel a bit of the unfair philosophical mistreatment she imagines the animal feels subject to human reason. Projective identification is endemic to pedagogy as the teacher’s feelings are constantly placed on student, such that they come to define how the student sees herself. The affective process is silent—feelings circulate like air. Feelings are inaudible but registered by others. The teacher’s projections onto their student operate by way of feeling—one feels bad receiving the teacher’s words, but like Norma cannot pinpoint why or how. If projective identification is the dangerous mechanism delineating self from other by delivering feelings for the self put on the other paradoxically, Klein (1959/1975) suggests, it also provides the mechanism by which we feel for and identify with the other: We are inclined to attribute to other people—in a sense, to put into them—some of our own emotions and thoughts; and it is obvious that it will depend on how balanced or persecuted we are whether this projection is of a friendly or a hostile nature. By attributing part of our feelings to the other person, we understand their feelings, needs and satisfactions; in other words, we are putting ourselves into the other person’s shoes. (p. 251) Feeling then, good and bad, for others is part of our personal make up and histories. The demeaning qualities and characteristics we attribute to others tell us more about how we really feel of and about ourselves. If not in the same way, philosophical discourse and Costello’s metaphorical re-worked one embody this projective tension and tendency to be at the heart of our human trouble with understanding each animal other. Costello’s argument that philosophical discourse and the application of reason from Plato to Nagel, even Costello’s unreasonable own, is illequipped for articulating the lives of animals falls on deaf ears. But her embodiment of discourse does seem to convey her point. It is not that Costello’s arguments are unreasonable; they are incisive in their deployment of projective procedures of thought overlooked by philosophers in their supposedly objective thinking. In Costello’s projective reasoning, the delivery of thought is shown unable, in the first place, to feel for either animal or human, or at least the aspects of its unknowable existence. Finding reason unable to account for the animal, Costello turns to poetry, which again is a human rather than animal discourse.

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Still she clings to the idea that poetry provides a better record of engagement with the animal than philosophy ever has (EC 96).

Education is a Fight Costello’s first lecture fails to convince her colleagues. The heated debate travels to the speaker’s dinner where philosophical reasoning is abandoned. As her colleagues enter into discussions addressing the more fraught maternal and personal domains of child-raising, dietary prohibitions, and the question of infant consciousness, Costello uses common sense discourse to get her points across. A male colleague decides Costello’s common arguments for animals are non-philosophical and can only be understood through the irrational. He cites the human preference for “human babies” over those of “animals” as an example of irrationality. Defending against this misinterpretation of what she is saying, Costello refuses his line of her thinking: “I don’t know what I think,” she says in response. “I often wonder what thinking is, what understanding is. Do we really understand the universe better than animals do?” (EC 90). The pedagogical impossibility of clear meaning is repeatedly, frustratingly, and agonizingly articulated in the character of Costello. The impossibility is distinctly pedagogical: Costello is most hard to follow when she is teaching.11 The difficulty of teaching anyone anything leads Freud (1937) to describes education as one of three impossible professions “in which one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfying results” (p. 400). Education is a conflict and clash of desires of what one knows when faced with the other. Fed up with his mother’s antics, John decides to get to the bottom of her big problems with animals (and humans): “Do you really believe, Mother, that poetry classes are going to close down the slaughterhouses?” he asks her. His mother responds, “No.” Then what, John wonders. She can’t answer. “John, I don’t know what I want to do. I just don’t want to sit silent” (EC 103–4). Costello’s emotional and moral determination to “not to sit silent” re-calls the ghost of Hannah Arendt haunting educational scenes in Coetzee’s novels. Pam Ryan (2005) argues the influence of Arendt on Costello “is an absence that […] is palpably present, a lacuna throughout the text that draws attention to itself […] I suggest, as a possibility, that Coetzee is presenting Elizabeth Costello as a latter-day Hannah Arendt, a woman ‘thinking in dark times’” (p. 279). I further find that Costello does not present as Arendt but channels her severe Socratic style and hyper-Kantian penchant for judgment. The collegial sponsor of her talk is humorously named Arendt, such that her ideas on education are the backdrop to the lecture. Arendt’s character is a blueprint to Costello’s moral conviction and desire to affect our thinking to bring about acting in the world.

66  Those Who Can’t, Teach Arendt’s thoughts on adult educational authority palpably find their way into Costello’s solitary stance of revolt and responsibility for the world and the generations. In Between Past and Future, Arendt discusses her alarm with the crisis of education she saw child-centered pedagogies usher into public schools in the US. Arendt (1968) felt that the adult’s relinquishment of authority in schooling would lead to the loss of tradition and history, such that children could not be led properly into an old world: “This responsibility is not arbitrarily imposed upon educators; it is implicit in the fact that the young are introduced by adults into a continuously changing world” (p. 186). This projective tension circulates through Arendt’s writing on education as it does in Costello’s lectures, albeit not in the same way. The lectures of Elizabeth Costello animate her projections interfering with her on-the-ground delivery of education ideals. When pedagogically acting in the world, her ideas tell another story. It is a story of the very human limits of speaking, politics, and action to address the world, a story Arendt (and her followers) perhaps cannot access or bear to tell. Costello also does not recognize the faulty state of her pedagogy, even as its weird intra- and interpersonal delivery haphazardly unravel her arguments on animals and cause her colleagues to break from her and her talk. She and we can only gain access to her conflicted state of mind, what Arendt (1971) calls “thinking dealt with invisibles,” in her running conversations with her son John. Thinking deals with invisibles, with representations of things that are absent; judging always concerns particulars and things close at hand. But the two are interrelated as are consciousness and conscience. If thinking - the two-in-one of the soundless dialogue actualizes the difference within our identity as given in consciousness and thereby results in conscience as its by-product, then judging, the by-product of the liberating effect of thinking, realizes thinking, makes it manifest in the world of appearances, where I am never alone and always too busy to be able to think. The manifestation of the wind of thought is no knowledge; it is the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And this, at the rare moments when the stakes are on the table, may indeed prevent catastrophes, at least for the self. (p. 446) Knowledge’s intimate ties to pedagogy are expressed to John. He provides the soundless medium with which to review her grief with her inability to be understood. When John gently asks his mother to clarify her thinking, we gain a sense of the two-in-one thinking each of us holds with our self. It is his passive voice, ironically of reason, that supports her to drop her guard and think again. His child’s voice stands in for the

Those Who Can’t, Teach  67 other inside her mind that holds court over the rightness or wrongness of her thinking. In the last lecture in a debate with her now nemesis, humanist philosopher Professor O’Hearn, Costello loses the lines of her thinking. Refusing to take the professor’s bait that her argument has nothing to do with reason, Costello angrily responds: A calf can miss its mother, as a child does, without having “mastered the concepts of presence and absence,” without having “to take a course in philosophy.” Costello’s parting shot on the matter stings: “Throw it out, I say. What good do its [reason’s] piddling distinctions do?” (EC 111). Invoked in her outburst is Singer’s position on the philosopher’s distinctions as giving reasons for man’s attitude of superiority over all other beings that leads to a specified mistreatment of animals. To throw out the distinctions, she returns to Derrida’s (1974) deconstruction of the mythological artifice of reason exalting man to the case of animals. To me, a philosopher who says that the distinction between human and nonhuman depends on whether you have a white or black skin,  and a philosopher who says that the distinction between human and non-human depends on whether or not you know the difference between a subject and a predicate, are more alike than they are different. (EC 111) The claim is accusatory, a biting version of Derrida’s complex argument. Although dangerously under-explicated, her position surfaces the ugly face of projection in the philosopher’s reason. It indicts the philosopher’s use of projective-distinctions as at the root of the prejudiced and discriminating Western school of thought, one in which human children continue to be globally educated. She also exposes the philosopher’s apparatus of logos, man’s reason, to be a performance of thought designed to make the human, known as man, distinct and superior to all other creatures. Her parting word: Reason and its language games perform the superior being of man. In the end, Costello’s accusation abandons the existence of animals, leaving behind her dogged rebuke of reason to ring throughout the hall and the last pages of her more-human-thananimal story. On the car ride to the airport, Costello is filled with second thoughts, self-doubt, and remorse for the injury her outbursts may have caused her son, his family, and her colleagues. She pleads with John to see that she is not against reason, nor the humans, but for the animals: I seem to move around perfectly easily among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participating in a crime of stupefying proportions? Am

68  Those Who Can’t, Teach I fantasizing it all? I must be mad! Yet every day I see evidences […] Corpses. Fragments of corpses that they have bought for money […] I look into your eyes, into Norma’s, into the children’s, and I see only kindness, human kindness. Calm down, I tell myself, you are making a mountain out of a molehill. This is life. Everyone else comes to terms with it, why can’t you? Why can’t you? (EC 114–5) Despite raising the stakes on her and our “thinking the animal,” thinking cannot save Costello. It will not save the animal. Begging her son out of public view to see her side, she begins to acknowledge the projected wrongs in her one-sided animal position (i.e., the animals are good, the humans are bad). She finally acknowledges her trouble reconciling the cruelty and kindness of the human capable of both goodness and badness. As such, her last question about the animal is posed to herself: “Everyone else comes to terms with it, why can’t you?” (EC 115, emphasis added). Without words (and feeling a bit put upon and anxious to get rid of her), John embraces his devastating mother whispering to her the (patronizing) words she presumably once did to him, as any mother might with her child’s unreasonable upset with the whole wide world: “There, there. It will soon be over” (EC 115). Teeming with transference, Costello reaches her devastating conclusion: Everyone comes to terms with it, why can’t I (you)? Her impossible question leaves the reader wondering who is everyone and what is it? It is difficult to know where Costello puts her failure to teach—is it her fault or others. What is clear is that Costello finally gets it: In her present and projective state of mind, she can’t teach the animal; she is too affected by her subject to convince others she knows anything of its existence. Costello’s ontological justification for the animal is tied up in transference, one that brings her to the devastating truth, one that Malcolm (1980) deems is inherent to its working: The concept of transference at once destroys faith in personal relations and explains why they are tragic: We cannot know each other. We must grope around for each other through a dense thicket of absent others. We cannot see each other plain. A horrible kind of predestination hovers over each new attachment we form. “Only connect,” E. M. Forster proposed. “Only we can’t,” the psychoanalyst [the narrator] knows. Readers are left with Costello’s unbearable recognition that she cannot sympathetically imagine the animal existence without considerable expense to her own human bonds, at least in this point in her and our human history. This knowledge leaves her devastated and not knowing what it is she feels, imagines, and thinks. Abounding inside her are

Those Who Can’t, Teach  69 feelings of despair that she like an animal is unreasonable, unrelatable, unable to speak in a language common to fellow beings she also loves. Perhaps only in bearing affect, these intolerable, unsympathetic, antisocial feelings, can Costello imagine what it is, what it really feels like to be an animal subject to cruel human treatment. The unconscious dynamics of transference circulating between Costello and John, mother and child, are rendered visible by Coetzee’s narrative and can be rather entertaining, more recognizable to the reader than her hard to get at feelings. Costello’s over-identification with the animals she is trying to save turns on her. However, John’s softer and pedagogical delivery of her thoughts provides her (and us) the vulnerable opening she needs to learn. Ironically, it is only John, the child in an adult audience, who can recognize what she is saying. He alone is intimately equipped to hear and deliver back to her a profound animal message, the one that she is but is not and cannot tolerate being, although we cannot know for sure. In her essay “Education and Crisis,” Shoshana Felman (1982) describes one’s teaching and learning as constantly derailed by pedagogy exhibited in “breakthroughs, leaps, discontinuities, regressions, and deferred action” (p. 27). The agonizing inner life of pedagogy Felman describes is very much like the conflicts in thought Costello feels when asked to give a lecture on the lives of animals. Still, and as Felman suggests, crisis in teaching is a condition of pedagogy constructed by and in human relations. “Teaching,” she writes, takes place precisely only through a crisis: if teaching does not hit upon some sort of crisis, if it does not encounter either the vulnerability or the explosiveness of a (explicit or implicit) critical and unpredictable dimension, it has perhaps not truly taught. (p. 52) If she can’t teach in her breakdown, Costello resets the conditions for learning. In lectures to follow, Costello compulsively projects her desire for knowledge onto others. Her ideas continue to be received badly. Her off-putting delivery derails her arguments. She cannot seem to learn. It is hard to know what, if anything, is gained from her lessons. But we do get a sense that all participating in the lectures, including herself, feel an altered sense of self. The Gates Lecture may be Elizabeth Costello’s last word on animal rights but not the author’s: The educational problem of the animal lives on in Disgrace and the Jesus trilogies. If lost on her colleagues, Costello’s confusing animal meaning is registered by her child and the reader. She is slightly able to garner a hearing for the animal. Her temporary breakdown offers a reprieve to work through the feeling she so desperately needs to say: About a loved and hated animal she is. All that is left is to

70  Those Who Can’t, Teach think again of the meanings her hard lesson fails to deliver: Our human problem of not knowing the animal, the one we are and are not, endures as long as our cruel treatment of any live thing continues.

Notes

Those Who Can’t, Teach  71 trace the transference I read in and out of his words. I assume responsibility for any mis-readings I make and transferences and/or projections I take in finding traces of authorial text in the literary one. 7 I see these stories as offering another reading of a story we already know. 8 Psychological animal experiments despicably inform theories and practices of human behavior used to punish and discipline children in schools. Amongst these are Pavlov’s (in Specter 2014) reward and punishment experiments with dogs and Harry Harlow’s (in Aalia, 2016) experiments on attachment depriving rhesus baby monkeys of affection from their mothers. It is unclear if findings of these experiments conducted on animals are ever intended to be used with children. Specter’s (2014) article argues that Pavlov’s was not finding he did not think, “the study of human behavior could be reduced to the analysis of observable, quantifiable events and actions.” It is an insight that researchers of educational psychology continue to refuse to heed in their zeal to advance closed-text and often reckless, pseudo-scientific studies of the human mind and behavior. What is clear is this: These academic exercises are cruel to animals and are cited, used, and enacted in the inhumane disciplining of children in school. 9 Evidence of Costello’s projective collapse of her plight into that of Kafka’s animal is highlighted when she bursts out: If Red Peter had any sense, he would not have any children […] Hybrids are, or ought to be sterile; and Kafka saw both himself and Red Peter as hybrids, as monstrous thinking devices mounted inexplicably on suffering animal bodies. This hybrid knowledge, she goes on to claim, wounds Kafka to the flesh: “The state that we meet in all the surviving photographs of Kafka is a stare of pure surprise: surprise, astonishment, alarm. Of all men Kafka is the most insecure in his humanity” (EC 75). In Costello’s hard-to-follow, deeply projective, existential collapse, perhaps it is her own wounded humanity, and not the animals’ mistreated nor Kafka’s insecure one, at stake in her lecture. 10 Barbaric is the word Greek philosophers used to distinguish cruel human conduct in terms of the animal likened to sheep. As Nethersole (2015) suggests, the Greeks cite the animals’ lack of reason as the reason why humans behave like animals when waging acts of barbarism. 11 Coetzee’s placement of an academic lecture in intersecting domains of personal, professional, and intellectual conflict illuminates the transferences that each hold for the other. Costello’s maternal views on vegetarianism enter into her philosophy of animal rights. Her colleague’s views of the baby’s non-consciousness inform his understanding of animal consciousness and lack thereof. O’Hearn’s need for clarification of Costello’s position on animals, which seems almost too clear, seems like he is itching for a fight rather than understanding. Whole schools of thought have been produced out of such conflicts and rivalries, often sexual, kindred, and collegial as well as intellectual in nature.

4

David Lurie in Disgrace Post-Education of the Teacher

In the wake of personal and social devastation, Lucy invokes learning: Perhaps that is what I must learn to accept. To start at ground level. With nothing. Not with nothing but. With nothing. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity. Like a dog. Yes, like a dog. (Disgrace 205) Her words are hard to read. Learning to start over with nothing is unthinkable. But it is, as Lucy indicates, what is required of a mother, of a country seeking out the possibility of a shared and sustainable future with others for her unborn child in the new South Africa. Uttered to her father David Lurie, Lucy insists the stakes for education, as learning from a traumatic past, are high for those living on in the wake of Apartheid. Written in 1999, in the period during and after the fall of Apartheid, Disgrace is considered to be, as Elizabeth Lowry (1999) writes, “the best novel Coetzee has written.” Lauded for his sparse, piercing prose, “what is most powerful about the book,” James Wood (2005) claims, is “its loose wail of pain, its vigorous honesty” (p. 248). Others, such as fellow South African writer Nadine Gordimer, experience this pain as further insult to ongoing injury: “In the novel Disgrace,” she laments, “there is not one black person who is a real human being […] If that’s the only truth he [Coetzee] could find in post-Apartheid South Africa, I regretted this very much for him” (in Donadio, 2007). Similarly, Salman Rushdie (2003) finds the novel too “dark” to be enlightening. “The writer’s task,” he insists, “is to provide the reader with the insight lacked by the characters. If he does not, his work will not shine a light upon darkness, but merely become a part of the darkness it describes” (p. 299). Ordinary readers too find themselves at a loss while reading scenes of social and individual devastation the novel depicts. As do many of the novel’s characters.

Post-Education of the Teacher  73 In this chapter, I characterize the deeply contested response to Disgrace as distinctly pedagogical, a dynamic of the novel overlooked by critics and scholars. Literature is not so supposed to feel like a vexing lesson, like a problem that won’t go away. Yet Disgrace feels hard in this way: Unsettling one’s taken-for-granted as it presses one to think, think, and think again. Set in the university, Disgrace features a familiar teacher figure in an aging, white, English professor. As with many has-been academics holding themselves in high esteem, Professor David Lurie wields power over his students without discretion and little thought to their personhood. Supplementing a toxic and academically cultivated egoism is his unapologetic predation of young women students. When Lurie is accused by a female student of sexual assault, he is indignant. He deeply resents being pushed out of the university. Fleeing his public life of letters, he seeks anonymity and asylum in his daughter’s small holding in the South African countryside. The brutal lessons of his and his country’s cruel treatment of others unleash on him when he and Lucy are attacked at the animal shelter where they volunteer. With the brutal attack on him and his child, Lurie is made to review his own violent thought and acts produced out of distinctly Afrikaans, English, and humanist social formations. The novel is primarily read in terms of its politically charged content: Misogyny, racism, rape, animal cruelty, Afro-pessimism. I read for what might be learned from the characters mired in violent social conflict after Apartheid’s whimpering fall. My reading brackets the political implications and historical context of the novel which are widely and heatedly discussed (McDonald, 2002; Poyner, 2008). Instead, I follow the “post”-education of David Lurie in his upended world. The post-education of David Lurie comes in content and pedagogical mode. The content (curriculum) refers to the (often grossly distorted) versions of humanism Lurie (mis)cites in numerous justifications of his way of life. Rethinking humanism as a curriculum text critical to the formation of a person and society, I demonstrate how Lurie’s bad academic habit of mis-using literary passages and glossing-over complex philosophical ideas is used to justify his violent mistreatment of others. My understanding of curriculum is not only as running the course of a life of study, as William Pinar (1975) has theorized. While retaining the autobiographical qualities of curriculum outlined by Pinar (1975)— progressive, regressive, analytic, and synthetic—my work predates this theorizing of knowledge of the self without the other. Following Grumet (1998), I find a study of knowledge cannot be unbound from its delivery by the maternal body of the other that carries the course of one’s life. Lurie’s humanism consists of self-justifying passages selectively plucked from his colonial English literary curriculum. This literary curriculum supports the fantastic logic of the thoughtless1 person that he

74  Post-Education of the Teacher has become. In my retheorization of curriculum, the drive for knowledge, the body of the (m)other’s knowledge, and its delivery are bound. Similarly, as illustrated across this book, pedagogy is it not instructional but relational and onto-epistemological. The separation of knowledge from its aesthetic and relational delivery erases intimate pedagogical dynamics of appeal, Eros, and desire from the processes of education. If we think of study as solitary, it is always with an object or other in mind. Disgrace depicts this other-oriented education in David Lurie’s learning from his own disgraceful conduct and that of his countrymen. As noted in the last chapter, Coetzee’s characters routinely critique the humanities for their justifying role in the denigration of existences that are not human, white, adult, and male. In the novel Elizabeth Costello, Costello’s critiques of humanism foresee positions taken by posthumanist scholars in the university today. In the introduction of Posthumanism and educational research, Nathan Snaza and John Weaver (2015) argue: Humanism, through a radical truncation of the ‘world’ (so much is even suggested by the word’s etymology), has made a tiny part of the world (what pertains to ‘humans’) seems as if it were the whole. Humanism is, to combine phrases from classical rhetoric and Giorgio Agamben’s (2004) philosophy, a machine that produces the world as synecdoche. ‘Man’ is made to be the measure of all things. (p. 2) This post-human, post-educational stance, notably advanced by postcolonialism and post-structuralism (and not animal studies), is adopted by Costello in her vocal critique of humanism’s narrow vision, particularly when it comes to the lives of animals. Still, the most forceful comment on humanism delivered in her lessons is not by Costello but her sister Blanche. And it is delivered not on the state of animal existence but that of humans. In the lesson entitled “The Humanities in Africa,” Costello’s sister Blanche espouses the post-humanist sentiment of Weaver and Snaza. A Christian missionary nun who takes the name Sister Bridget, Blanche commits her life to serving the poor and sick in a hospital in the district of Zululand, in KwaZulu-Natal Province, South Africa. Costello travels to Zululand to attend a commencement speech her sister is invited to give. Expecting her sister to speak of her missionary work, Costello is taken aback when Blanche decides to attack Costello’s vocational humanism instead. Taking the non-secular humanities severely to task for its role in facilitation of a godless, selfish, unjust world, Sister Bridget declares that “The studia humanitatis have taken a long time to die, but now, at the end of the second millennium of our era, they are truly on their deathbed” (EC 123). Stunned by her sister’s rivalrous outburst,

Post-Education of the Teacher  75 Costello enters into a mutually rousing and ironic defense of the humanities, given her previous strong condemnation of it for its mistreatment of animals. Reviewing the sister’s argument in his essay “Twilight of the Humanities,” Reingard Nethersole (2015) reminds us: The term ‘humanism,’ in correlation with the study of the so-called Humaniora or Humanities, Heidegger informs us, emerged from the studia humaniora or studia humanitatis in 14th and 15th century Europe. Concerned with discovering the essence of ‘man’ these studies proceeded on a twofold determination of the human: First, in so far as his nature differs from ‘bestiality’ ascribed to animal nature he is ‘human’; secondly, he is in accordance with ancient Greek tradition, distinct also from the ‘inhuman’ embodied in the uncivilized, uneducated barbarian. Interestingly the barbarian is different from anthropos due to his meaningless speech, for barbarians, as indicated in their Greek name, are people who can say only ‘ba, ba, ba, ba.’2 (p. 67) This two-fold determination rooted in man’s supremacy over all others informs Costello’s arguments in her lectures on the lives of animals. Nonethe-less, rather than concur with Blanche’s mean-spirited view, Costello retracts her own. She does so, Nethersole suggests, (2015) by holding onto “the idealism of an ancient paideia that most likely all educators and not only those in the Humanities share” (p. 67). If at odds with humanism’s white and man-centric logics and Eurocentric curriculum, Costello is unwilling to relinquish her attachment to the humanities’ humanizing teachings as insightfully contextualised by Nethersole (2015): […] [H]omo humanus was opposed to homo barbarous. Homo humanus is the name given to Romans who embodied the Ancient Greek paideia (pedagogy) referred to earlier. Humanitas, the Roman translation of the Greek paideia according to Heidegger, then came to mean scholarship and training in good citizenship, an educational and political ideal we might add, that informed the introduction of the liberal in contrast to the theological and judicial arts in the European academy during the early 19th century. Moreover, under the label ‘Hellenism,’ this paideia was exported and spread to a colony like Zululand, for instance, by ‘men from England with public-school education’ in order to administer it ‘on behalf of the Crown’(Coetzee, 2003, 140). (p. 65) The humanist end opposing barbarism and pedagogically delivering good citizens bolsters Costello’s reluctance to abandon the humanities

76  Post-Education of the Teacher altogether. Despite its many failings, the humanities, Costello reminds her sister, can pedagogically generate hopeful horizons of human existence: The classless society, for instance. Or a world from which poverty, disease, illiteracy, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and the rest of the bad litany have been exorcised. I am not putting in a plea for either of these visions. I am just pointing out that people cannot live without hope, or perhaps without illusions. (EC 132) Even more than knowledge, Costello holds onto the hope that “the Humanities teach us humanity” (EC 151, emphasis added). As with Costello, Professor David Lurie is a humanist (Disgrace 132). Unlike Costello’s reluctant humanism, Lurie is a fervent one. Ignoring the animal and human wrongs committed in the name of the humanities, Lurie laments their decline. To express his disappointment with the decline of the humanities and presumably his own growing academic irrelevancy, he rails against the “post” everything characterizing a new generation of university students in South Africa: “He has long ceased to be surprised at the range of ignorance of his students: Post-Christian, posthistorical, postliterate, they might as well be hatched from eggs yesterday”3 (Disgrace 32). Despite this derision toward his student’s supposed “post” time, it is a time, as Grant Farred (2002) notes, during which the unwitting David Lurie is also made to live after the fall of Apartheid: If his students are ‘post’ everything, Lurie too is rooted in the aridness of his moment […] Just as his students, who have little concern for the workings of history, occupying their variously ‘post’-world in ways which show no regard for either the past or the future, so Lurie is fixatedly dislocated […] Describing himself as a ‘hangover from the past’, he is intellectually landlocked, out of joint with the intellectual and physical temporalities he inhabits so intently yet unreflectively. He is blind to the historical commensurability of the two moments: Byron’s post-French Revolution world and his own post-‘revolutionary,’ post-apartheid society (p. 40). (p. 355) Both students and teachers in the new South Africa, Farred (2002) finds, are regressively caught in a moment of post-education. Apathy permeates the still-fraught relations between blacks, whites, and others. Indifference to what they collectively suffer grows thick between the generations. And, as Farred (2002) argues, it is the teacher’s willful forgetfulness of this history mirrored in his students rather than his

Post-Education of the Teacher  77 students’ lack of reverence for the canon of humanism that disgraces all their chances for a future of renewed and more equal relations for all those living in South Africa. Post-education is the new generation’s response to the failures of humanism in addressing what Hannah Arendt has called an old world, one which students did not create but with which they must contend. Education without adult authority and tradition results in what Arendt (1968) calls the “crisis of education.” Sixty years later, what once was a crisis brings the traditions of the old white and European world to its sorry end. But the end of education threatens also to erode paideia, the adult and child relation that fosters studious meaning and significance in the lives of the young. As the humanistic discourses are replaced by scientific, digital, economic, artificial, and other instrumental and consumptive forms of knowledge acquisition, the whole world of human and other history is slipping away from our teachings. The post- colonial failure to excavate humanism’s injuries to animal, human, and planetary life is coming to roost on our young. As Zygmunt Bauman (2000) warned, without pedagogical mediation, insignificant and information-overloaded education, will wreak its amnesiac toll on the generations. Thus, and despite all of humanism’s discontents, this century’s post-view of the humanist pedagogical imperative to cultivate the life of the mind and the meanings of life are deeply troubling. If the cruel logics of Western humanism ought to be contested, as argued by Costello, I feel that to lose the humanizing pedagogical ideals and principles of education at this time is to offer little hope for humanity to the young and old of the planet. To hold onto the possibilities of humanizing education after human atrocity and ruin, Disgrace returns human knowledge to the maternal scene. The maternal scene, I insist, is where all education for a human being begins. This first education consists entirely of feeling on the part of a curious, sensitive, infinitely open, infantile-animal creature we all once were. For the infant to survive, it must be led, cared for, spoken to, and guided into and through the world by its mother. No education for the child is a choice. No infant can survive alone in the world without attachment to a mother, maternal education, and its distinctly affective pedagogy. The novel situates Lurie’s resistant learning to be again human in the maternal one humanizing the animal-infant. By doing so, Coetzee implicates white kinship structures in the racist, patriarchal structure governing land, bodies, and animals under South African Apartheid. Human beings, he finds, are not only systemically and institutionally racist but paternally governed, raised, and taught in and by the imaginary bloodlines staining us all. Lurie is no mother, nor even a good father to Lucy. His non-authority and non-presence with Lucy is emblematic of post-education that forgets

78  Post-Education of the Teacher or is too self-absorbed to raise its young. Returning education to its maternal and authorial mooring, the novel returns Lurie to his child, specifically through his humiliation. Lurie’s disgraced return to Lucy re-animates maternal feelings needed for him to take responsibility for her and her ruined world. This ruin is reflected in his child’s contestations of his privileged and barbaric way of life. Feeling himself through his child’s eyes provides the impetus for Lurie’s learning of the cruel onto-epistemological and real violence he enacts on others in the guise of humanism. In his efforts to attend and bear witness to what remains of his life and that of his child, Lurie begins to take responsibility for others and the world post-Apartheid and humanist education. What is significant about the novel are the insights it poses to education. If we are living in a time of post-education, it is one bearing witness to the end of authorial and adult authority in the pedagogical relation. In humanist education, the adult teacher is called upon to lead children and students. In post-education, the child is left by non-present and unattached adults. The unthinkable inversion radically revisions both the maternal and pedagogical relation in ways that startle and surprise the reader. The child as teacher turns damning questions of existence onto the failures of parents and teachers to create a just world. In posteducation, adults of the world are subject to the child’s condemnation of the ruined states of existence they leave to her.4 Post-education then also provides an opportunity for adults to learn from their child, if they can bother to hear what she is saying. I have argued that these existential questions asked by all children—if roundly ignored by school systems— generate significant education that remains with a child for all of her life. In speculatively turning the pedagogical relation around, the novel poses these hard questions to adults and teachers entrusted to care for and educate children in the world and times they live. My reading of the chapter is post-humanist with and against the post-educational. Although I have no use for educational institutions and their ongoing abuses, I, like Elizabeth Costello, am reluctant to leave the pedagogical principles grounding human education to assemblages and animals. As long as infants are in need of their mothers, they will be in need of some form of maternal, authorial, humanizing, loving education. To leave children’s education to the agencies, elements, or other children without political power and little experience in an increasingly violent world seems immoral and irresponsible beyond measure. Post-education is amoral and reprehensible in the light of the traumatic and degraded states of the world we leave for our children. And yet, increasingly, even adult parents are growing unfit and ill-equipped to lead children into the world. Teachers are amongst the few adults left holding to their responsibility to grow children, even as they are under attack in societies across the world. In this regard, post-education, an education felt through the eyes of this new generation of children, might be the wake-up call an old

Post-Education of the Teacher  79 generation of adults needs. In the novel, the post-education Lucy delivers unto her father seems to sorely be what he needs. My post-humanist reading engages the novel’s delivery of knowledge unbound to the colonial justification of one’s way of life. It is not that humanist education is responsible for the world’s ill and global mindset; instead, I hold colonial pedagogies wrought by various European missions responsible for creating, legalizing, instituting, and maintaining dehumanizing humanist racisms today. My reading of Disgrace follows the post-education of David Lurie as he begins to retrace his self by bearing witness to the violently traumatic after-effects of Apartheid’s deadly social experiment. Lurie’s twisted relations with the female figures of color in the novel also unwillingly play a key role in Lurie’s relearning humanity. Bearing witness to traumatic history, I argue, is key to meeting the aims of post-humanist education in the amnesiac post-colonial time we live. Judith Butler (2004) writes, “If we are interested in arresting cycles of violence to produce less violent outcomes, it is no doubt important to ask what, politically, might be made of grief besides a cry for war” (p.  vii). Although framed as a political imperative, the demand Butler makes is profoundly pedagogical. Arresting cycles of violence in the production of less violent outcomes can come about only through acts of learning. Based on lessons from Coetzee’s Disgrace of what it means to represent, bear, face, and learn from violence and one’s place in a violent human history, I suggest that what might be pedagogically inserted between the cry of sorrow and the cry for arms is post-humanist education generated by socially reckoning with human pasts.

Literary Lessons: Humanism and Its Discontents No longer heady with intellectual or sexual power, Professor Lurie is a banal figure of colonial disappointment. Aware of racial injustice, he is at the same time unmoved to do anything about it. He moves in the university classroom with ease and without thought to (ab)using women. His misuse of humanist texts constructs a palatable narrative for his demeaning actions and ontological views. The novel’s opening line, “For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well,” tells all one needs to know about Professor David Lurie. The sentence is a bit laughable to those who recognize the type in academic cultures. “To his mind” expresses his cerebral and egoistic problem of sex. It is telling that he can solve this “problem” without consideration of a partner. For the learned man, solving a problem like sex is like engaging an abstract academic puzzle, largely a trained and meaningless exercise. Lurie’s cerebral sexism is garnered through the humanities, white, British, and South African style. Through his academic education, he internalizes a tautological narrative to justify his borderline cruel sexual

80  Post-Education of the Teacher and epistemic treatment of women. The English literature allegories of a woman Lurie internalizes are not natural. Nor is it a feature of his ignorance. The Professor knows what he is doing, having mastered the problem of sex conceived in and as a woman’s body. David Lurie’s sexism is learned, wrought from academic argument, and backed up by literary examples. Comprised of philosophical argument, literary allusions, and popular (rape) culture, when Lurie preys on women he does so knowingly. And he cites Western aesthetics for doing so. While wining and dining his young student Melanie, he declares to her, “[A] woman’s beauty does not belong to her alone […] She has a duty to share it” (Disgrace 16). In his outrageous formulations justifying sexual predation, he twists the aesthetic discourse of Kant (1892): “he says that the thing is beautiful […] he demands this agreement of them” (p. 58). In Lurie’s Kantian mis-reading, beauty is an unspoken demand made of Melanie: She, the thing, is beautiful and he expects her agreement to his sexual demands. When she does not agree to his sexual demands, Lurie tries another tact. Or, as Sue Kossew (2003) notes, “Thus, despite his own awareness of bad faith and the sense that ‘he ought to let her go,’ he tries again to seduce Melanie via ‘smooth words’” (pp. 16–18). Or as Lurie puts it, with words so smooth that “he almost believes in them” (Disgrace 16, emphasis added), Lurie cites Shakespeare to seal the sexual deal: “From fairest creatures we desire increase […] that thereby beauty’s rose might never die” (Disgrace 16). The turn from sublime logic to romantic image exposes Lurie’s lewd hunger festering at the base of his competing efforts at seduction. Offended by the slick allegorical shift from philosophy to poetry, Melanie rejects the professor’s advances leaving him to his frustrated, churning desire. Left to feign confusion with her disgust, Lurie absurdly attributes his lack of sexual allure to his didactic approach rather than his obvious predation (Disgrace 16). Reading the passage, the reader sees Lurie is not confused. Neither is Melanie. Nor is the reader. We all know what Lurie is up to. We know how the story of a woman’s rape goes. We are educated to know. Lurie’s citations to Beauty to justify his rape of his young charge are familiar to students of English and popular rape culture. As Melinda Harvey (2015) finds in Lurie’s use of romantic poetry, “Coetzee’s depiction of the sexual encounter that follows leaves us in no doubt how closely Romanticstyle ‘usurping upon,’ when it comes to men and women, resembles rape” (p. 103). Lurie’s well-read ideas of beauty escalate to their brutal extreme when eventually he forces himself on Melanie in an act that he describes as “not quite rape”: Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core. As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself

Post-Education of the Teacher  81 for the duration. […] So that everything done to her might be done, as it were, far away. (Disgrace 25, emphasis added) Reading what we know is rape characterized as not quite that is disconcerting. It puts readers off balance. Not quite that jumps out of the passage, rattling the bodies of millions of women subject to rape, from the pages of the novel. As Carine Madrossian (2011) writes: Disturbingly, at this point in the narrative, the text makes no effort whatsoever to establish an explicit and salutary distance between the authorial narrator and the character’s viewpoint. Readers are made privy to the reasoning that leads Lurie to decide this is not rape, and it is impossible not to participate in his way of thinking without also taking away from the violence of his act. He sets the terms in which this event is viewed so readers are made complicit with an economy that obscures his responsibility by focusing on the victim’s. The narration encourages them to ask not ‘what was he thinking?’ but why does she not resist, or why did she say ‘no, not now,’ rather than ‘no, never’. This passage, then, forces readers to engage in debate about whether this is legally and actually a rape based on her behavior. (p. 79) If Madrossian states the narration does not encourage readers to know “what is he thinking,” I see the passage as depicting precisely what men (and the author and reader) do think. The “not quite” of rape is common, despite readers becoming hung up on the phrase.5 From childhood, we, and particularly girl children, are taught to feel and see forced sex as sex, to understand men’s unwanted and unasked for desire as desirable. As well, Lurie does not so much shift blame of the rape to Melanie but stoke interpretive confusion on what in the first place constitutes rape. In his use of the phrase “not quite,” Lurie wants to convince himself and others to believe that what he knows full well is rape is “not quite that.” Lucy Graham (2003) notes that in Lurie’s narration of the event, reviewers foreclose the implication of what rape is to men and maleidentified readers: [T]he majority of reviewers seem to read in sympathy with Lurie when he glosses his sexual encounter with Melanie as ‘not rape, not quite that’. Lucy Hughes-Hallett writes that Lurie ‘seduces a young female student’, and other reviewers represent his abuse of Melanie as an ‘affair’. Overlooking the violation entirely, Albert du Toit explains that the ‘affair’ between Lurie and Melanie ‘blossoms but soon sours’. Derek Attridge describes Lurie’s interaction with

82  Post-Education of the Teacher Melanie as ‘a brief liaison’, and even lauds Lurie’s refusal to cooperate with the university disciplinary committee who call upon him to account for his behavior. (p. 440) As Graham implies, David Lurie not only focalizes his own thoughts, he also focalizes the reader’s normalized view of rape. Because we have normalized the male professor’s violent sexist way through education, the reader also thinks rape is only actually rape if the man determines it is. We read this way because we learn this lesson from our mothers, our fathers, our siblings, our uncles, and our aunts, to be reinforced in novels and experiences we get at school. As such, Coetzee’s actions are enabled by this educated thinking that justifies his attack on his student. Without investigating his distinctly socialized and humanist literary education (why he and we think the way he does), he (and we) fails to hold a man to account for his rape of a woman. Even when Melanie does try to hold Lurie to account for the rape, reason fails to move him. Refusing to mount a defense against her allegation, Lurie makes an easy admission of guilt. His lack of remorse troubles the senior colleague Dr. Farodia Rasool, collegially adjudicating his misconduct. Professor Rasool struggles to know how they can judge the unrepentant professor guilty for his actions. We are again going around in circles, Mr. Chair. Yes, he says, he is guilty; but when we try to get specificity, all of a sudden it is not abuse of a young woman he is confessing to, just an impulse he could not resist, with no mention of the pain he has caused, no mention of the long history of exploitation of which this is part. That is why I say it is futile to go on debating with Professor Lurie. (Disgrace 53) Lurie rests his case on his desire for younger women of color, a desire he seems to attribute to the sexual suggestion brought about by their mere existence.6 The affective complex of social hatred churning disinterestedly in David Lurie’s thoughtless defense combust in his perverse, uncontrollable, masculine and white sexual desires. Violent rape of a woman is figured in the racist and misogynist complex of men like David Lurie, as much a part of the way of the old life in South Africa as it is in the new. And it is this complex of social hatred that Disgrace seeks to resurface and confront in the remainder of the novel.

The Post-Education of David Lurie David Lurie’s non-guilty admission of the rape of his student brings the hearing to a screeching halt. Without a verdict, he is released from

Post-Education of the Teacher  83 all academic duties. With his ego in shreds, Lurie leaves the academy seeking sanctuary in his daughter’s provincial life. Reunited with his only child, the story of Lurie’s post-education begins. Returning to Lucy, Lurie re-enters his and her infancy. He is filled with childhood nostalgia upon entering his daughter’s space. But Lucy will not entertain Lurie’s pastoral and white patriarchal attachments to the veld, claiming, “It’s just a place of land where I grow things” (Disgrace 200). Despite her denials, Lucy will terribly find as Graham (2003) suggests: There is no erasing the histories of land tied up in colonialracist control of women: The farm space is a violently contested boundary in post-apartheid South Africa and […] has been discursively implicated in the colonial appropriation of territory. In Disgrace however, the anti-pastoral mode breaks with colonial mappings of the female body and land, depicting instead feudal systems of claiming and reclaiming where there is contempt for women as owners of property and land. (pp. 438–9) Neither Lucy nor her father can escape this proprietorial history of white kinship, which governs the interactions of both white and black families who toil at re-growth on its burned soil. These unraveling ties insinuate new and unknown manifestations of violence in the lives of all who inhabit Lucy’s small holding. Upon arrival, Lurie is subject to his child’s way of life and views. Antagonisms festering between them mirror the stark contrast between how parent and adult child choses to live. Lucy is disparaging of her father’s shameful conduct with women and female students of color: “Don’t expect sympathy from me, David,” she warns him, “and don’t expect sympathy from anyone else either. No sympathy, no mercy, not in this day and age” (Disgrace 44). Submitting to his child’s authority on the new South Africa, one he knows little about, sets the conditions for Lurie’s post-education. Observing the rumblings of discontent between blacks and whites and animals living on and near Lucy’s farm, he grows fearful for her safety. He discusses the matter not with Lucy but with Petrus, a former farmhand who tends to the dogs and garden. While Petrus agrees Lucy is not safe by herself on the farm, he reminds Lurie: “Everything is dangerous today. But here it is all right, I think” (Disgrace 64). After Lucy is gang raped, Petrus reneges his original stance: “But here […] it is dangerous, too dangerous. A woman must marry” (Disgrace 202). Petrus’s patriarchal pledge to protect his daughter in a place and time where her aging white father no longer can rankle and rouse Lurie’s resentment of the changing of the guard. Stung by the black man’s offer of protection, Lurie clings to his feeling that his daughter cannot last too long out on

84  Post-Education of the Teacher her own: “Poor land, poor soil, he thinks. Exhausted. Good only for goats. Does Lucy intend to spend her life here? He hopes it is only a phase” (Disgrace 64). Lurie’s inability to relate to his daughter is colored by his failure to recognize her lesbian and unmarried grown-up body. Lucy is similarly unable to relate to her culturally elitist father and resents his unwanted intrusion on her adult life. She objects to his superior attitude on a life he knows nothing about. She rejects his passive constructions of Petrus and the other people she lives alongside. And she disapproves of his sexual predation of his young women students, implying he “preys on children” (Disgrace 69). As Lurie witnesses his child’s outright rejection of him as part of the old South Africa he stands for, he mocks the life she has chosen to live. When he jokes that she like her friend, Bev Shaw, and the animal welfare people, “are a bit like Christians of a certain kind,” she grows angry (Disgrace 73). “You think, because I am your daughter,” she tells him, “I ought to be doing something better with my life” (Disgrace 74). When he responds “[n]o, no, no, Bev and Bill.” Lucy angrily supposes, “You don’t approve of friends like Bev and Bill Shaw because they are not going to lead me to a higher life.” The unspoken implication: like yours. Although he again resists her interpretation, Lucy counters, “But it is true. They are not going lead me to a higher life, and the reason is, there is no higher life. This is the only life there is. Which we share with animals” (Disgrace 74). Finding himself at a loss with her reasons, Lurie reluctantly tries to live her way. He begins by helping Bev Shaw out at the animal shelter. Soon after, he and Lucy are attacked by three black men loitering outside the building. Lurie is thrown in the lavatory and set on fire. The men gang rape Lucy in the room next door. The rape is not narrated, nor is Lurie privy to it except in his mind, where, of course, all thoughts of Lucy are first of himself: He speaks, Italian, he speaks French, but Italian and French will not save him here in darkest Africa. He is helpless, an Aunt Sally, a figure from a cartoon, a missionary in cassock and topi waiting with clasped hands and upcast eyes while the savages jaw away in their own lingo preparatory to plunging him into their boiling cauldron. Mission work: what has it left behind, that huge enterprise of upliftment? Nothing that he can see. (Disgrace 95) And then of her: “A vision comes to him of Lucy struggling with the two in the blue overalls, struggling against them. He writhes, trying to blank it out” (Disgrace 97). “My child, my child,” (Disgrace 98) is all Lurie can summon. Lucy resolutely stays put. Harshly grating between his useless despair and her utter silence is what men did to her (Disgrace 99).

Post-Education of the Teacher  85 Strange is Lurie’s thought of humanist missions and the colonialist violence set upon himself and his child as he is fighting for their lives. But set off in the middle of the brutal scene are Lurie’s second thoughts on his humanist education. Still, the narrative does not leave the plot here—as a story of retribution for the educated sins of the father. The attack and Lucy’s response to it sets the conditions for Lurie to bear witness and learn from traumatic colonial history. In her first conversation with Lurie of the rape, Lucy speaks of it not as accusation but with a question: “It was so personal […] It was done with such personal hatred […] why did they hate me so? I had never set eyes on them” (Disgrace 156). Lurie cannot bear the truth and childlike tenor used to ask it. Abstracting her expression of visceral grief with social hatred, he offers a reason: “It was history speaking through them […] A history of wrong. Think of it that way, if it helps. It may have seemed personal, but it wasn’t. It came down from the ancestors” (Disgrace 156). Lurie’s abstract appeal to reason is absolutely no help. Taking it personally, Lucy turns his reason on him. She accuses him, men like him, of committing and then desiring the rape of a woman: Hatred …. When it comes to men and sex, David, nothing surprises me any more. Maybe, for men, hating the woman makes sex more exciting. You are a man, you ought to know. When you have sex with someone strange – when you trap her, hold her down, get her under you, put all your weight on her – isn’t it a bit like killing? Pushing the knife in; exiting afterwards, leaving the body behind covered in blood – doesn’t it feel like murder, like getting away with murder? (Disgrace 158) The words shock Lurie (and the reader). He loses moral footing. For the first time, Lurie is struck speechless, unsure of himself, betrayed by his reasons, unable to launch an aesthetically rousing defense of his concepts. Explanations seem terrible, inadequate, hollow, and heartless in light of Lucy’s grave accusation. His remorse produces unbearable thoughts of men and what they do to women: “They do rape” (Disgrace 159). He knows he has it in him to be the men that rape. What he does not know: “Does he have it in him to be the woman?” (Disgrace, 160, emphasis added). The damning thoughts are un-staged, unable to follow the desire-driven plot of the professor’s Romantic English education. His child’s accusation, “you ought to know,” transfers haphazardly to his childhood, to his own treatment of women, to the rape of his student Melanie. Disoriented, he wonders: Can he face the wrongdoing of his white Afrikaner kind? Can he feel for the violence his kind commits upon countless, faceless

86  Post-Education of the Teacher women? (Disgrace 160). His child’s blunt words shatter and break him down and open to learn.

Post-Humanist Education: What Have We Learned? Haunting Lurie in the wake of the attack on his daughter are the strong words of Melanie’s father: “The question is not, are we sorry? The question is, what lesson have we learned? The question is, what are we going to do now that we are sorry?” (Disgrace 172, emphasis added). Responding to Lurie’s request for a pardon for mistreating his daughter, Melanie’s father demands educational action rather than apology as reparation. If the hard words failed to register with him then, they scream out of the violent attack. Only when the narrative turns the country’s violence and racist ontology upon him and his child can Lurie learn and get a feeling of what he is and has become. Or, as Jana Giles (2012) puts it: David only begins to develop sympathetic imagination for others when physical and emotional trauma makes him other to himself. His deeply affecting education of the other involves the new understanding that aesthetics and ethics are not as mutually exclusive as he once imagined. (p. 23) Educating oneself from what one is and has done to others, David Lurie learns, is more than hard, it is brutal. Rushdie’s (2003) harsh critique of the novel characterizes how unbearable it can feel to learn from it. Nobody in Disgrace understands anyone else. Lurie does not understand Melanie, the student he seduces [rapes], nor she him. He doesn’t understand Lucy, his own daughter, and she finds his deeds and his ‘case’ for his actions beyond her. He doesn’t understand himself at the beginning, nor does he get any wisdom by the novel’s end. […] The whites don’t understand the blacks and the blacks aren’t interested in understanding the whites. To the novel’s whites, its black inhabitants are essentially a threat - a threat justified by history. Because whites have historically oppressed blacks, it’s being suggested, we must now accept that blacks will oppress whites. An eye for an eye, and so the whole world goes blind. This, then, is the novel’s acclaimed revelatory vision: one of a society of conflicting incomprehensions, driven by the absolutes of history. (pp. 289–299) Ironically, Rushdie’s upset report depicts just how bad it feels to learn from traumatic history. The incommunicable, intolerable, ineducable

Post-Education of the Teacher  87 feelings Disgrace elicits, I am arguing, are the “bone hard” (Rushdie, 2003, p. 338) narrator’s intent; we feel the pain of mis-recognition giving rise to hatred of the other, we experience its incomprehensible violation of ourselves in the event of reading. The offense, outrage, horror we register is to the novel’s delivery of social hatred in cold, unflinching words. If unreadable, it is because rape and racism, senseless violence, defy comprehension. And, as if anticipating Rushdie’s dissent, Coetzee depiction of Apartheid is precisely as Derrida (1985) finds it is: an exemplar of the “absolutes of history.” As one of few unthinkable experiences of human cruelty on record, Apartheid and its representation can only disgrace and diminish us all, if not in the same way or for the same ends. Something more than “understanding” has to occur, something inwardly and materially life-altering has to be passed through, the novel suggests, for learning to begin. An education beyond the humanist imperative of understanding and learning from history is sorely in order. Moreover, if we are to arrest existing cycles of violence, we must learn to affectively read, to bear reading the sorrow and rage that victims of atrocity live with but never really move past. Disgrace reckons with the affects of atrocity held in colonial pasts to pedagogically surface the injury festering within the individual and collective bodies of postApartheid South Africa. The child Lucy carries as the result of the violent rape, also moves Lurie toward feeling for women, for others. As Lucy takes the rape of her body to produce a life, the novel implies that a more loving human relation7 might be produced from the unthinkable violence of our humankind. The mixed-race child conceived by brutality and out of Apartheid, metaphorically and tragically offers the novel’s only tangible sense of hope for the future, an inarticulate and impossible hope: And now, lo and behold, the child! Already he is calling it the child when it is no more than a worm in his daughter’s womb. What kind of child can seed like that give life to, seed driven into the woman not in love but in hatred, mixed chaotically, meant to soil her, to mark her, like a dog’s urine. A father without the sense to have a son: is this how it is all going to end, is this how his line is going to run out, like water dribbling into the earth? Who would have thought of it! A day like any other day, clear skies, a mild sun, yet suddenly everything is changed, utterly changed! Standing against the wall outside the kitchen, hiding his face in his hands, he heaves and heaves and finally cries. (Disgrace 199) By confronting the violence propagated by and now overtaking “his line,” Lurie finally bears the considerable weight of his place in history.

88  Post-Education of the Teacher Being open to learning is not the same as being changed; Lurie will and does fall back to his old ways for advancement of his kind, despite his harsh awakening. This immense and unflinching felt sense of “what it would take” to educate “what we have in us” is what a post-humanist education is charged with after the reading of Disgrace. The scene of Lucy’s rape allegorically articulates to white Afrikaners a feeling of what justice might entail for black South Africans. Justice, the novel suggests, cannot be served until white South Africans like Lurie pass through and feel inside the relentless effects of their dehumanizing social experiment on the lives of those it subjects. This is not the “eye for eye” justice of Rushdie’s rendition. Coetzee’s overwhelming telling works against the old allegory. Justice in Coetzee’s novel is not a story of revenge but education: A post-humanist education that is pedagogically affecting and existentially oriented toward what is unbearable about human being. It is an education that involves students bearing witness to the human wrongs committed by colonial education. It is an education that begins our whole sorry kind over when we are small babies and children clamoring for affection and care. Post-humanist education pedagogically immerses students in aesthetic events that ask them to re-call, imagine, and feel what it might be like to live an existence bereft of the other’s mercy. The novel’s pedagogy reorients reconciliation toward an education after atrocity to relearn to recognize the depths of humanity that still stirs in the dehumanized and the dehumanizer, an education that must take place with the other in concerted acts of self and mutual learning to again and differently be human. The “worst violence,” Jacques Derrida’s (2005) warns, is yet to come if and when we fail to recuperate the pedagogical and humanizing aims of education that historicizes, gathers, and carries all our global relations together for better and much worse. In Rogues, he writes: A new violence is being prepared and, in truth, has been unleashed for some time now, in a way that is more visibly suicidal or autoimmune than ever. This violence no longer has to do with world war or even with war, even less with some right to wage war. And this is hardly re-assuring – indeed, quite the contrary. (p. 156) Derrida characterizes the worst violence as distinctly adult and threatening to exterminate the other. My own feeling is the phrase “more visibly suicidal,” involves not only killing ourselves and each other but our children and the rest of the vulnerable inhabitants of the planet. And now, every single day, we see, we receive news of this “more suicidal” violence aimed at and already killing our children, and the world they share with other sibling species already extinguished or threatened with extinction (Thunberg, 2019). In placing the remnants of violence in an attack on

Post-Education of the Teacher  89 the existence of his white child and his child’s mixed-race child, the narrative of Disgrace recognizes that post-humanist education is critical to our relearning to love all of our children, to love who and what we profoundly “forget” we are: Infants, others, animals. Our time is distinctly one that visibly, horrifically bears witness to unthinkable adult war on children in school shootings, in family separations, in rape and abuse of children, in tiny bodies dragged up on shorelines at the borders of nations. As the adult community’s humanity descends deeper into brutality, as we begin killing our young, we are no longer recognizable to ourselves. Vital is an education that learns from the violence of the past of what we do to each other and our children. Post-education might refind us in the universal and humanizing principles that we do still recognize as holding our differences together: Beauty, truth, justice, equality, liberty, and responsibility to children. David Lurie, after all, learns of his degenerating self from his child, not knowledge, history, or sociality: He also relearns his humanity from her. Above all, post-humanist education attempts to address the colonial formation of human subjects to redress social hatred we learn as children in school. The pedagogical intervention is faintly hopeful, leaving us with the image of Lurie’s grief-stricken tenderness for his grandchild yet to be. The child will be born into a society still possessed by Apartheid’s horrific memory with no warning of the ruined world that awaits her and conceived in bloodshed. Faintly hopeful because learning to repair a traumatic history does not guarantee the end of Lurie’s line, “running out dribbling into the earth,” nor an end to his kind of privileged inhumanity and cruel indifference. For the child’s sake, above all, for all of our sake, we can only hope (Morrison, 1981, 2015). “There may be things to learn,” Lurie finally admits at the end of the novel (Disgrace 218, emphasis added). We sense that these things may have nothing and everything to do with learning how to be a white ex-patriarch to a mixed-race grand-child conceived in racial hatred and sexual brutality and born into a country still traumatized by Apartheid. His belated admission and appeal to learning sets the conditions for reparation, conditions that can only emerge after Lurie passes through and faces up to the unforgivable violence the mythology of white supremacy commits to others. We are living in a time of great violence against those with the least power and recourse to justice in our human community. As indicated by the violence against mostly African and South Asian ethnic minorities in South Africa today, the violence rippling across the globe is no longer between black and white, colonizer and colonized but, as Appadurai (2006) suggests, waged between friends, neighbors, and even kin. It is also, and unthinkably, waged on all of our children. The novel holds a lesson for those who think that learning about or analyzing structural oppression is enough. As Disgrace demonstrates with its risky yet

90  Post-Education of the Teacher insightful teaching, we have everything to lose by not facing up to and engaging with the remnants of violence in our historical (un)consciousness entrapping us, violence from which none are truly free. To learn from the past, we must be open to participating in a humanizing conversation facilitated by a demand to listen and respond to history’s exacting toll on our children. Post-humanist education as reparative curriculum pedagogically offers us a chance to remake our former worlds and estrange human relations by teachings that feel for justice as a painful and internally motivated relearning how to be infinitely, infantly human. Justice returns our being human to start over again with “nothing,” as Lucy suggests: “Not with nothing but. With nothing” (Disgrace 205). To survive the worst chapters of our humankind, we must give up on our disgraceful (hi)stories of life, wrought by a deforming education, to learn again to be the feeling creatures we are and once were.

Notes

Post-Education of the Teacher  91

4

5

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7

the well-read citizen is perhaps nearing its end. And while I might also be a “hangover” humanist from the past, like Elizabeth Costello, I am a reluctant mother, humanist, elementary school teacher, and academic, one who desperately clings to paideia, the idea of higher learning and the university for all, and the promise of a humanizing and literate education. I, too, might need to leave the university and return to small group, face-to-face teachings, the place where the humanities professor is needed most. Whatever its form, for me, the humanities as paideia, not to save souls or advance ways of life, but to re-invent, repair, and recuperate the common, good, the beautiful, and broken old world is still a noble and worthwhile endeavor, still worth fighting over and for. Greta Thunberg’s school-strike grievance to political leaders, adults, and her own parents is a present and compelling enacting of post-education. “People are dying;” Thunberg (2019) accuses the adult community, “entire ecosystems are collapsing,” she said. “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!” Thunberg’s outrage (j’accuse!) echoes that of Mrs. Curren, Costello, and Lucy. It is also met with heated and violent reaction by mostly adult males finding her delivery to be a threat to their bloated egos and (dying) afflicted way of life. I say delivery because quite perversely grown men take a totally non-threatening young women’s message personally as if it were a dire threat to their existence. The inexplicable force of Thunberg’s teaching is, perhaps, what makes it different than others delivering the same message. Perhaps it will be post-education and not a post-humanist one to deliver us from ecological destruction of men refusing to believe or rather choosing their lust for money over change to their unsustainable and demeaning way of life. In my teaching of the novel, these two words “not quite” are endlessly debated causing some students, mostly female, to emotionally break down in and during our discussions. Many male students remain completely silent when discussing rape scenes in Disgrace. What else would men do? Are they not assigned to “understand” Lurie’s “not quite?” Coetzee has set us all up to fail in our understandings of those words. Elleke Boehmer (2002) reads the novel as placing the burden of white guilt on the body of Lucy, white or adult woman, to redress the cruel acts of white men: “White dominance and the overcoming of white dominance are both figured as involving the subjection of the female body, as part of a long history of female exploitation of which the narrative itself takes note” (p. 344). Still, the novel seems to resist this first order reading as social hatred and its affects ricochet off David Lurie’s relations with animals, black men, and white and black women. The burden of white guilt is not as an act of retribution toward white dominance, I find, but one that Lurie is made to allegorically bear on his own white male body in his firsthand witness of the cruel effects of supremacy turned on him and the rape of his kind and his kin. His white, female child, rather than adult, female daughter, bears the brunt of his history. But as Spivak (1999) metaphorically notes in the context of colonial violence, “an enabling violation, a rape that produces a healthy child cannot be advanced as the justification for the rape” (p. 309).

5

Simón in Childhood of Jesus Learning to Live, Again

Childhood of Jesus features the formal education of a child of five years. He has no name, parents, home, or history. The state authorities give him a name, David. They assign a guardian. The designated adult, Simón, promises to find David a mother. The two set out to live in the place they landed. The Jesus trilogy picks up where Disgrace ends: “with nothing” (Disgrace 204). More precisely it depicts the form(s) post-education will take in a new world void of history. With no parents, the child has no personal or familial history; he does not know who he is. The child shows very little distress with being left to the stranger. Apart from wanting a father and mother, David is surprisingly1 resigned to having lost everyone. In fact, everyone in Novilla but Simón is resigned to leaving the old world behind for good. Simón is in every way the child’s first teacher in the way I conceive a first teacher. He delivers to the child maternal pedagogy. Under Simón’s teaching, David becomes quickly and extraordinarily literate in rudimentary Spanish, numbers, and Don Quixote. But his educational gifts are derided and dismissed in school. In the institution, David struggles to follow the simplest of tasks and complete proper lessons. What the child learns in school is that his unique ways are not welcome. David learns a child like him is unwelcome at school. As with children, David is gifted. His particular gifts include speaking to animals, inventing mathematical systems, reading in a second language, and dancing with stars. Despite his talents, David is regarded by many, except for his mother, to be a nuisance. 2 Critics of the book also view David negatively (all seem to forget that this child has totally lost his family). In his review of the book, Benjamin Lytal (2013) describes the Jesus-like child as a “spoiled brat.” Urmila Seshagiri (2013) characterizes David as the “enfant terrible par excellence” (p. 645). Fictional characters are similarly hard on the tiny boy. His schoolteacher finds him delayed and “insubordinate” (COJ 209). Even Simón calls him “a baby” and “silly” (COJ 165). In my analysis, Age of Iron emphasizes the maternal; Elizabeth Costello, the pedagogical; Disgrace, the curricular and humanist; and

Learning to Live, Again  93 Childhood of Jesus engages the educational and the idealist. Maternity, pedagogy, curriculum, humanism, and idealism constitute modern education. The novel’s emphasis on ideal education rivals the strange pedagogical relation of David and Simón. What Simón believes to be an ideal education clashes with the phenomenological and practical. For Simón, assuming the dueling positions of maternal first teacher and wise sage of knowledge proves to be an ongoing challenge. As provider of David’s early childhood education, Simón holds high expectations for his child, worrying about his safety and future. As pedagogue in the polis, he entrusts himself with the special duty to lead David in the world. As teacher, he aims to provide the child with a worldly and distinctly literary humanist education. And as mother, he fiercely and irrationally loves and despises David so much it affects his desire to provide deliberative, just, and moral teachings, terrifying him to the core. My reading of the chapter follows educational ideas rehearsed in Socratic dialogues held between David and Simón. I also revisit Costello’s ideal pursual of the role of humanizing paideia in the construction of knowledge critical to one’s personhood. Knowledge of significance to the reader, and Simón, if he is paying attention, is shown surprisingly to be garnered through the child’s protests. Consistent in all forms of education, maternal, and public is David’s tiny revolt staged daily against all his teachers (including the dog, Bolívar), but particularly Simón. Lost on Simón is David’s unspoken but daily acted out frustration with his unthinkable situation of orphan displacement. He fails to connect the child’s traumatic history to David’s intense, and relentless, pursuit of love and a family. He has no idea what his truth-driven fatherly rejection is doing to the child. The child’s inexplicable insistence on a family overwhelms the adult project of David’s education. Try as Simón might, neither a literary nor Platonic education can quell the child’s longing for a mother and father and their affordances: Intimate affection, sexuality, 3 attachment, care, kinship, inheritance, and belonging. David longs for knowledge grounded in passionate aspects of human existence roundly discouraged in Novilla and traumatically repressed in Simón. Strangely and through David’s intimate revolt with his ideas, Simón learns to feel for the existential lessons the child offers to him. In the child’s fight for a story he can live with, it is Simón that learns to refind and live his existence in a ruined world.

Maternal education, again The a-historical Republic of Novilla is a strange and new world. Translated from Spanish to mean heifer or baby calf, the word holds multiple literary associations: “the name also evokes Novalis and so the early German romantics […] and echoes of the novel”4 (Pippin, 2015, p. 153). As the first education a child receives is literacy, the republic of letters

94  Learning to Live, Again seems an apt place to receive an early childhood education. Novilla’s meaning as animal baby adds a twist to Arendtian’s educational coining of natality. In her educational writings, Arendt (1958) positions the baby as a newcomer, a certain kind of refugee even, to a new world that is actually old: “The new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting” (p. 9). For Arendt, only humans5 can act and thereby are in need of education. All those processed in Novilla share this characteristic newness through their washed away memories. Newness, Arendt (1958) claims contra her male counterpoints, is “the central category of political thought” (p. 9). I argue natality is pre-eminently educational. As the active caretaking of the newcomer, pedagogy is a precursor to its political meaning; they are akin to each other even while kept radically apart6 in the Republic of Novilla. The novel is set in a post-apocalyptic time void of unnecessary material goods. The seemingly socialist society provides David and Simón with their educational and health needs. Self and social improvement seems to be the only goal of a society void of jealousies, competitions, corruptions, and violence. There is no need for money: Basic needs are overseen by the state. Although Simón works on the dock, his work resembles service. All children are educated in state-run schools. The public schools allow parents for some choice in accordance with their child’s talents. There are no divisions in class, no visible religious or ethnic tensions. The society is just and equal as a Republic is imagined to be. Utopian and a-political, Elena remarks to Simón that, in this society, “Nothing is missing” (COJ 63). But Simón cannot forget what is missing—family, desire, meat, faith, passion, romantic love. Aimless, he wanders in this new state feeling like the odd man out, filled with unnameable loss: “Only he is the exception, the dissatisfied one, the misfit. What is wrong with him?” (COJ 64). David is not an adult and not yet disillusioned by the state of the world. He is exuberant with passion for life. His love of life redresses Simón’s grief. For the sake of the child, Simón tries to withhold his depression in their new situation. In fact, the child at times makes him forget his despair. Still, David feels there is something bothering the kind but humorless man. To help him, he asks Simón if he could be his padrino.7 Simón rejects the paternal association, settling on the truth: “There isn’t a proper word for what I am to you, just as there isn’t a proper word for what you are to me” (COJ 33). When David presses for Simón to take him on as if he is his father, Simón balks: “You may think you are washed clean, but you aren’t. You still have your memories, they are just buried, temporarily” (COJ 21). Unconvinced, David sets upon finding a parental figure he knows for sure will love him: A mother.

Learning to Live, Again  95 On the importance of the mother in David’s life, Simón readily agrees: “A child can’t grow up without a mother” (COJ 104). Once more, maternal pedagogy is placed at the forefront of Coetzee’s educational concern for children in a world untethered to tradition. The Childhood of Jesus fictionalizes this concern as delivered in a graduation address to young men: If you want to change the world, teach young children. The address materializes when, in the basic and most Platonic sense, Simón declares, somewhat hastily to the woman at Centro Republicación de Novilla, “I am responsible for him” (COJ 1). With this declaration, Simón, a man, assumes maternal responsibility for an elementary-age child in a new world (uncannily like our own) filled with historically traumatized migrants wandering adrift with orphan children. If washed clean of historical memory like ours, the world is not yet void of adults, and as such, perhaps, it is not too late for it to succumb to oblivion. The novel conducts an experiment in educational thought, one filled with transference. Transference, Freud notices, runs rampant in school. Reflecting on his desire to become a doctor, Freud admits that he is unsure whether it is his love of science or love for his science teachers that lead him into the profession: “I do not know which it was that made the greater claim upon us and held more significance, the study of the sciences being presented to us, or the study of the personalities of our teachers” (in Phillips, 2006, p. 355). In this incredible statement, Freud suggests that learning is caught up not only in desire for subject matter. Learning is caught in the pedagogical relation of attachment to the one delivering that knowledge. What one learns wholly depends on, by whom, and how knowledge is delivered. Situating the pedagogical relation in the maternal one, Freud claims that intense feelings for one’s primary significant others interfere with the child’s capacity to attach to their teachers at school. “The people upon whom he fixates […] are his parents and siblings. All the people he meets later on become substitutes for those first emotional objects (his carers as well as his parents) […]” (in Phillips, 2006, p. 355). As Freud finds, teachers are substitutes for the complex of affection children hold for first caregivers. For children to learn from teachers, they attach to them as they to do their parents. Complete strangers to each other, David’s affection for Simón is made possible through the affection he once felt for his mother. Although the child insists that he cannot remember her, Simón tells David he will, he must: It is key to finding his real mother. Simón himself is also plagued by transference with past people, which he characterizes as “not memories themselves but the feel of residence in a body with a past, a body soaked in its past” (COJ 143). Simón’s feeling of memories, of having visions of memories taking residence in the body, resonates

96  Learning to Live, Again with Melanie Klein’s (1959/1975) reconceptualization of transference as arising in “memories in feelings” (p. 180, n. 1). Most importantly, Simón’s strong transference to the child compels his caretaking without him knowing how. So taken is he with the child, Simón sets out to fulfill David’s irrational wish for a mother. Spying Inés at a tennis court, he proposes to her to “become David’s mother. I give up all claim to him (he has a claim on me, but that is a different matter)” (COJ 82) Inés’s brother Diego protests and tries to be the voice of the reason: “You can’t be this child’s mother, he already has a mother, the mother he was born to!” (COJ 82). Simón’s companion Elena is similarly appalled but mostly by Simón’s awful choice of a mother: Inés is not his mother. She did not conceive him! She did not carry him in her womb! She did not bring him into the world in blood and pain! […] She is just someone you picked out on a whim, for all I know because she reminded you of your mother. (COJ 105) Simón is adamant with his feeling Inés is the one and responds: “If we don’t trust the voice that speaks inside us, saying, This is the one! then there is nothing left to trust” (COJ 105). Elena cannot accept his non-sensical reason. But Inés irrationally agrees because she wants desperately to be a mother. Although Simón thinks he has solved the problem of David’s need to have a family, David refuses to go with Inés alone. Simón agrees to stay on as “servant” and “helper,” but not without stressing, “You will be a family. I can’t be part of that family” (COJ 82, emphasis added). Not only does Simón join the family; he is compelled to keep his maternal role because Inés is not good at it. “What if the mother is not a good mother?” (COJ 91), Simón realizes. What happens to the child then? The confusion the mother elicits arises transference in each character’s idea and experience of mother. Their conflicts say more about their own relations with and understandings of a mother than David’s need for one. Their intense disagreements over who should and can best be David’s mother are mostly about feeling. Irrational and unconscious feelings of mother borne from infantile and past histories of mother we carry inside are projected onto our characterization of real and fictional (m)others. Unlike the conflicted adults, the child is fine with his new mother. He is oblivious to their adult agonies. Despite not wanting to father, Simón does. Claiming to want to mother, Inés does so badly. The irony causes Elena, Simón’s “companion,” to remark: “You love him. He loves you. That isn’t artificial. It’s the law that is artificial. He should be with you. He needs you” (COJ 95). David is just happy to finally have a complete

Learning to Live, Again  97 family. Still, of all those who care for him, only the animal Bolívar seems to understand that biology need not matter in families, as all dogs just know. As such, the dog is the only family member David totally trusts loves him. Rather than understand himself as either mother or father of the child, Simón takes on the role of “manservant” leading his young charge through the Republic. Maternalizing the Greek principles of paideia, he becomes like Freud’s own schoolteachers. Freud remarks: These men, who were not even all fathers themselves, became father substitutes to us. It was for that reason that they seemed so mature to us, so unreachably adult, even if they were still very young. We transferred to them the respect and expectations of the omniscient father of our childhood years, and then we began to treat them like our fathers at home. (in Phillips, 2006, p. 357) Assuming the position of teacher, Simón also unwittingly becomes what he is not and does not want to be: A maternal figure burdened with a child’s affections. When David tells him, “I want to live here with you,” Simón begins to second guess his resistance to father him. What if that [the child’s] wish comes bitterly true? Does he have it in him8 to be both father and mother to the child, to bring him up in the ways of goodness while all the time holding down a job at the docks. (COJ 76, emphasis added) The crossing of lines between parent and teacher makes palpably charged the bond they both feel but struggle to accept. And it awakens Simón deep down inside to the profundity of his mistake of confusing [his] masculinity, his maleness to be a kind of innate flaw in his capacity to mother the child. The crossing of lines between mother and teacher invokes Socrates’s misleading understanding of pedagogy, one that continues to misinform the idea of paideia today. In his fashioning of pedagogy, Socrates intentionally and tellingly forecloses the role of affective maternal relation in the educational scene. I am so far like the midwife, that I cannot myself give birth to wisdom; and the common reproach is true, that though I question others, I can myself bring nothing to light because there is no wisdom in me. The reason is this: heaven constrains me to serve as a midwife, but has debarred me from giving birth. So of myself I have no sort of wisdom, nor has any discovery ever been born to me as the

98  Learning to Live, Again child of my soul. Those who frequent my company, at first appear, some of them, quite unintelligent; but, as we go further with our discussions, all who are favored by heaven make progress at a rate that seems surprising to others as well as to themselves, although it is clear that they have never learned anything from me; the many admirable truths they bring to birth have been discovered by themselves from within. But the delivery is heaven’s work and mine. (Theatus 150 in Plato, 1921) Socrates identifies his lack as a teacher to be biological: Men cannot bear babies and therefore cannot give birth to knowledge. This revelation presses upon Socrates’s calling of philosopher-teacher. Redirecting the aim of pedagogy as delivering knowledge rather than bearing it, Socrates finds a supplement in the figure of the midwife. He forecloses his own insight that knowledge requires a relation of dependency and institutes a detached midwife to lead the independent student to what she already has within. The slight alteration to the scene of knowledge that Socrates makes radically orients pedagogy as men rationally leading the (male) child into the world rather than as a female mother bearing the agonies of knowledge that the genderless infant holds inside. Socrates’s midwife views the child as in need of his delivery of knowledge rather than retrieving what the infant is already brokenly holding it in. In Klein’s (1952) view, the infant’s inability to speak what she knows does not mean she is unknowledgeable—it only means she requires an other, a conduit to make her knowledge known to others. For Klein, the vessel that carries to the child her knowledge is the mother, the teacher, the analyst, the carer. Projected onto the idea of modern education is the ideal masculinist conception of the teacher and academic. The infant and mother must be eliminated from the scene of education for man to deliver to both and all his superior knowledge. Education continues to grant authority to male experts, to child-free white men (and child-free white women), who have little or no knowledge of carrying, bearing, and caring for infants. The figure of midwife reorients the educational enterprise of children away from the actual birther of the subject of knowledge and their own animal infancy. Education is reconceived by Socrates in the male midwife’s violent act of taking the infant away from mother to be handed over to worldly and distant care and teachings. In this ancient story, a midwife can be anyone, but certainly men who never bore nor cared for children. Anyone willing is charged with delivering knowledge of the child’s world to them. The popular view that anyone can teach children, anyone can be a teacher, finds a basis in these earliest philosophical dialogues of education. Strangers to each other, the knowledge of the teacher often conflicts with the maternal knowledge/care the student already receives and holds

Learning to Live, Again  99 within. Education then rests on a strange conflict between knowledge and care of the self against that given by the other. Through the construct of transference, Freud returns education to the maternal family scene as he remembers loving his teachers: We wooed them or turned them away from them, we imagined sympathies and antipathies in them that probably did not exist, studied their characters and formed or distorted our own based on theirs. They provoked our greatest levels of rebelliousness and forced us into complete submission: we sought out their foibles, and were proud of their preferences, their knowledge and their justice. Basically, we loved them very much if we gave them reason to; I do not know whether all our teachers noticed that. (in Phillips, 2006, p. 355) The transference relationship of David and Simón characterizes to the extreme this intense pedagogical love. This is why every time Simón assumes a teacherly position with David, it only heightens his young charge’s determination to seek out a mother’s love and approval from him. Knowledge desired by the self is founded in and dependent on our significant relations. Education cannot exist without significant relation and yet, for the most part, parents are totally left behind at school. Although lacking in explicit pedagogical theory, Coetzee’s three Jesus novels intuit the critical importance of the maternal function in fostering burgeoning love in the child for engaging others, knowledge, and world. The function is not inherently female, as Simón learns through the example of Inés’s bad mothering. Rather, the maternal requires both love of the child and the child’s knowledge. One’s love is in pursuit of the other’s knowledge. The maternal function of knowledge dissuades scholars of all disciplines of the idea of cogito as being the harbinger of knowledge. As with other animals, the mind is bodily, it is relational, it is animate, and it is animated by the mother’s love. All significant knowledge is built upon loving relations one makes between oneself and the other. As David grows rebellious, belligerent, and resentful under Inés’s bad mothering, Simón has no choice but to mother the boy. However, this proves to be difficult now that Inés has gotten to him. The effect of her infantilizing care regresses David. He sucks his thumb while she wheels him around in a baby carriage. She also plays strange games with him. Aghast with “the strange spectacle” of Inés “kneeling on the bed straddling the boy” in a bit of “child’s” play with him, Simón sorely regrets his choice of mother: “Has it been a calamitous mistake to hand him over to this woman? […] More and more he is convinced that something is wrong” (COJ 89–90). To get David out of his mother’s grips, Simón decides it is time to teach David to develop educationally beyond the

100  Learning to Live, Again family so that he, as teacher, can have a more steady and sober influence over him than the unreliable and unstable Inés.

Novilla: Education of Letters The education Simón choses to give David is literary. His teachings are based on the only picture book he finds at the public library: An Illustrated Children’s Don Quixote 9 by Benengeli.10 The first novel on record, the book is a seminal children’s story for Spanish and other children residing in Spain and Spanish-colonized countries. To learn to read Don Quixote, Simón tells David that, “first I will read the story aloud” in their second language and then “go through it word by word, looking at how the words are put together” (COJ 152). Finding this agreeable, Simón begins the child’s literacy education by first reading, and then piecing together with David, the now globally familiar story of Don Quixote, Sancho, and the windmill. Where he fails as a parent, as a teacher of literacy Simón excels. He reads animatedly and stops to respond to his student’s questions. “What are knightly adventures?” David asks. “What is a windmill?” (COJ 152). Giving him clues from the pictures, Simón responds patiently. But as David asks harder and harder questions, Simón is compelled to admit to his student that the children’s story of Don Quixote is quite “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 sets 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. (COJ 154) When David sides with Don Quixote’s interpretation, Simón corrects him. Even the book’s author and artist agree that the object is a windmill. Ignoring Simón’s criticism of his interpretations, David asks, “Who wrote the book?” Simón responds, “A man named Benengeli”11 (COJ 154). David then asks if the author lives in the library. No, says Simón. The child asks why they are reading the book then. Simón says it is because he came across it in the library and felt it would be good for his Spanish (COJ 154). But Simón forgets: the child hates Spanish, the second language (COJ 186). When David asks why he is forced to speak it, Simón responds, “We have to speak some language, my boy, unless we want to bark and howl like animals” (COJ 186). But the child insists: “I want to speak my own language.” SIMÓN: DAVID: SIMÓN:

There is no such thing as one’s own language. There is! La la fa fa yam ying tu tu. That’s just gibberish. It doesn’t mean anything.

Learning to Live, Again  101 It does mean something. It means something to me. That may be so, but it doesn’t mean anything to me. Language has to mean something to me as well as to you, otherwise it doesn’t count as language. (COJ 186)

DAVID: SIMÓN:

The child’s insistence of liberation from linguistic captivity causes Simón to feel “dizzy” and unable to “think.” (COJ 187). Unable to bear the child’s desire to speak his own language, he returns them both to reason in search of certain and common ground: “One of the ways in which we get along is by speaking the same language.” Seeing that David is unconvinced, Simón abandons reasons. He tells the child if he does not learn Spanish, “You will be shunned.” (COJ 187). As with every child, David’s first learning in literacy is as a fight to be heard on his own terms, one Derrida (1998) reminds us he won’t win: “I have one language; it is not mine” (p. 1). First, he discovers he cannot speak his own language, the magical one he feels inside. Then, he learns he cannot speak his first German/English language as it is not spoken by the State. Then, he learns that a story he would like to read for enjoyment is really to help him learn Spanish, the language he hates. Finally, and most painfully perhaps, he learns from Simón that he cannot read Don Quixote the way he wants: I can read. No you can’t. You can look at the page and move your lips and make up stories in your head, but that is not reading. For real reading you have to submit to what is written on the page. You have to give up your own fantasies. You have to stop being silly. You have to stop being a baby. Never before has he spoken so directly to the child, so harshly. DAVID: I don’t want to read your way […] I want to read my way. There was a man of double deed and nadynandynandy need, and when he rode he was a horse and when he walked he was a porse. SIMÓN: That is nothing but nonsense. There is no such thing as a porse. Don Quixote is not nonsense. You can’t just make up nonsense and pretend you are reading about him. DAVID: I can! It’s not nonsense and I can read! It’s not your book, it’s my book! And with a frown he returns to whipping furiously through the pages. (COJ 165–6, emphasis added) DAVID: SIMÓN:

Enraged by their dispute, Inés, tells Simón to stop badgering David, which surprises Simón given the child’s belligerence. Find a “simpler” book, she tells Simón. Don Quixote, she decides, is “too difficult for a child” (COJ 166). Gripping the book as if his life depended on it, David

102  Learning to Live, Again will not let it go: “No!” The boy clutches the book tightly. “You are not going to take it,” he cries. “It’s my book” (COJ 166). The family scene of David’s reading feels familiar. Every reader remembers learning to read in childhood. Reading is a personal experience that draws us singularly into a one-on-one relation with another. In these scenes, Coetzee shows literacy to be a profound intimate relation imbued with significance and meaning for the child that goes beyond learning and saying words. Literacy, I argue in my book Literacy of the Other, is critical to the subject formation of a child. And I suggest that learning to read particularly humanizes. Words provide us with the structures of thought and carry the logics of ontological being that habituate and domesticate thinking. These words superimposed onto our interpret capacities “radically determines the human limits and possibilities for thinking and communicating with others” (Mishra Tarc, 2015, p. 10). In the early years, the child has a vast repertoire of expression (nonsense as Simón terms it) that exceeds words. As words take over the playful expression, the child’s “nandy dandy” capacities for language diminish. The child is necessarily but also punitively taught to use words to contain and repress their felt expressions. They are taught to assign proper words to their improper feeling, as occurs when Simón corrects David’s reading of a “porse” in Don Quixote (COJ 165). The teacher’s correct reading attends to the words on the page. But because he is still a child, David is unconvinced with the corrective. He has not lost the ability for words to jump out at him, to regale and rally him. They vividly mean what he feels they mean. Words are not yet instruments but speculative objects of visual experimentation imbued with vast possibilities for their structure, sign, and play (Derrida, 1970). Simón’s discouraging of David’s fantastic reading inhibits rather than opens up the child’s learning. As David wages war with his teacher’s directives, the reader gains insight into the limits of Simón’s humanist education. Simón’s teaching is didactic and incremental: “Before you can write your book, you will have to learn to read” (COJ 165). It aims at comprehension: “Don Quixote did not fall from a crack, he descended into a cave using a ladder and rope” (COJ 165). Both forms of incremental and instrumental teaching, widely used in literacy education, turn David off reading a story that otherwise enthralls and enchants and sustains him via his silent and solitary reading. Combined with the greater pressures he feels to conform to literacy practices mandated by school, David will shut down his desire for reading altogether. Unbeknownst to Simón, David is not yet social in his becoming literate. In his anti-social state, one that is both outside the social and willfully against it, David is, to some degree, untrainable. It is this anti-­ social, revolting quality of learning that distinguishes education in childhood from other kinds of human experiences. Simón, like most parents,

Learning to Live, Again  103 understands the child’s non-conforming responses in terms of the child’s being special or bad or both, and as such label him as delayed, deviant, special, not like the others: “For the first time it occurs to him that this may be not just a clever child – there are many clever children in the world – but something else, something for which at this moment he lacks the word” (COJ 151). The word he lacks for Simón, “cognitively delayed,” is supplied by señor at school, but it is not anything close to what Simón thinks David feels he is. Despite Simón and Inés thinking Don Quixote is too difficult for the child to read, David feels he already knows things the pages say. If he sees windmills rather than giants, it is not because he is wrong, any more than is Don Quixote. It is because he can see beyond the grim realities the world offers us, as all children do. The child has vivid and expansive knowledge of his own that he has authority over, garnered from an ordinary curiosity he embodies in his questions and his enchanted orientation to the world. The questions he poses to Simón are to confirm his wondrous feelings rather than form understandings of things. If Simón must teach, as the adult with the authority of history and experience, it should be to lift up the child’s authorial impulse rather than imposing his own. It might be oriented towards developing and sustaining relational love for each other’s readings. This untrainable quality of children is one viewed negatively by adults who view non-conforming children with disregard. Adults in the novel, including Simón, at times view David as deficient, devilish, and insubordinate. David’s expansive intellectual qualities, including the ability to communicate with animals and make people disappear, are not viewed as a child’s source of incredible knowledge, but regarded by adults with disbelief and dismay. The child’s unrealistic, ungrounded habit of learning troubles Simón, until his friend Elena points out that his way is actually a source of insight for what might be ailing him: “They are not creatures of memory. Children live in the present, not the past. Why not take your lead from them? Instead of waiting to be transfigured, why not try to be like a child again?” (COJ 143).

David’s Revolt: The Education of Simón David’s resistance is viewed by adults as unruly, disturbed, and spoiled. Where his teacher sees numbers, David sees “stars” (COJ 178). Where Simón sees the “natural philosophy of the sky,” David sees the sky “breathes [everything] in” (COJ 131). Where Simón views Don Quixote as larger than life and “not real,” David insists that the fictional character is a “hero” (COJ 178). It is the epistemophilic instinct that drives David’s irrepressible learning. Philosophically, this instinct is qualified by educators as the fuel for enlightenment. Psychoanalytically, Klein claims, the drive to know

104  Learning to Live, Again begins with the infant’s curiosity and questions with how things work in the world. In her analysis of Fritz, a child of four and three quarters, Klein (1923) claims, “questions concerning birth set it.” The question, she continues, “Where was I before was born […] cropped up again in the form of ‘How is a person made?’ and recurred almost daily in this stereotypical fashion” (p. 422). Fritz, like David in the novel, is consumed with questions: Why can’t you be my father? Why is poo not a person? What is the measure of death? What is an undertaker? (COJ 132–133). The questions children ask in early childhood are tied up in parentage, sexuality, sustenance, expulsion, and existence. David seeks out not only lessons from Simón but also knowledge vital for his existence from others outside the family, including ducks and stars, Inés’s unsavory brother Diego, and Bolívar the dog. “Epistemophilia,” as Andre Green (1980) terms it, “is more akin to the search for an explanatory ‘theory,’ as exemplified by the sexual theories put together by children to explain how babies are made” (p. 23). Like all children, David is also consumed with babies. He informs Simón he wants to be his mother’s baby, her “third son.” When Simon informs him of the impossibilities, the child refuses to listen: “I told Inés and she says yes. She said I can go back in her tummy and come out again!” (COJ 148). As Simón learns, the child’s pursuit of explanations is relentless even when implausible. David’s curiosities on the harder matters of life are not welcome or easily faced by the adults in his midst. Feeling constantly wrong, David has no choice but to resist and fight for his mind. The child’s outbursts are a fight for his life, for the significant knowledge vital to his survival. According to the Oxford dictionary, revolt means “a movement or expression of vigorous dissent and a renouncing of allegiance.” Even a baby and the smallest of children are capable of revolt. Crying, tantrums, whining, and withdrawal are among the myriad expressions of a child’s revolt. The children’s book by Roald Dahl (2007) features a revolting Matilda. In the beloved children’s book, Dahl doubles the meanings of revolt, referring both to her parents’ disgust with her as well as Matilda’s dissent with their disgusting treatment acted out in her revolting body. Countering Camus’s “I revolt, therefore we are,” Kristeva (2014) writes: “I revolt, therefore we are to come” (p. 3). With this slight alteration, she highlights the pedagogical significance of revolt in the instantiation and renewal of one’s subjectivity. Revolt grounds our becoming, our learning to be someone, as it is our first expression of breaking with the norm, crying when left in a cage called a cradle, refusing to sleep with the light turned off. In its most intimate sense, Kristeva (1996) claims, “revolt keeps are inner lives alive” when we feel most viscerally caught in repressive states (p. 8). As agents of repression, schools are alive with students’ creative efforts of dissent. Kristeva views a child’s rebellion and bad behavior against authorities as an expression of the

Learning to Live, Again  105 self, as the self’s bid for sovereignty where there is none and when the stakes for one’s survival are high. Intimate revolt, Kristeva (2014) writes, is pre-political. Revolt supports us to find meaning in our lives. It marks one’s indignant and persistent refusal to question the subordination of the self. Above all, intimate revolt is registered deep inside as it provides the conditions for speaking. We first practice revolt within and against the confines of family and then in school with our teachers. Revolt incorporates the child’s pre-political capacity to speak his or her truth to adults in a way that foregrounds politically speaking in adult life. David’s revolt resembles Foucault’s notion of parrhesia, meaning to say everything and to speak truth to power. Of speaking truth, in his last lectures given at Berkley, Foucault (1983) says: In parrhesia the speaker emphasizes the fact that he is both the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the enunciandum — that he himself is the subject of the opinion to which he refers. The specific ‘speech activity’ of the parrhesiastic enunciation thus takes the form: ‘I am the one who thinks this and that.’ (p. 3) David’s confrontation with his teacher over his ability to count numbers exemplifies revolt as the impulse to parrhesia, to telling the truth as one knows it despite the risk. At school, he pretends he cannot read and count. When señor learns the truth, he punishes David for “pretending all the time you said you cannot count” (COJ 225). As part of the punishment, the teacher forces the child to write on the board for his parents to see: Conviene que yo diga la veridad, I must tell the truth. Write it. Con-viene. Writing from left to right, forming the letters clearly if slowly, the boy writes: Yo soy veradad, I am the truth. (COJ 225) This Jesus-like impulse to speak the truth (I am the way, the truth and the light) is an ordinary act common to each child. Speaking truth comes naturally to children but is viewed as anything but (this is the reason they learn to lie). Inés sees David’s revolt as exceptional where the teacher, señor, sees him as belligerent. Simón, paradoxically, wonders if he is both. The adult confusion around David mirrors the general response to those who revolt and tell the truth. Those who revolt are often viewed personally as exceptional but socially and politically as deviant and defiant. As such, revolters are punishable by law and subject to repressive

106  Learning to Live, Again instruments like torture, isolation, and prison. But for its exceptional qualities, both good and bad, Kristeva attributes to revolt its power and pedagogical possibility. Despite all attempts to shut it down, revolt is basic to a person’s will to mentally and existentially survive despite the threat of external assaults on the body and personhood. For this, it bears repeating Kristeva’s (2014) claim that Mental life knows that it will only be saved if it gives itself the time and space of revolt: to break, to remember, to re-do […] In contrast with certainties and beliefs, permanent revolt is this questioning of the self, of everything and of nothingness, which no longer seems to have any place to occur. (p. 3) Viewed in Kristeva’s pre-political conception, David’s tiny revolt, in and out of school against his teachers, generates his Jesus-like mysticism, which is actually an ordinary quality of every child’s thinking. If extinguished by teachers and adult authorities, the child’s mystical belief in herself does not subside. This self-belief, Kristeva suggests, fortifies the child’s affective force making all adults second guess12 themselves (2016). Through the revolting questions David asks of him, Simón finds himself significantly13 affected and reconsidering his certain knowledge. First, he questions his perceived inability to parent and teach; he becomes aware of his stunted political capacity and his actual ambivalence to hold good will toward others (COJ 57). Second, David’s revolt at school presses Simón quite radically to question why he allows his young charge to be punished by the repressive system of schooling in Novilla: “He,” Simón has to admit, “does not like the autocratic señor Léon: he agrees with Inés that he should not be in charge of small children” (COJ 226). Still, at the same time he wonders, “But why does the boy resist instruction? Is it just some inborn spirit of rebelliousness flaring up in him, fanned by his mother; or has the bad feeling between pupil and teacher a more specific cause?” (COJ 226, emphasis added). Taking the matter right to the child, Simón learns that David’s mistrust of his teacher is more basic than one might think. Simón’s refusal to learn from señor has something to do with “his glass eye” and the fact that the teacher ridicules Don Quixote, which hurts the child’s feelings (COJ 226). The child’s revolt perhaps has less to do with reason in the way Simón wishes it might than with David’s gut (inborn) response to the teacher he views to be true. Whatever it is, señor’s pedagogy poses a hard threat to who David knows he is. When señor suggests that David is in need of psychological treatment given at a special school, Puntos Arenas (Final Medicine), Inés is aghast: “Over my dead body will he go to Puntos Arenas!” (COJ 225). In light of Inés’s unrelenting protest and after some deliberation, Simón decides he also cannot submit David, his child, to psychological

Learning to Live, Again  107 treatment, as per the strong recommendation of educational authorities. Simón’s decision to let David leave school is a “lifesaver,” which invokes, ironically, David’s wishes for a future profession, along with “escape artist and magician” (COJ 172). Lifesaving is perhaps why we, in the first place, are driven to know and learn. It is also why children and adults view books and education as “saving their lives.” The point of education, Simón learns, is not to become learned but to know (our) the truth of and sustaining our precarious human existence. David’s revolt facilitates such an opening for Simón to learn the truth sustaining the child’s existence: The boy desperately wants someone to love him, which means to accept him as one’s own flesh and blood. This is every child’s basic requirement to learn to be. It also reminds Simón of his own truth: He (was) is clamoring for a child’s love. And at this point of no return, he acts on the truth: “How he loves this child” (COJ 128). Despite his better judgment and with the urging of Inés, Simón allows David to leave the punishing school: “I am going to write a letter to the school,” he tells Inés, “to notify them formally that we are withdrawing David. That we will take care of his education ourselves” (COJ 215). For once, he and Inés agree but not without her adding: And while you are at it, write to that señor Léon too. Ask him what he is doing, teaching small children. Tell him it’s not a job for a man. (COJ 215, emphasis added) Assuming pedagogical and maternal responsibility, Simón gives into his desire and duty to totally love the child, to raise and hear him out, in other words, to learn from to teach him. With Bolívar, the three become the family much longed for by the child. Still, bad (teacher) habits die hard and Simón cannot help but clarify: “Spanish doesn’t really have a word for exactly what we are, so let us call ourselves that: the family of David.” (COJ 260). Together, the so-called family of David stage a final revolt of Novilla leaving the little republic to renew all their lives in a new place, Estrellita (little star). Here, and hopefully in his (and Coetzee’s) Schooldays, David embarks on an education that appeals to the infinite horizon of a child’s existence: One where he can read, dance, and live on his own terms, with stars and without knowing (there is no telling what awaits the child there). But what Simón now knows is he can and will do anything for his child. For the love of David, Simón risks everything and learns to break free.

Notes

108  Learning to Live, Again

Learning to Live, Again  109

8

9

10

11

12

be his padrino (replacement or second father or author), David seems to be asking not only for a father figure but an authorial one—someone to help him read and write the story of who he is in the new world. I argue that the maternal authority teachers assume for children is also authorial: The teacher’s main role is to hear the child’s story and co-construct “new readings” that do justice to a child’s existence (Mishra Tarc, 2016). A version of the teacher’s question “do I have it in me” undoes the character of teacher in many of Coetzee’s novels. The clichéd phrasing refers not only to a test of one’s character. When literally read, as I do, it refers to the internal composition of one’s capacity to feel for others outside of one self to sympathetically read in and with the other’s plight. What is in us, Klein (1937/1984) claims, is all our desires, all our experiences, all of ourselves, all we can be. This inner capacity to sympathetically feel and make examinable one’s capacity to feel for the grievance of the other seems, in Coetzee’s novels, a basic requirement for the teacher’s learning to teach. It is why, I have argued (Mishra Tarc, 2015), all teacher education ought to include training in one’s autobiographical education (Pinar, 1975) and/or one’s sustained reflecting on one’s biography to work through childhood experiences in schools. A cursory search on Google shows there are no actual children’s books with this specific title authored by Benengeli. The book does not exist. Fictional is the version of the actual historically real book that David learns to read. Coetzee’s fictional delivery of the real book pedagogically highlights the ongoing questions of actual authorship that surround it (see next note). Coetzee (1987) hints at the novel’s questionable authorship in his acceptance of the Jerusalem Prize. In the novel, David and Simón fight over authorship in their discussions of the book. But perhaps as critical to contests over authorship is Coetzee’s radical suggestion that the idea of true authorship is and should be contested. In his deliberations of the book’s authorship, Cervantes scholar Howard Mancing (1981) finds that the author of the first part of the book is historian Cide Hamete Benengeli. He claims the second part of the book is added by an unknown morisco (moor) translating the book from Arabic to Spanish. The whole Spanish version, Mancing (1981) claims, is revised and edited by Miguel de Cervantes (p. 64). With other scholars, for practical purposes, Mancing says, he has no choice but to concede that “the author of the final, edited text which we read is Miguel de Cervantes” (p. 64). Coetzee’s repositioning of the original author, Benengeli, in the children’s stories telling the first part, the tales of Sancho and Don Quixote, is perhaps to return proper citation to the actual creator. Here, the narrator pokes at the reader to question her canonical understandings of authorship, in terms of the actual novel but also our educated understanding of what an author is and does and can do to our “real” engagements with the world. In an interview, Kristeva (with Mock, 2016) explains: Without the ‘need to believe,’ there is no transference. The analysand has to invest in the analyst in order to establish the psychoanalytic link of transference and countertransference. The desire for knowledge can only develop on the basis of this reciprocal trust-investment, by which the child (and also the analysand) develops the capacity to call things into question, to problematize, to deconstruct. (p. 81)

110  Learning to Live, Again

Conclusion “Things to Learn”: Pedagogy and the Novels of J.M. Coetzee

In a rare in-person appearance, J.M. Coetzee gives an address on childhood. Invited by eminent philosopher Jonathan Lear at University of Chicago on the occasion of the Neubauer Collegium Director’s Lecture, Coetzee’s address is entitled: “Growing up with the Children’s Encyclopedia.” In the “essay on autobiography,” Coetzee (2018) considers the indelible impression English literature makes on his early childhood self: What I will be presenting today is an essay in autobiography, specifically an essay on my formation between the ages of about three and ten under the influence of reading and re-reading a children’s book that was popular during my day, The Children’s Encyclopedia. Now I take it as uncontested, that the books we read as children, at least some of them, leave an impression on us, and that this impression goes deeper than the impression left by books we read as adults. Whether the impression left by our childhood reading is abiding, or whether, on the contrary, we routinely outgrow it, and throw it off, is a separate question. Without empirical evidence one way or the other, I tend to believe the former claim, in fact a strong version of it: that we are marked by our early reading, that the mark may be formative of our character but also that it may lie so deep as to be unavailable to scrutiny, at least by normal processes of introspection, whether it may be recoverable by some alternative process such as, for example by psychoanalysis, is outside my purview today. (Transcription, mine)1 Coetzee is three years old in 1943, when his mother brings home a ten-volume set of the 1925 edition of Arthur Mee’s The Children’s Encyclopedia. The set was to be discarded by the local library. As the family owned few books, Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia became young John’s “staple” literary curriculum “until the age of nine or ten.” The Encyclopedia, he (2018) adds, is also the “staple resource of my mother.” When the child complains of boredom at home, the mother directs him to read “the green books.”

112  “Things to Learn” I, too, have made the claim that our first readings leave a lasting marking on us (Mishra Tarc, 2015). I date these first readings much earlier than the age of three to an infancy we cannot remember but leave a lasting impression. In infancy our childhood reading begins when we feel our way through others “in the common way that all animals do,” as Peggy Kamuf (2001) puts it. If children’s stories of the “family of man” leave a formative mark on our character as Coetzee (2018) supposes, infantile readings of ourselves felt in “the voices of our mothers” leave their mark on our infantile minds (Kamuf, 2001). Coetzee’s story of growing up with the Children’s Encyclopedia is one familiar to many children growing up in the golden century of English literacy. His story is deeply pedagogical. Its autobiographical content bears witness to the profound role of the mother in the delivery of significant content to and in the child’s life. The Children’s Encyclopedia is one of countless contents of knowledge the mother offers. The set of books, each unique, each conveying different messages, provides a concrete way to think of the vast reservoir of knowledge every mother gives to the child. At first the content of the mother’s knowledge is un-worded, taking the form of maternal care. The mother’s carrying home discarded books for her children provides an un-worded example of care. It expresses a mother’s knowledge of the importance of books to nurture her children’s minds. The child, in turn, is eager to read the books, partly because he is curious but also because he loves what his mother loves. Once the son engages the books on his own, his relation to knowledge changes, leaving what his mother loves (although this lingers) to generate a love of knowledge of his own (Coetzee, 2018). Much like David in Childhood of Jesus, the child, John, reads the pictures before words. As he reads the books, he scribbles down “pencil markings of his pre-literate self” on its pages. These jot-notes2 offer “internal evidence” of the author’s first readings (Coetzee, 2018). Still, there is no way to account for what he has learned from the literary knowledge delivered by those picture books. Those of us who study the enigmatic workings of pedagogy from the onset understand our work to be next to impossible. There is no way to know how one’s teaching and learning affects us. We can only examine childhood autobiography in feelings, memories, and jotted-down and archived notes, as does Coetzee (2018), to gain a sense of the way the pedagogy delivered by early people and things affect us, leaving a lasting impression in the stories of our lives. Coetzee’s talk on “Growing up with the Children’s Encyclopedia” aligns with my theorization of pedagogy in his novels. Pedagogy arrives through his mother’s reading but also through Mee’s curation of the book. It finds its way through his own silent and repetitive reading of the books. It is delivered in the images and stories of masculinity, racial difference, and sexual desire storied in the Encyclopedia for England

“Things to Learn”  113 and exported across to colonial elsewheres. When the child eventually does grow up, he will deliberate his reading of one of the stories into his own, re-titling it Foe. Some of his childhood enchantments and agonies with Robinson Crusoe will set the seeds for his novel depiction on how another author’s characters reckon with the colonial history of human enslavement that stands between them—that stands between self and other. “Growing up with the Children’s Encyclopedia” is not simply autobiographical. It is also historical. Coetzee’s autobiographical example demonstrates how one’s personal story is caught up in historical and political circumstance, as our lives universally are. The history of colonial education delivered “innocently” by children’s books is one denied in official records. Teachers do not learn of what books can do to children in their teacher education programs. But children’s literature has lifelong affects. As it did for a child growing up in British South Africa. As it did for my father reading children’s poems in British India. As it did for me, subject to my father’s and my own English literature in commonwealth Canada. In her essay the “Burden of English,” Gayatri Spivak (1992a) notes, as Mee and others understood, the strong force of the literary in forming lives subject to an English colonial education. Literature might be the best complement to ideological transformation. The successful reader learns to identify implicitly with the value system figured forth by literature through learning to manipulate the figures, rather than through (or in addition to) working out the argument, explicitly and literally, with a view to reasonable consent. Literature buys you assent in an almost clandestine way and therefore it is an excellent instrument for a slow transformation of the mind. For good or ill. As medicine or as poison, perhaps always a bit or both. The teacher must negotiate and make visible what is mere clandestine. (p. 278) Coetzee’s (2018) autobiographical return to Mee’s Encyclopedia, almost 75 years after first encountering it, makes visible the influential means by which English literature has gotten in and to him. His interior and social-historical examination of the books is of the meanings they left on impressionable children, children like he once was. In different ways, this autobiography and his body of work repeatedly offers teachers and scholars of literacy and literature incredible insight into the enigmatic and leading human messages English literature pedagogically delivers to children and readers. In his ground-breaking book, Learning to divide the world: Education at Empire’s End, John Willinsky investigates how English literature,

114  “Things to Learn” using Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye’s words, “educates the mind.” For Frye the phrase reflects a particular form of engagement with literature and the arts that radiates from a Western canon to encompass traditions around the world. In making this case, Frye still falls back, as I will make plain, on a colonial imaginary of island paradises, plantation economies, and evolutionary hierarchies. This imperial legacy lives on as a trace element in our educational lives, not necessarily toxic in itself but worrisome as it goes unspoken and unexamined. Along with the English language, literature formed the core of the British empire’s for export culture, and in many ways, literature still holds a special place. (pp. 213–4) Willinsky’s (1998) 20-year-old remarks still hold, but perhaps not in the same way. Comprising the standard English medium curriculum in schools worldwide, the instructions, logics, and symbolic forms of British humanism, for better and worse continue to be internalized by children and students at home and school as they learn to read. However, the vernacularization of English(es), the expansion and spread of media forms emanating from multiple international centers, and the transactional approach to English language acquisition for financial gain may mean that the transmission of British humanism through children’s literature has lessened. Reading, and not only literature, plays a leading role in the formation of pedagogical subjects. In the rise of social media, the most popularly textual medium of our time, we are witnessing what reading particular contents can do to our ability to think and relate to one another. If what we read is not necessarily toxic in of itself, as Willinsky (1998) says, the critical point for teachers is that, as unspoken and unexamined, we are letting our students’ reading material have its way in and with them and us. It is vital for teachers to make examinable one’s felt experiences of reading, to understand how impressions of the other can influence who we can be. We need to think about what reading, in forms as well as contents, is doing in us and the people we can be. This is, perhaps, Coetzee’s most significant point in the lecture. It also marks a radical contribution to our understandings of literacy, literature, and text in the formation of selves. This project of examining how the child is delivered to adulthood through maternal and schooled pedagogies is undertaken in all of Coetzee’s work. If his novels follow in and rework traditions of late modern male writers, quietly cited in each is the lasting authorial influence of his mother. Reporting on Coetzee’s literary papers, Attwell (2016) attests to Vera Coetzee’s unspoken affect on her son: “Vera’s influence on

“Things to Learn”  115 Coetzee’s authorship is profound but not straightforward” (p. 381). The mother’s influence is not garnered by a didactic approach. Vera Coetzee did not instruct Coetzee how to be a writer. Rather, she made a mark on him by intensely delivering her love of reading English literature to her young son. In Coetzee’s archival notes, Attwell (2016) finds pedagogy, natality, aesthetic experience, and the bios of the author blurrily yet intrinsically bound. We are read and marked by the stories our mothers tell and give in ways we cannot completely know. But, perhaps, more importantly: Our mother’s unique delivery generates newness of old stories in our own. Storying the child is not thought-out pedagogy for most mothers. It is overwritten by larger social forces that make available particular texts and their legitimate meanings. As Attwell (2016) finds of Coetzee’s mother: To begin with, she was responsible for creating his particular relationship with the English language. It was also through her and her reflections on education that John’s reading developed, from Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia to Paul Gallico’s The Snow Goose to Treasure Island to The Swiss Family Robinson to P. C. Wren and on to The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Unlike most parents of the day, she encouraged the reading of comics, believing that if the child was reading both the image and text, the benefits were doubled. (pp. 381–2) Vera Coetzee builds for a son a literary curriculum sustaining the person he comes to be. In her selections of and from the Children’s Encyclopedia and in her orientations toward those texts, she softly influences her son’s reading, both what and how he reads. The stories also read him, who and how he feels he is and can be. The impression is singular, his alone to review, revise, and reconsider. But his mother leads him on, offering graphic novels as well as proper literature, encouraging reading in its myriad forms. The literary curriculum his mother gives him and the one he pursues continues to haphazardly orient this child’s life of letters. Coetzee’s mother is not featured in any of his novels. She makes fleeting appearances in his autre biographies. She garners wry acknowledgment in his Nobel acceptance (in Attwell, 2016, p. 374), the greatest of all literary accomplishments. Still, and if only in muted recognition, the mother is here. If we bother to listen, we can feel her presence stirring in an author’s silent witness to his writing. Or as Attwell (2016) argues, “the mark” of Coetzee’s mother finds its way into his writing: Her intelligence, the struggles in her marriage, her limited financial means, the strength of her relationships with her sons, all left their mark on Coetzee’s writing. Many of his leading characters

116  “Things to Learn” are women, articulate heroines who struggle against trying circumstances, often contesting patriarchal authority: Magda in In the Heart of the Country, Susan Barton in Foe, Mrs. Curren in Age of Iron, Elizabeth Costello. There are other influences on Coetzee’s female fictional authors too, including the example of Nadine Gordimer. And without having to refer to either Vera or Gordimer, there is Coetzee’s own shrewd sense that the female narrator is a strategic way of positioning oneself on the margins of authoritative traditions. The assertively feminine position in Coetzee’s writing is at times a proxy for a self-staging that has little to do with gender. Nevertheless, Vera’s perseverance would have shown the way. (p. 382) Notwithstanding the fact, as Butler (1990) suggests, that self-staging seeming always to have something to with gender, Attwell critically notes that an affective trace of the mother informs the author’s delivery. Along with sharing the feminine position with Coetzee’s women characters, Vera Coetzee is also a teacher. Her pedagogy bears down on his teacher-characters, both male and female. The asymmetry and agony of her maternal and pedagogical relation insinuates itself in the more heart-shaking moments of Coetzee’s fiction. In this felt but unheard way, his mother’s pedagogy remains, guiding his literary appeal, which reaches out to millions of readers. Perhaps more than the feminine, the force of the pedagogical shows the way.

Learning that Never Leaves: Storied Teachings In the author’s fictional theory of pedagogy, the maternal also leads the way: 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 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. (p. 163) The real but imagined-to-be-dead author of the posthumous memoir Summertime returns the ancient principles of paideia to its maternal

“Things to Learn”  117 function (usurped by Socrates and the midwife). Learning ignites when the teacher’s pursuit of knowledge sparks the student’s desire3 to know what he knows. Still, as Adriana’s skeptical response to the fictional Coetzee’s luring theory reveals: “That does not sound like philosophy to me.” (Summertime 163). As Adriana in Summertime indicates, the fictional Coetzee’s desireladen take on paideia does not sound like philosophy. Rather, it is akin to what Klein (1928/1984) terms, the epistemophilic instinct. If aligned with his character’s version of pedagogy, my maternal theorization of epistemophilia resists its alluring metaphysical metaphors of fire and higher realms. Following Klein, I describe the drive as a curiosity, a question, a desire for the other’s knowledge to come closer to one’s own. I also hold, as the real author (2012) does, to the Platonic principles of paideia committed to the humanizing duty of growing a child to be an adult deeply knowledgeable of the world and others. If Coetzee deliberates the practice of paideia in his contemplation of ideal education in his novels, I materialize my own understandings in a theory of pedagogy that relegate paideia to the basic provision of bearing children’s knowledge into and of the world. The ignition of the imagination is generated not only by coming into the light of the world but by feeling our way through the loss of our mother’s dark womb to come into it. Pedagogy, as an infantile relation, outlives one’s drive for the other’s knowledge. Stricken terminally with dementia, my father’s last intelligible English words were not the omipotent vocabulary of his revered scientific profession. They were words “burning bright” in the William Blake (1901) children’s poem “The Tyger.” My father garnered his first English words in a child’s fragments honoring the animal. He parsed out its meanings from one poem found among many on a single library shelf of English books. My great uncle gifted the useless books to my illiterate grandmother before Independence’s blood-thirsty arrival to India. My father passed down his uncle’s gift of Blake to him to me when I was small, at a time when children were still expected to recite poetry. Like him, I committed Blake to heart and passed the words on to my own children: They fail to inspire in this time and world. But a teacher has to try. In my mind, Blake’s trace in my father’s formation showed itself (even) as he lost his mind. I also wonder, a bit morbidly, heartbrokenly, did these words, words of the wretched situation of the animal, words he delighted over, anticipate his sorry end? What the hammer? what the chain, In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp, Dare its deadly terrors clasp! (l. x–x)

118  “Things to Learn” Now in an apparent catatonic state, he cannot tell me now the significance this poem held for him. But I imagine the majestic animal remains in “the furnace that was thy brain,” burning bright, inside him, now inside consoling me, and I hope him, in our felt and wordless maternal and literary bonds. In her reading of Assia Dejbar’s Fantasia, Gayatri Spivak (1992b) notes the double-bind of human relation heightens when we are subject to the other’s way of life. Dejbar, Spivak reports, struggles to write herself in the colonizer’s language: To attempt an autobiography in French words alone is to show more than skin under the slow scalpel of a live autopsy. Its flesh peels off and with it, seemingly, the speaking of childhood which can no longer be written is torn to shreds. Wounds are reopened, veins weep, the blood of the self flows and that of others, a blood which has never dried. (In Spivak, 770) Dejbar’s peeling flesh depicts the deep wound of being forced to learn a language that makes one other to oneself (Derrida, 1998). As David Lurie is also forced to admit, something unaggrieved is seething in one’s forced use of the colonizer’s language. Doubtless Petrus has been through a lot, doubtless he has a story to tell. He would not mind hearing Petrus’s story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa. Stretches of English code whole sentences long have thickened, lost their articulations, their articulateness, their articulatedness. Like a dinosaur expiring and settling in the mud, the language has stiffened. Pressed into the mould of English, Petrus’s story would come out arthritic, bygone. (Disgrace 117) Coetzee also registers the British colonial text’s removal of a child from his sensitive self as he reads the books in The Children’s Encyclopedia. And perhaps now, today, his ambivalence with (the) English has reached its limit, one materialized in his turn to Spanish in the last book of the Jesus trilogy, La Muerte de Jesus. At Derek Attridge (2019) notes: Part of Coetzee’s decision, to allow The Death of Jesus to appear first in a Spanish version, he says, is that in these novels people arrive in the next life and find that the language spoken in the next life is not English, but Spanish.

“Things to Learn”  119 The move is perhaps pedagogical. Coetzee’s long implied wish to decenter English and English literature as the only mode and means for the formation of subjects seems right at this time in this global world. But I cannot help but wonder can Spanish and its letters (or any language given to reason and the logics of man) produce a different kind of human subject? Can any language avoid colonizing the child into something she is not? I am doubtful, although as a child of a deeply affecting and romantic language, Bengali, I feel it might, but not necessarily for the better, if better is in the interest of justice wrought by humanizing truth. I learned at an early age, the commonly used Bengali word for child is boy giving way to the idea, at least in the way it felt, no daughters exist. But daughters exist. We, daughters, are children. And this truth of a daughter and my existence was given to me not in my mother tongue, but in the colonizer’s, English. English not only colonizes (although it does and has, and devastatingly so); it can also care exquisitely for you, as it does for my father’s unraveled mind now. Having more than one language kept up his mind’s fight, and how the mind fought for the body valiantly, for an incredible ten years post-diagnosis. After he lost all words, his mouth still forms the “o” he came into the world breathing with. Levinas’s (1969) o of other and not Derrida’s (1982) a of the alphabetic system is the first and last affecting letter he is left. If affect us moves to the other, it is the other who affects us with her meaning that carries us all our life until and after its end. Rather than pin my hopes on any one idiom or dialect of language, I put mine on the paideia of literacy, the humanizing force of language (Mishra Tarc, 2015). Decades after her first reading of Dejbar’s linguistic wounding, Spivak (2012) re-finds a place for the agonies of the mother tongue, not in identity but in and as fiction. To examine the fictional elements of identify, she calls for an aesthetic education while calling on post-humanist teachers “to pick up the qalam offered us in uneven globalization, and, with help of our Polaroid, attempt to figure forth the world’s broke and shifting alphabet” (p. 157). Her readerly project of aesthetic education is one teachers need to begin in a time when the world’s alphabet is not only broken but no longer makes sense in any language. A pedagogy of felt literacy attends to and hears the child’s particularly felt response, to what Paulo Freire (1970) envisions as reading the word and the world, reading the world in the “soul of the word” (p. 19). Felt reading, our first means of reading in the “common way all animals do” (Kamuf, 2001), returns us to the soul of the word bridging our real and imaginary relations to each other. It is this feeling for each other, what Costello clumsily terms sympathetic imagination, which David tries out in his first, faltering readings of Don Quixote. His reading is one that produces inventive vocabulary and/or knowledge. In this re-invention of

120  “Things to Learn” language, the teacher bears witness to a child’s unreal capacities to make up knowledge he knows of the world. In the acceptance speech for the Jerusalem prize, Coetzee longingly delivers his wish to follow in the footsteps of the “first of all novelists, Cervantes” to “take up residence in a world where a living play of feelings and ideas is possible, a world where we [writers] truly have an occupation.” But, born during the worst of times in South Africa, he finds he cannot: What prevents the South African writer from taking a similar path, from writing his way out of a situation in which his art, no matter how well-intentioned, is – and here we must be honest – too slow, two old-fashioned, too indirect to have any but the slightest and most belated effect on the life of the community or the course of history? What prevents him is what prevents Don Quixote himself: the power of the world his body lives in to impose itself on him and ultimately on his imagination, which, whether he likes it or not, has its residence in his body. The crudity of life in South Africa, the naked force of its appeals, not only at the physical level but at the moral level too, its callousness and its brutalities, its hungers and its rages, its greed and its lies, make it as irresistible as it is unlovable. The story of Alonso Quixano, or Don Quixote – though not, I add, Cervantes’ subtle and enigmatic book – end with the capitulation of the imagination to reality, with a return to La Mancha and death. We have art, said Nietzsche, so that we shall not die of the truth. In South Africa there is now too much truth for art to hold, truth by the bucketful, truth that overwhelms and swamps every act of the imagination. (in Attwell, 1992, pp. 98–99) Although Coetzee’s lament is of art’s lack of freedom and creative force, he might as well be speaking about pedagogy’s slow advance: “too slow, too old fashioned, too indirect to have any but the slightest and most belated effect on the life of the community or the course of history.” But pedagogy—like art, like infancy, like the body—is not useless, even if we cannot remember or know its affect: Each in its own way and time alters us, brings new life to old things. Coetzee is the novelist of our time. If he claims that he, the author, cannot leave the residence of his body nor the brutal world he inhabits, his characters sometimes can and do. It is David who brings new life to not only to Coetzee’s storytelling but to Cervantes’s old one. It is life that moves even the cynical teacher and reluctant father to see and feel for the child’s totally made-up world of Don Quixote through new eyes. What if we are wrong and he is right? What if between one and two there is no bridge at all, only empty space? And what if we, who so

“Things to Learn”  121 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? (COJ 250) Children do know “a world where a living play of feeling is possible” (Coetzee in Attwell, 1992, p. 98). They know because they have already experienced the total play of feeling for their other in their infancy. And they still believe that if we feel for the beauty and goodness of the other we know it to be true. Perhaps the lie is the crudity of life men make of all that is beautiful and good in the world. Perhaps this truth of ourselves caught in lies is the truth we adults, we teachers, need to see, to relearn, re-story, and deliver.

Storied Beginnings In Coetzee’s novels, pedagogy takes the form of literary letters. No other form of address summons and delivers messages of our self from the inside out as do letters. The singularity of this self-other form attests to the intimate pedagogical significance that maternal teachings impress upon a life. In her book Relating Narratives, Adriana Caravero (2000) argues that each and every infant has a uniqueness that is revealed through stories told of and by her. As her translator Paul A. Kottman explains, the significance of this unique existence “is revealed ex post facto through the words of his or her life story” (in Caravero, 2000, p. xiii). Or, as Caravero, through the words of Karen Blixen, (2000) so poignantly puts it: The question: who am I? flows indeed, sooner or later, from the beating of every heart. It is a question that only a unique being can sensibly pronounce. Its response, as all narrators know, lies in the classic rule of storytelling. (p. 4) The affecting and affectionate “beating heart” material the child uses to story tell herself finds its source first in maternal address. How the mother “pronounces” the baby will “form” her memories and experience from infancy on. As she grows and struggles to thrive into and with the “ruled” words used to address her, the child re-tells her story in her own words to revise, review, and redress from and apart from those used to form her. Caravero (2000) finds, one constantly revises to renew one’s story in becoming a person with a story of one’s own. Novel pedagogy is one that Coetzee’s readers, scholars, and critics also wordlessly register, as evidenced by unsettled, frustrated, and upset responses to and reception of his work. Coetzee’s books get to us

122  “Things to Learn” because they convey cryptic, existentially significant messages that one feels one already knows. In this most formative sense, a novel is an education. For David, it is Don Quixote; for Coetzee, it is Robinson Crusoe; and for me, it is The Bluest Eye. Each of these novels makes a mark in a young and impressionable reader in-forming a life in ways seen and unknown. The stories we never forget are those told of us to us by our (m)other. Mrs. Curren, a mother, re-finds in an unloveable child, too late, the story is of: “Our humanity, that we are born with, that we are born into” (AOI 80). There is no existence without a (m)other’s story. The infant cannot even suck at the mother’s breast without guidance, despite the wrongly naturalized versions of this first and necessary act of pedagogy. Infants do not come out of the mother’s body clean and able. Infants are ripped into existence, eyes startled, bodies reeling, skin hyper-sensitive to light and touch. Infants, like the mothers who bear them, are battered and barely alive creatures on arrival. And yet this profound story of battered and bruised existence is significantly absent in our present metaphysics of being, knowledge, and education. This story is retold in Coetzee’s novels. We are reborn into our humanity fighting for others, the way many of Coetzee’s characters stage a tiny revolt in his novels. Susan Barton defies Crusoe and teaches Friday to speak. Lucy battles her father to raise her child well amongst her people, under the third wife “patronage” of Petrus. When a horrified Lurie tells his daughter it is not our way, she informs him it is now: “in my life, I am the one who makes decisions” (Disgrace 198). Elizabeth Costello fights the whole human race. She is, as Pam Ryan (2005) claims, a woman thinking in dark times but not thinking entirely alone—she is thinking aloud in public with others. Unlike Arendt, Costello speaks not with conviction of her own mind. Her messy, rambling, hard-to-follow thinking in public with others speaks her self and perhaps, to both deliver the bracketed out yet deeply felt thinking of Coetzee, her creator: (Let me add, entirely parenthetically, that I, as a person, as a personality, am overwhelmed, that my thinking is thrown into confusion and helplessness, by the fact of suffering in the world, and not only human suffering. These fictional constructions of mine are paltry, ludicrous defenses against that, being overwhelmed, and, to me, transparently so.) (Attwell, 1992, 248) To act as pedagogical subject, it is not enough to hold court over ideas sequestered in the hallowed halls of the ivory tower or a room of one’s own. One must also speak out one’s messy, thought-out ideas in public

“Things to Learn”  123 with others. One must be prepared to be defensive and be wrong, at least some of the time. But unlike politics, the point of pedagogically speaking is to speak one’s truth unflinchingly to others knowing it will fall down. Unlike politics where we imagine we are speaking and being heard as equals, acting as a pedagogical subject overwhelmingly reminds one of asymmetrical relations and the impossibility of being heard in the way one desires, aims, and intends. Speaking as a pedagogical subject reminds us that we fail to speak to others all the time. Despite its pitfalls, Costello holds faith in pedagogical self-other relations that sustains us to learn. And from the other, her son, she learns that despite being unrelatable, off-putting, and stubborn, the other’s love remains. And it is the most tender and naked of loves a child holds for mother, for his others, for her world: Children have tender hearts - that is to say children have hearts that have not yet been hardened by years of cruel and unnatural battering. Given half a chance, children see through the lies with which advertisers bombard them (the happy chickens that are transformed painlessly into succulent nuggets, the smiling moo-cow that donates to us the bounty of her milk). It takes but one glance into a slaughterhouse to turn a child into a lifelong vegetarian. In response to a child’s tender-hearted love, as Coetzee (2007) a bit projectively depicts, each and every adult is called to bear what the child witnesses to know (animals slaughter is wrong. I can be vegetarian. I can love animals as I love myself) and the news of it she wants to deliver (this place, this world feels wrong for me) to foster and sustain her educated survival in the world. Sensitive and forgiving, a child David, like the baby Jesus, cannot help but hold love, even for strangers, even for a shell of a man who has forgotten how. He is a child. Like every child, he needs the other’s love. Of all the teachers in Coetzee’s novel, Mrs. Curren, a dying mother, a reluctant humanist, a self-immolating world citizen, affects me most. Having lost everything—her daughter, her body, her education, her country, her life—she wages war with her kind to make the last stand of her life for the lives of black children. When she fails to protect them, she tells John (the child she cannot love) that she is fighting for girl children, the weak, the vulnerable, the forgotten: The condemned unheard. But her plea for the unheard is lost on the child she addresses it to. Because the plea does not include him. We learn that what is unheard is uneducable. This is why, perhaps, despite much gain in civil rights and our awareness of social hatred, we still do not learn. But still as Mrs. Curren learns too late from and for John, we have to try for the children that live.

124  “Things to Learn”

Things to Learn: The Affect of the Other If Coetzee’s novels depict pedagogy in his teacher-characters, the novel, says Elizabeth Costello, teach nothing. Her books teach nothing, preach nothing; they merely spell out, as clearly as they can, how people lived in a certain time and place. More modestly put, they spell out how one person lived, one among billions: the person whom she, to herself, calls she, and whom others call Elizabeth Costello. (EC 207–8) Of course, the untold irony of Costello’s statement finds real life form in the novel work of one real person amongst billions named John Coetzee. If Coetzee’s novels also purport to teach nothing, the Nobel Prize novelist has managed to not merely spell out but cast a spell over millions of readers in his relentless address of the most difficult issues of our time. Perhaps more important than teaching, the novels of J.M. Coetzee generate a pedagogical last stand. As with Plato, “[p]aidea is,” Coetzee’s “first and last word.” (Werner, 1944, p. 213). Time and time again Coetzee turns to pedagogy to advance the humanizing force of learning that supports us to live with ourselves and others. He also turns to pedagogy and not politics when acting as a subject in the world. In his recent public reading (2019a) of Behrouz Boochani’s memoir, Coetzee decries the torturous conditions young migrants are made to bear—detained and imprisoned in the mountains of Australia: Whatever the answer, the argument against Australia’s treatment of asylum-seekers can be made as trenchantly on the basis of a single case as on that of a thousand, and Boochani has provided exactly that case. Under atrocious conditions he has managed to write and publish a record of his experiences (experiences yet to be concluded), a record that will certainly leave his jailers gnashing their teeth. Delivering to the world Boochani’s singular witness of his circumstance, resounding those of thousands, Coetzee acts as a pedagogical subject. If the singular revolt by a single person can move us to thinking, it needs another to hear, witness, and mobilize its cry. Above all, Coetzee reminds us giving a hearing to the tiny revolt in a single case can teach us to remember, repair, and re-find our humanity. As teachers our duty is one of witness: to hear the appeal of and to each and every life we meet. Entrusted with the principles of maternal pedagogy, teachers have a special responsibility to others that exceeds that of all others: To grow up a child entrusted to our care is a gift from which we are given the beauty and potential of each singular one.

“Things to Learn”  125 History of the world, our own, the others, has everything to do with education. An education without history fails to address who we are as a people in our world. Our infantile grief with who we are revives this aesthetic conflict with history stemming from what unthinkably happened to us as people. There is no way to historically write about grief without attesting to the utter decimation of each person and world subject to mass violence and degradation. In fact, it could be argued that in its retrieval of certain facts, history defends against what we have done to each other, our unending sorrow. The untold of our history can only be rewritten in and with what Arundhati Roy (2019) recently called “the shelter of fiction.” Perhaps, literature provides such a cover for Coetzee’s grief-stricken historical address of the country of his birth and, now, exile4 through his novel depictions. I have studied the workings of affect on existences across my life. It steers me to my pressing inquiry—lost children left behind by parents, separated at borders, writing their stories to no one that hears. I speak of and with these children because their unheard lives speak to me, to my history, to the mother I am, the teacher of young children I was. And because I, unlike so many others, can. My mission for literacy is not to teach children to be successful in a capitalist society that rabidly consumes its young: It is to teach them to closely read, to generate and study knowledge of their selves, the world, and others. My investigation of how language forms a life informs my aesthetic orientation and my capacities for reading, which is through a wet blur of wanting to know, clamoring to understand. Grief fashions the tales I tell to repair irreparable things, to paint them with something that can stick together fragments of a life caught in between worlds and needing a way to reconcile the difference. “I grew out of books,” the fictional John in Coetzee’s Duskland proclaims (30). So have I. At times, I feel I identify more with fictional people I read in a book than with real ones. These days I find myself speaking in borrowed words from Didi, Sethe, and Mrs. Curren as if they were mine, as if they were real and not made-up by characters. Didi’s husband was a monster, my mother reads5 (Tagore, 2005), and I know whose ravaged body she speaks to. You, your best thing. You are, Paul D. tells Sethe and I feel for the brutal history of which he speaks (Morrison, 1987). I am speaking for that condemned unheard; Mrs. Curren cries as I do when I read that another child is abused, tortured, and killed in detention camps at the colonial border. And the last utterance I hear my father say o is the first letter a fictional Friday learns to write. The first enunciation of Friday’s breathed out letter, I feel in the wordless last word of my nearly dead father: His mouth opens. From inside him comes a slow stream, without breath, without interruption. It flows up through his body and out

126  “Things to Learn” upon me; it passes through the cabin, through the wreck; washing the cliffs and shores of the island, it runs northward and southward to the ends of the earth. Soft and cold, dark and unending, it beats against my eyelids, against the skin of my face. (Foe 157) o my child o I am dying. The silent, the unheard, the grief-stricken. Affect of the other opens our mouth, leads our way into and out of our lives. Perhaps of late and maybe for always, I have been struck dumb without words but for the musical, moaning, breathless, useless o I endlessly read to carry me on. In reading, we do not have to communicate our understandings immediately to others. We can ruminate with the other’s words in our minds, forever mulling over them for what it all means with much pleasure and pain. Reading novels, we find words to formulate what it is we can think about the terrible and beautiful things happening to us, in this time, in this world, to us, to our children These striking, haunting words of the other carry me now in these terrible times and through my father’s dying state. From Coetzee, I learn “feeling for,” rather than Forster’s “only connecting,” speaks to our humanizing struggles to relate to ourselves and others. We learn to become into being affected by our mothers. There are no words for affect. Affect, Lyotard (2002) insists, is unspeakable even as it rouses us to think and act. Words just fail, as the great wordsmith Freud also found. But they affect us. And this is the point of following them still, as Nouvet (2003) explains: Freud, according to Lyotard, speaks here as a literary writer who feels that he owes words to the ‘singular beauties of the case, words that would do justice to it, restitute it adequately and completely. He feels the laboring pain of the writer who seeks to find the ‘right’ words. He also feels the despair of the writer: his language is inadequate to the task. Something has been missed. The restitution lacks. It is not true. Where Freud is mistaken, however, is in the identification of what is lacking. His writing does not lack, as he believes, the ability to restitute the richness of the lexical lode, or the ingenuity of the unconscious syntax. (p. 246) Nouvet’s point is that no one—not Freud, not Coetzee, not Mrs. Curren, not her—can say what affect speaks. My wager, however, based on my observations of infantile states, is that we can hear, feel, and be altered by it. Engaging the unheard runs counter to all I learned in school about literature and poetry. Yet I felt the unheard speaking to me in books despite many of my teacher’s directives to read properly.

“Things to Learn”  127 Somehow, Coetzee harnesses affect, propelling the negative force of its revolt in his novel teachings. I have heard whole rooms of people recite passages from his novels. In hearing them, I am glad for my father’s insisting I learn to recite poetry from heart. Uncannily the unrecognizable person he is most like now is the fictional Prufrock of T.S. Elliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Wet-eyed and startled, mute and waiting, is he still thinking?: “The women come and go. Talking of Michelangelo” (Elliot, 1963). For his sensitive, painstaking, enduring attention to felt existence, Coetzee is a writer unlike any other. More important than his affect (which belies words), or who he is (this for certain), or what he desires for the reader (there is no way to know for sure), the searing imprint of the novelist’s barely audible communication inexplicably stays with the reader. Author Nadifa Mohammed (2013) movingly attests to the impression Coetzee leaves in the mind of the reader: In the Heart of the Country changed the way I saw my work and changed the way I did work. I would read it every day, almost superstitiously, before writing and it gave me easier entry to that dark place where nebulous ideas fuse into something intelligible, where creativity sits and madness lurks. Like Magda I have always pressed my knuckles to my eyes to see what galaxies I might find there, and in that simple shared action I find a sense of how we are all childlike and fragile, overawed by the sheer scale and inscrutability of life. Coetzee’s novels so affect us because he takes care, and he is meticulously careful with his words. A man of little affect leaves the reader reeling with his characters’ insight: “Everybody comes to terms with it, why can’t you?” the mother says (EC 114). And we, the reader, get it in the way her child John cannot bear. We feel the significance of the fictional mother’s words not wanting, not knowing how to live in such a death-stricken world let alone bring children into it. A mother’s sorrow over her part in one’s troubled history is the truest thing a child knows and feels to be true deep down inside. Readers, scholars, and critics of Coetzee’s novels are typically consumed in the literate task of parsing out what the author means. With its carnival of intra- and inter-texts flooding our reading, Coetzee’s writing defies the task of the literary critic to determine the novel’s meaning. As Janes (1997) notes, “Though we do not lose ourselves as we do to Milton or Dostoevsky, we are, like it or not, taken over and moved along.” She also claims, “We want to claw at the itching place. So, we keep reading Coetzee.” (p. 105). But if we do not lose ourselves, we are overwhelmed by loss, it claws away at us. It can take days, months, and years to get

128  “Things to Learn” through Coetzee’s novels. The significance held by a novel can carry our little lives. So, we keep reading (his) literature. As with his convocation address, Coetzee’s suggestive plea for pedagogy is stealthy, quiet, and uncertain. It grates at us rather than instruct. But the best pedagogues do this—direct, lead—urge one on without explicitly telling others what to do. His is an open book to be read over and again. Coetzee’s curious address revitalizes the force of pedagogy toward altering the visibly destructive course of our present adult social and political life. Pedagogy, he urges the adult community on, is our last stand to bolster one and another’s shaking faith in humanity. Remaining at the end of each of his novels is a child’s love: The love of an estranged daughter, the love of an unloved child, the love of an overzealous professor’s son, the love of a fallen professor’s daughter, and the love of a child lost to his parents. Still and despite everything the world throws at him, Coetzee’s novel pedagogy hangs onto the fragile chance that the adult child might relearn a humanity that still resides within us all. Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that Coetzee’s affective sensibility, one regularly condemned and ridiculed for being felt, can help keep us hanging on to each other and our shared love of the world that lies between us. Coetzee’s last stand for pedagogy and the novel is thus an expression of the unheard, characterized in the potential of the child; children are artists, before we rid them of the infantile capacity, as Malraux says, “to hear others through the throat” rather than the ears (in Lyotard, 1996, 210–11). To feel for the loud unheard wailing o is to be an artist, a creator, a lover, a teacher, an infant, to turn affective experience into a way of speaking what cannot be said in words and only felt breathing, still stirring within and between each other. To hear the other’s lasting effect on our lives requires literature. To learn from it requires pedagogy.

Notes

“Things to Learn”  129 story with: Didi had a monster husband. My father would chide her interpretation for what he saw was her irrational love for the author, a foolish and romantic man. I remember him once admonishing her also in Bengali (which he rarely used): such nonsense, why would anyone write such a thing? My mom ignored him but looked me unflinchingly in my five-year-old eyes. Pundit-babu (teacher-father) tells the truth: Didi had a monster husband. This new telling was spoken as she never before delivered: In (nearly) complete and proper English.

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Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. abstraction 45, 57, 61, 79, 85, 90n1 academic 16, 42, 56, 73, 76, 98; and culture 15n8, 73, 80, 83; and egoism 73, 79 academic discourse 15, 45, 54, 57 acting 19, 94; as pedagogical subject 55, 123–124; in the world 17, 65, 66 address 1, 11, 17, 50n3, 53, 95, 111, 121; and animal 55; and child 49, 50; and literature 33, 39, 50; and mother 12, 30, 34, 36–37, 39; and pedagogy 1, 5, 11, 19, 50, 54, 128; and world 33, 66, 77, 89, 121, 125 adult 2–5, 8, 48, 60, 88, 92, 94–96, 105, 107, 121; and authority 77–78, 97, 106; and child 7, 11–12, 25, 27, 39, 77, 103–4; and responsibility 1–2, 41–42, 48–50, 66; and whiteness 39, 41–44, 74; and world 77, 117, 123, 128 adult centrism 23–24 adult-child 36, 43, 66–67, 69, 73, 83–84, 91n6, 128 adult projection 3–4, 39 anti-black racism 35, 52n10 authorial freedom 120; see also freedom authorial impulse 103 authorial function 11, 20, 28, 30, 39; and Elizabeth Costello 53–54, 78; and maternal 11, 39, 78, 109n7, 114; and pedagogy 11, 20, 21, 28, 78 aesthetic 9, 74, 80, 85; and ethics 21; infancy 23–4, 36–38; and operation 11, 54; and pedagogical delivery 11, 20, 21, 54; and woman’s beauty 80

aesthetic appeal 28 aesthetic conflict 125 aesthetic education 119; see also Spivak aesthetic experience 23, 115 affect 21–22, 23, 36, 54, 56, 68, 125; and aesthetics 23–24, 38, 86; and animal 64; and change 8, 11; and feeling 4, 21, 25, 45, 56, 59, 61, 112; and forces 3–4, 106; and infancy 23–25, 38, 112; and literature 20, 127–128; and maternal relation 11, 19, 36, 38, 97, 114, 116; and other 4, 6, 8, 30, 86, 119, 126; and pedagogy 8, 20–21, 25, 27, 30, 53, 54, 77, 112, 120, 127–128; and reason 63, 85; silent 24, 31n6, 32n7, 64, 115, 126; and subject-(re)formation 20, 24–26; and transference 24, 38, 64; and unheard 30, 31n5; and unspeakable 23, 31n5, 64, 126–127; and violence 80–82 affected 38, 68, 106, 126 affecting 8, 11, 20, 24, 86, 88, 119, 121 affection 93, 121; and parent and children 56, 88, 95–96, 97 affective appeal 22, 40, 48, 120, 124 affective reading 11, 27, 29–30, 87, 88 affectivity 4, 23 aggression 38; see under Klein allegory 7, 88 analogy 24, 58, 61, 63 ancients 6, 7, 11, 26, 75, 98, 116 animal 4, 21, 53, 56, 57, 69; and feeling 61–62, 69; and humans 60, 64–66, 69–70; and projection

142 Index 56, 62–64; and reason 63–64, 67; and transference 68; and Western metaphysics 58–61, 64, 65, 67, 68 animal cruelty 58–63 animal existence 53, 59, 62, 68 animal experiments 59–62, 71n8 animal rights 7, 69, 123 animal speech 54, 57–59, 63 animal treatment 58, 64, 67, 69, 70 animate 2, 25, 38, 62, 66, 99, 100 anti-social child 24, 32n7, 51n4, 102 Apartheid 12, 33, 34, 35, 40, 41, 43, 72, 77, 79; and Derrida 87; see also post-Apartheid appeal 1, 22, 40, 48, 74, 85, 89, 107, 116, 120, 124 Arendt, H. 41, 66; and acting 66, 122; and adult obligation 42; and authority 66, 77; and children 1, 7, 8, 42; and crisis of education 66, 77, 94; and Mrs. Curren 42, 45; and dark times 65, 122; and education 1, 8, 49; and Elizabeth Costello 41, 65; and Ellison 42, 45, 48; and judgement 41–42, 65; and Little Rock 41–42; and natality 1, 7, 94, 115; and old world 5, 7, 49, 66, 77; and other people’s children 42, 45, 48; and pedagogy 1, 7, 8, 49, 66; and protection 8, 42, 48; and race 42, 45; and responsibility 1, 41, 42, 44, 48, 49; and shame 9; and Socratic style 65; and special duty of teacher 1, 6, 12, 42, 49, 93, 107, 117, 124; and thinking 65, 66–67, 70n3, 122 atrocity 50n2, 51n9, 58, 61, 77, 87, 88 attachment 22–24, 95–96 Attridge, D. 18, 53, 54, 81, 118–119 Attwell, D. 32n9, 34, 55, 70n6, 114–116 author 9, 10, 17, 20–21, 27, 28, 30, 30n1, 32n10, 33–34, 38–39, 50, 53–55, 60, 70n5, 70n6, 6, 81, 100, 108n7, 109n10, 109n11, 112, 115–116, 117, 120, 127 authorial 53–54, 103, 108n4; and author’s intent 28, 81; and maternal function 28, 78, 109n7, 114; and pedagogy 11, 20 authority 12, 83; and adult 2; and education 2, 98; and knowledge 21, 103; and literature 28; and patriarchal 83, 116; and

pedagogical relation 7, 26, 78; and teacher 43, 45, 109n7 authorship 55–56, 109n9, 10, 11, 15 autistic 24, 32n7 autobiography 29, 30, 32n8, 32n9, 70n6, 111–112, 113, 118 baby 3, 4, 14n2, 23, 25, 31n4, 62, 71n8, 92, 93–94, 99, 101, 104, 108n5; see also infant backstory 55 Baldwin, J. 39; see also epistolary Benabhib, S. 42; see also Little Rock Blake, W. 117 blaming children 3–4, 52n11 blaming mother 4, 34–35 birth 7–8, 9, 14, 19, 22, 23, 30n2, 31n4, 37, 49, 94, 97–98, 104, 125 Boochani, B. 124, 128n4 born into race 42 breakdown 30; and love 47; and self 39, 69, 91n5; see also crisis British colonial literacy 17, 79, 113–114 Britzman, D. 26–27 broken English 119, 128–129n5 Butler, J. 22–23, 24–25, 31n4, 79, 116 call of the other 1, 50 Caravero, A. 121 care 2, 12, 26, 36, 97, 107, 112, 124; and children 2–3, 7; and grief 27, 119; and inequality 26–27, 52n11; and mother 22, 24, 25, 35, 44–45, 49, 99; and pedagogy 77, 88; and responsibility 78; and teacher 42, 44, 98; and transference 95–96; and words 127 caregiving 5, 10, 94 care/knowledge 25, 98 cats 18, 62 Cervantes, M. 109n10, 120 character 4–7, 9, 20–21, 31n6, 55, 72, 103, 111–112, 120, 125; and author 29, 38–39, 53–54, 56, 70n6, 81, 127; and mother 30n2, 96, 115–116; and reader 28, 29, 110n13; and teacher 10, 12, 27, 65, 109n8, 124 characteristic 31n5, 69 characterization 18, 20, 22, 26, 30, 31n5, 37, 41, 58, 70n5, 76, 81, 86, 88, 92, 99, 128 child 2–3, 34–35, 36, 87, 92, 108n6, 124, 126, 128; and abuse 2, 4,

Index  143 14n3, 89, 125; and care 26; and concern 94; and figure 3–5, 7–8, 14, 31n3; and language 100–103, 119; and love 47, 93, 49, 106; and misogyny 81, 84, 119; and mother 37, 49, 50, 62, 68, 93, 95, 96, 112, 113–115, 127; and normativity 22, 24–25; and paideia 97–98, 117; and play 99; and politics 15n9, 24, 40, 50n1; and police 46, 48; and responsibility 49, 78, 95, 98; and revolt 26, 45, 93, 104–105, 108n2; and social hatred 40–41, 44–45, 81, 89; and truth 85, 103, 105–106; and violence 35, 45–46, 48–49, 89–90, 91n7; and whiteness 14n2, 34, 52n10; and world 1–3, 5, 7–9, 18, 19, 28, 37, 39, 41–42, 43, 44, 49–50, 51n6, 66, 68, 77–79, 89, 92, 93–95, 96, 98, 100, 103–104, 127; and writing 28 child-free 3, 98, 50 childhood 2, 4, 6, 15n6, 42, 102, 104, 111, 118; and Arendt 41–42; and hated 41, 44; and misogyny 81, 85, 127n4; and nostalgia 83; and racism 34–35, 41–43, 44, 51n8; and reading 102, 112, 113; and traumatic history 6, 88, 93, 107, 118 childhood experience 8, 24, 26, 50n9, 51n8, 60, 109n8 childhood grievance 26, 35, 39, 68, 91n4, 93 childhood innocence 41–42, 43–44, 48, 113 childhood memories 43, 48–49, 51, 112, 121 childhood protection 8, 41–42, 48–49 childhood story 12, 17, 30, 32n10, 100 childish 44, 48 childish outburst 40–41, 42, 56, 67, 74, 104, 107n1 child-like 26–27, 127 child-parent conflict 34, 35, 96 child psychoanalysis 25, 37; see also Klein child-raising 53n10, 65 children 1, 5, 40, 88–89, 106, 126, 128; and animals 60, 71n8; and historical trauma 107n1; and history 50, 66, 89–90, 127; and personalizing 50n9, 84

children’s education 1–2, 5–9, 18, 34, 36, 40–41, 50n1, 67, 77, 78, 88, 93–94, 95, 98–99, 107, 107n3; see also paideia The Children’s Encyclopedia 32n10, 111–113, 115, 118 children’s expression 23, 24, 36, 102, 104–105, 128 children’s knowledge 23, 24, 37–38, 43, 51n6, 60, 98, 99, 103–104, 109n12, 117, 119–120 children’s literature 100–103, 109n9, 111, 113, 117; and literacy education 100–101, 111–114, 118 child’s love 11, 38, 40–41, 47, 49–50, 94, 95, 96, 97, 99, 106, 107, 112, 123, 128; see also love civilize 35, 75; see also humanize Clarkson, C. 39 Coetzee, J.M.: and authorship 33–34, 39, 53–54, 55–56, 70n5, 100, 109n9, 115; and autobiography 29, 32n8, 32n9, 70n6, 111; and children’s education 1, 6, 9, 78, 92–93, 117; and intra-text 32n9, 36, 39, 41, 54; and literature 9, 13, 20, 23, 26, 53, 111, 113, 114, 115, 117, 119–120, 125, 128; and mother 11, 30, 32n10, 33–34, 50, 111–112, 115–116; and teaching 1–2, 5, 8, 10, 20, 27, 49, 110n13, 116, 124, 127; and writing 6, 9, 18, 20, 30, 33–34, 53, 54, 115–116, 120, 127 Coetzee V. 11, 30, 32n10, 33, 39, 111–112, 114–116 colonial 4; and childhood 51n9; education 12, 88, 113; and English literacy 73–74; and history 18, 85, 87, 113; humanism 14n1, 34; and logics 4, 79, 114; and missions 79, 84–85; and race 83; and subject formation 89; and text 17, 30, 118; and violence 91n7, 118; and writing back 6 communication 12, 18, 36, 39, 54, 103, 126, 127 conflict 25, 30, 37, 65; and desire 6, 25, 26, 29, 65; and existential 14n4, 30; and reading 32n9; and self-formation 1; and self-other 11, 20, 37–38, 71n11, 98–99; and social-political 73, 86 conflicting feelings 38, 55, 66, 69 condemned 23, 31n5, 123, 125, 128

144 Index Cornwell, G. 31n1, 57 creative 29; and capacity 29, 104; and force 120; and reading 59; and response 22 crisis of education 66, 77; see also Arendt crisis in learning 69; in self 33, 39, 45, 69; in teaching 69–70 critical response to Coetzee’s literature 1, 11, 29, 31, 53, 54, 70n1, 70n6, 72, 73, 92, 121, 127 curriculum 73–74, 93, 111, 114, 115; and humanism 73, 75; and knowledge 74; and pedagogy 73–74

on symbolization 8, 101; on trace 32n9, 56; on white mythology 58–59; on worst violence 35, 88–89 detention camps 125, 128n4 dialogue 54, 62, 66, 70n2, 93, 98 discourse 7, 19–20, 21, 54, 57, 58–59, 63, 64, 65, 77, 80 dog 72, 83, 97, 104, 107 Dorfman A. 9 drives 103; and anti-social 25, 69; and epistemophillic instinct 37; and life and death 37 Don Quixote 103, 106, 108n4, 108–109n7, 109n10, 119, 120, 122

dead child 44, 46–47, 48, 88 death camps 58, 61, 62 debate 34, 65, 67, 70n2, 70n4, 81 Deckard, M. 15n7, 70n5 defense 75, 82, 85, 122 defer 21, 56 deferred action 69 Defoe, D. 11, 17, 20, 30 dehumanizing 31n3, 79, 88 deliberation 11, 12, 15n11, 29, 54, 106, 109n10 delivery 9; and author 49, 53–54, 55, 56, 70n2, 109n9, 116; and knowledge 73–74, 79, 87; and maternal 24–25, 36, 37–38, 73, 112–115; and meaning 37, 57, 64; and pedagogy 28, 54, 55, 66, 69, 70n5, 91n4, 98; and post 37, 40 Delpit, L. 34, 44 dependence 12, 19, 24–25 depression 10, 94 desire 2, 4–5, 6, 58, 94, 109n8; and adult 2, 3–4, 14n3, 93, 107; and child 24–25, 101, 102; and figuration 20; and maternal 44–45; and pedagogy 7, 17, 18, 25–26, 27, 55, 57, 65, 95, 99, 116; and projection 14n4, 29, 69, 74; and rape 15n8, 80–81, 82; and sexuality 50n3, 74, 108n3, 112; and writing 28–29, 85 desire for knowledge 7 Derrida, J. 4; on a(ffect) 23, 119; on Apartheid 35, 41, 87; on deconstruction 30; on différance 21–22, 56; on distinction 63; on monolingualism 101, 118; on metaphor 63; on pedagogy 22, 27; on post 50n3, 76; on racism 35;

Edelman, L. 3–4, 14n2, 14n3 education 6, 7–9, 10, 11, 17, 80–81, 95, 99; and adult project 7, 93; and animals 57, 59–60, 71n8; and Arendt 1, 7–8, 15n9, 41, 49, 66, 77, 94, 108n6; and history 50; and humanism 13, 20, 102, 73–76, 79, 84–85, 90–91n3; and humanity 61, 76, 88, 117, 119; and literacy 102, 119; and literature 100, 102, 111–115; and men 1–2, 3, 5, 14, 17–18, 20, 50n3, 57, 67, 81–82, 85, 95, 97–98, 74, 91n4, 91n6, 121; and maternal 93–94, 97, 99, 115–116; and scholarship 7; and subject formation 6, 7, 14, 18–19, 49, 90; and paideia 5, 6, 7, 13, 32n10, 75, 77, 90–91n3, 93, 97, 108n3, 116–117, 119; and pedagogy 7–8, 9, 11, 14, 17, 18, 19–20, 69, 95; and punishment 59, 71, 8, 92, 105–107; and revolt 20, 26, 104–106, 107; and transference 27, 55, 68, 99, 109n12–13; and the world 1, 5, 7–9, 12, 13, 37, 41–42, 43, 49–50, 66, 74–75, 77–79, 90–91n3, 93–94, 95, 98–99, 102–103, 104, 109n11, 113–114, 117, 119–121, 125–126, 128; and the young 49, 66, 77; see also children’s education Ellison, R. 42, 48 Elliot, T.S. 127 emotion 25, 26, 38, 86, 95; and delivery 39, 75n5; and morality 68; and projection 64; and response 29, 53; see also feeling English 73, 101, 113, 115, 117–119, 128–129n5

Index  145 English education 80, 85 English literacy 14n1, 112 English literature 17, 73, 80, 111, 113–115, 117–119 Englishman 17, 18 epistemophilic instinct 37, 103–104, 117 epistemophillia 104, 117 epistolary form 35–36, 49, 50n3, 51n6 ethics 2, 4, 14n4, 21, 31n6, 34, 60, 86 existence 2, 4, 8, 11, 13, 14, 14n4, 17, 18–19, 31n3, 32n8, 61, 76, 104; and animal 53, 59–60, 62, 67, 68, 74; and child 23–24, 25, 27, 33, 37, 39, 43, 49, 78, 93, 104, 107, 108–109n7; and love 107; and white male 49, 58–59, 74, 89, 91n4; and woman 82; unknowable 64, 68, 88 existential crisis 36, 68, 71, 87, 94, 122 existential significance 17, 24, 38, 102, 118, 121, 127, 128 experience 24, 82, 102, 103, 109n8, 124; and aesthetic 16, 23–24, 114, 115, 128; and infancy 24–26, 78, 121; and learning 8; and pedagogy 8, 10, 13, 20; and projection 39, 42, 44, 51n6, 52n10, 60; and reading 8–9, 32n9, 38, 72, 87, 102, 114; and subjective 32n8; and transference 37–38, 96; and unthinkable 85, 87, 124 event of reading 28, 39, 87; see also Attridge failure to learn and/or teach 52, 68, 77 fantasy 17–18, 55; see also phantasy family story 33–34, 40, 55, 77, 83, 93, 111, 112; see also kinship Farred, G. 76–77 fascism 3, 4–5, 15n7 father 38–39, 51n4, 84, 86, 92, 93, 94, 104, 108–109n7, 113, 117, 120–121; and maternal relation 96–97; and patriarchy 51, 83–84, 87–88; and teacher 97, 125–126, 129n4 feeling 14; and aesthetic operation 30, 54, 55–56; and good and bad 61–62, 64, 102, 104, 106; and imagination 120–121; and infantile

18, 24, 25–26, 31n4, 37, 77–78, 117, 121; and love and hate 14n4, 61–62, 69–70; and mother 36, 37–38; and overwhelming 38, 60, 68–69, 86–87, 103; and reason 63, 96; and transference 38–39, 95; and teaching 95–96 feeling for animals 55, 57, 60–61, 62 feeling for others 15–16n11, 18, 24, 60–61, 70n4, 78, 119, 126; and incapacity 44, 87; and projective identification 46–47, 64; and sympathetic imagination 88, 126 feeling for self 24, 32n7, 86 feelings of childhood 6, 39, 51n9, 83 Felman, S. 69 felt existence 90, 127 felt knowledge 24, 37, 93, 120–121, 125, 128 felt meaning 25 felt memories 38, 95–96, 112 fiction and author 4, 8, 32n9, 53–54, 56; and animal 59, 6; and character 8, 20, 55; and child 2–3, 31n3; and ideas 10, 14, 20, 29, 70n2, 95; and history 38; and mother 39; and pedagogy 20, 27–28; and politics 30; and self 32n9; and teacher 10, 11 figure 2, 12, 14n2, 26, 31n3, 73, 79, 84, 94, 97, 98, 109–110n7, 112; and child 3–4, 18; unraveling 3, 21 figured 3, 5, 6, 7, 11, 12, 18, 38, 82, 91n6, 108n5, 113; and transfigured 103 figuring out 20–21, 60, 119 first reading 100–101, 112, 119 freedom 12, 13, 28, 29, 40, 120; and liberation 34, 39, 48; and pedagogical 12 free enquiry 13 Foucault, M. 19–20, 22; and adult ontology 22; and parrhesia 105; and power/knowledge 19 force 22; and infancy 22, 24; and literary 54, 113, 119; and pedagogy 5, 25, 26–27, 49, 50, 91n4, 116, 120, 124, 127, 128; and persuasion 81, 120; and power/knowledge 24–25; and violence 80–81, 99, 100, 105, 118 force of feeling 24, 70n4, 106 formal 18–19 Freire, P. 119

146 Index Freud, S. 10; on drives 37; on education 65, 99; on erotic ties 37; on grief 126; on mourning and melancholia 26; on social hatred 10n14; on transference 37–38, 55; on transference to teachers 95, 97, 99; on schooldays 95 Giles, J. 15n7, 86 gift of words 1, 30, 32n10, 117 gifted 92 gratitude 50n3 grief 26, 27, 33, 46–47, 48, 66, 79, 85, 125 grief-stricken 27, 49, 89, 94, 125, 126; see also child’s grievance grief with the world 55, 85, 125, 127 Gordimer, N. 72, 116 Graham, L. 15n6, 15n7, 81–82, 83, 128n2 Green, A. 104; see also epistemophilia Grumet, M. 3, 73 happy childhood 51n9, 96–97 hate 5, 14n4, 26, 38, 43–44, 69–70, 85, 100, 101 hearing 2, 29, 43, 51n6, 55, 69, 82, 118, 124, 127 higher consciousness 116, 117 higher forms of existence 84 history 2, 3, 10, 16n11, 17, 33, 35, 66, 68, 77, 86, 92, 103, 120, 125; and Apartheid 33–34, 76 -77, 87–89; and colonial 18, 83, 85, 91n6, 113; and education 50, 125; and mother 37, 49, 50, 51n8, 127; and traumatic 2, 50, 79, 86–87, 89–90, 93 history of wrong 82, 85, 127 Hu, X. 5–6, 26 human 26, 27, 29–30, 54, 57, 63, 72, 74, 77, 79, 87, 88, 89–90, 93, 94, 102, 107; and animal 58–60, 64, 67–68, 70, 71n8, 77; and barbarism 35, 61, 62, 71n10; and child 44, 60; and condition 9; and education 59–60, 67; and race 34–35; and relations 39, 61, 69; and reason 58–59, 63–65, 67; and speaking 66; and values 53; see also man human bonds 39, 68–69, 118 humane 61–62 humanism 45, 62, 67, 73–77, 93, 113

humanist 87, 89–90, 92, 102, 107n1, 108n3, 123 humanist education 13, 34, 45, 49, 78–79, 84–85, 93 humanity 35, 45, 61, 74–76, 79–80, 88, 89–90, 90n3, 122, 124, 128 humanizing 54, 60, 70n4, 77, 78, 88, 93, 102, 117, 119, 124, 126 humankind 9, 11, 87, 90 human problem 35, 67–68, 70 human race 34–35, 122 ideal(s) 6, 10, 42, 48, 66, 75, 77, 90n3, 93, 98, 117 idealism 1, 75 ideality 14n5 idealized 36 identification 26, 62–63, 64, 69; see also projective identification imaginary 3, 77, 114, 119, 120–121 imagination 31n3, 117, 120 immoral 78 impression 10, 24, 32n7, 32n10, 111–112, 113, 114, 114 impressionable 2, 14n5, 122 imprint 25, 127 inequality 18, 26, 34; and care 26–27 infancy 11, 22, 23, 62, 83, 112, 120, 121; and affect 23–24, 25; and animal 98; and pedagogy 19; and subject formation 24, 102 infant 7, 18, 19, 22–23, 24–25, 31n4, 31n7, 37–38, 55, 77, 78, 98, 108n6, 121–122, 128; see also maternal relation infant-animal 4, 77, 89, 94, 98, 108n5, 119 infantilizing 99 infantile 22, 23, 24, 25, 32n7, 38, 62, 77, 96, 112, 117, 125, 126 infant affect 23–24, 38 inhuman 4–5, 18, 42, 75 inhumane 58, 71n8 inner conflict 34, 54 inner knowledge 24, 37, 98, 101, 118, 125–126, 127; see also felt knowledge inner life 20, 69; and revolt 22; and teacher 10, 69–70; and pedagogy 69 insight 8, 9, 12, 20–21, 32n8, 47, 51n8, 55 instantiation of subject 19, 22, 104

Index  147 instrumental education 77, 102 interiority 24, 25 internal life 22 internalization 4, 37, 79–80 internal evidence 30, 112 internal operations 6, 36 internal resources 24 interpretation 65, 84, 100 intersubjective 19, 39 intertextual 54, 127 intimate revolt 22–23, 29, 93, 104–106; see also Kristeva intolerable 69, 86 intracommunication 31, 44, 52 intrasubjective 20, 25, 37 intra-textual 32n9, 39, 54, 127 j’accuse 40, 58, 65–76, 85, 91n4; see also child’s grievance Jane, R. 27, 28–9, 31n6, 33, 127 judgment 2, 12, 42–43, 52n11, 44–45, 82 justice 7, 10, 15–16n11, 34, 60, 88, 89, 90, 99, 119, 126 Kafka, F. 39, 51n5, 57, 59, 60, 61, 71n9 Kamuf, P. 112, 119 kinship 40, 93; and white 77, 83 Klein, M. 23; on epistemophilic instinct 37, 103–104, 117; and infant communication 98; and inner sight 32n8, 109n8; and maternal relation 98; on memories in feeling 96; on object relations 38; on ourselves 64, 109n8; on phantasy 25; on projective identification 62–63, 64; on transference 38 knowledge 2; and abstraction 90n1; and adult 23–24; and care 25–26; and children 2, 3, 5, 23, 103; and conflicting 21, 68–69, 98–99; and delivery 55, 70n2, 79, 97–98; and desire 93, 109–110n12, 116, 117, 128n3; and familial 27, 55; and force 21–22; and maternal 37, 74, 77, 98, 99; and pedagogy 11, 17, 19, 20, 27–28, 28–29, 66, 73, 74, 76; and power 21; and selfhood 19, 22, 24, 28, 93, 99; silenced 18, 23–24; teacher 7; and vital 30, 31n6, 53, 93, 99, 104, 106; and world 5, 50

Köhler, W. 59, 62 Kristeva, J. 4; on adolescence 5, 14–15n5; on intimate revolt 22–23, 29, 93, 104–106; and transference 109n12 Lear, J. 29, 111 learning 8, 87; and affecting 20, 87, 88, 126–127; and agonizing 27; and difficult 26, 46, 69, 104; and desire 116–117; and grief 79; and humility 9–10; and humanity 79, 88, 89, 90, 102, 124, 128; and inequality 26–27; and inhibition 102; and interiority 20, 25; and intimate human relations 17, 20; and loss 27; and literature 113, 114; and making reparation 86, 89; and not learning 8, 20, 69; and pedagogy 49, 69, 95; and revolt 102–104; and significant 12, 26, 110n13, 123; and teacher intention 8–9, 20, 24; teachers 95; and traumatic history 72, 87, 89–90; and violence 74, 78, 79 learning from: child 46, 78, 93, 107; grief 27, 46, 48, 49, 50, 66–67, 79, 89, 94, 125, 126; history 79, 85; literature 86–87, 90; other 20, 26, 37, 95, 104, 106, 128 learning to: be someone 5, 12, 25, 29, 77, 89, 104, 107, 126; lie 105; live 72, 90, 107, 123, 128; love 89, 107, 123, 128; read 101–102, 106, 112, 114, 125; teach 104, 106, 109n8, 121 lecture 20, 30n1, 32n10, 39, 45, 53–54, 55–56, 57–58, 66, 69, 70n2, 75, 105, 111 lessons 7, 8, 37, 39, 53, 54, 55, 69, 73, 74, 92, 93, 104 Lévinas, E. 4, 14n4, 119 life of letters 24, 73, 115 life of the mind 13 literacy 12, 10, 76, 90n3, 93, 100–102, 112, 113, 114, 119, 125 literary 1; and association 73–74, 93–94; and education 93, 100, 111–112, 115; and form 36, 38, 54; and human bonds 118; and thinking 5, 17, 20; and pedagogy 18–19, 54–55, 119, 121; and transference 39

148 Index literature and affect 2, 4, 20, 23–24, 113, 127–128; and event 28, 54; and freedom 13, 29; and pedagogy 6, 8, 26, 27–28, 54, 73, 119, 128; and shelter 125; and significance 128; and social change 124; and soft force 20; and subject formation 32n10, 111, 113–114, 115; and sympathetic imagination 61, 70n4; and transference 24, 38–39 Locke, K. 23–24 logos 58–59, 67 loss 27, 33, 66, 72, 94, 107n1, 117, 127–128 lost child 35–36, 125 lost for words 24 love 7, 11, 24, 47, 49–50; and care 26–27; and children 40–41, 49; and eros 7; and mother 25, 33–34, 47, 48–49, 50; and other people’s children 47–48, 52n5; and pedagogy 50, 50n3; and world 50; see also child’s love love and hate 14n4, 26, 38 loveless 45, 52n11 Lowry, E. 28, 72 Lyotard, J.F. 14n1, 18–19, 23–24, 31n5, 126 Madrossian C. 81 Malcolm, J. 68 man 3, 4, 12, 14n1, 17, 20, 22, 30, 36, 40–41, 57, 58, 61, 63, 79, 82, 83, 94, 101, 123, 127, 128–129n5; and author 100; and human worth 63, 74, 75; and maternal 4, 95, 97, 107, 123; and patriarchy 112; and reason 67, 98, 119; and superior 14n1, 57, 58–59, 63, 67, 75, 98; and white 3, 18, 41, 48, 58–59, 75 manservant 17, 97 maternal: and address 36–37, 121; and affect 23–24, 25, 30, 56; and authorship 77–78; and bond 26; and desire 27, 44–45, 93, 96; and environment 8; and love 47, 49, 50, 78, 84, 68, 107; and pedagogy 11–12, 21, 24–25, 27, 37, 45, 49; and relation 24, 42, 35, 73, 77; and transference 42, 107 meaning 9, 13, 14, 28, 29, 36–37, 40, 54, 55, 62, 65, 69–70, 77, 102, 105; and transference 38, 63

memory 6, 36, 42, 48–49; and traumatic 50n2, 89, 95, 103, 107n1 men 1, 4–5, 9, 14, 17, 20, 21, 30n1, 48, 71n9, 81, 84–85, 91n4, 91n6, 95, 97, 98; and child-free 98, 108n3, 121; and homo-erotic 50n3, 108n3; and white 3, 43, 44, 46, 47, 74, 75, 98; and women 80, 82, 83 metaphor 26, 54, 58–59, 63–64, 87, 117; and projection 64 misogyny 63, 73, 82, 83, 85 modern education 14n1, 70n2, 93, 98 Mohammed, N. 127 moral 2, 7, 40, 45, 52n10, 62, 65, 85, 93, 120 Morrison, Toni 2; and children 89, 108n6; and racist schooling 34–35 mother 4, 5, 6, 8, 18, 19, 21–22, 92, 93, 94–96, 97; and bad 77, 96, 99, 103, 106; and care 22, 24, 25, 27, 77–78, 122; care/knowledge 25, 35–36; and child 34–36, 48, 56–57, 61–62, 66, 123; and dying 35–36, 43, 123; and grievance 24, 34, 39, 47, 51n5; and history 33–35, 50, 72, 123; and knowledge 35–36, 103–104, 112; and literature 30, 32n10, 82, 111–112, 125; and love 50, 93, 99, 122, 126; and other mothers 40–41, 44–45, 48; and other people’s children 12, 14n2, 34, 44–45, 120; and pedagogy 25, 31n4, 37–38, 49–50, 77, 97–99, 112, 115–116, 117, 121; and projective identification 62; and socialization 24–25; and sorrow 48, 68, 127; and transference 25, 36, 38, 69, 96–97, 106; and woman 30–31n2, 51n4, 96; and world 4, 50 mothering 9, 34, 43, 49, 51n8, 52n10, 99 mother tongue 119 mother’s truths 36 mother’s words 50, 127 mourning 26–27, 33, 49, 72, 126 narration 12, 81; and selfhood 19; see also story telling narrative 5, 28, 33, 50, 81; and action 13; discourse 7, 79; and operation 30, 54, 86; pedagogy 7, 20, 89; and thinking 34; and transference 69

Index  149 narrator 33; and author 33, 81, 116; and pedagogue 5, 87; and unreliable 54 Neau, F. 33, 39 negative force 21–22, 28, 127; as not 22 newcomer 2, 94 newness 5, 7, 14, 94, 108n6, 115 Nobel Prize 1, 4, 12, 17, 29, 124 non-human 4, 12, 31n3, 67; see also inhuman non-knowledge 17, 22 nonsense 53, 101, 102 normative 22, 24, 27, 108n3 Nouvet, C. 126 novel 2, 4, 56, 72, 100, 108n4, 109n9; and address 35–36, 50, 127–128; and affect 38, 54, 88, 109n8, 126; and colonial 6; and contents 36, 54, 112, 114; and deliberations 11; and education 49, 78, 88, 93–94, 117, 122; and freedom 12–13; and history 33–35, 73, 113; and humanity 45, 76, 79, 88, 128; and intertext 70n3; and learning 86–87, 89–90; and maternal 77, 99; and mother 114–115; and pedagogy 5, 6–8, 10, 11–12, 17, 20, 22, 26, 27–30, 55, 73, 79, 88, 89, 110n13, 112–129, 121–122, 124, 127, 128; and thinking 2, 8, 41, 95; and transference 39; see also literature novelist 2, 13, 120–121, 127; as teacher 11; see also author object 20, 38, 74, 95, 100, 102 objective 32n8, 64 object relations 38, 62, 95 occasion 2, 7, 14, 29, 57, 111 ontological 7, 22, 68, 79, 102 ontology 22, 86 oppression 46, 89 other people’s children 12, 14n2, 34, 41, 44–45, 120 paideia 5, 6, 7, 11, 13, 32n10, 75, 77; see also child-raising pain 1, 8, 72, 82, 87 painful 12, 28, 56 painstaking 28 pastoral 83 patriarchal 4, 77, 83 pedagogical insight 27

pedagogical love 7, 98–99, 109–110n12; and other people’s children 12, 14n2, 34, 44–45, 120 pedagogical subject 12 pedagogue 5, 6, 10, 29, 93, 128 pedagogy 5–6, 7–8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 75, 93, 97, 115, 128; and adult-child 7–8, 18–19, 27, 92, 95, 106, 112, 128; and affect 6, 8–9, 10, 11, 77, 119; and care/ knowledge 25–27, 66–67, 74, 117–117; and crisis 56, 66, 69–70; and delivery 27–28, 54–55, 74; and desire 6, 18; and eros 7; and force 13, 19–20, 21–22, 27, 120, 124; and failure 70; and humanism 75, 88, 124; and infant-mother 19, 21, 22, 36–37, 49, 97–98, 115, 117, 122; and insight 20, 27; and instantiation of the subject 21–22; and last stand for humanity 14, 54, 128; and learning 20; and life altering 10; and literary form 18–19, 20, 27, 29, 30, 54, 121–122; and love 7, 50n3; and pre-political 94; and projective identification 64; and seduction 6; and self-other relations 17, 19–20, 25–26, 30, 50; and subject formation 21–22 personal history 6, 32n8, 33–34, 42, 55, 57, 65, 68, 71n11, 92; and projection 44, 50n9, 52n10, 64; and social history 35, 30, 50n2, 72, 85, 105–106, 113 personality 56, 70n6, 122 personhood 8, 25, 73, 93, 106 phantasy 25–26, 29, 38 Pinar, W. 73, 109n8 Plato 55, 64, 124; and pedagogy 70n2, 70n5 Platonic education 90n3, 93, 95, 98, 108n3, 116–117 plot 34, 60, 85; and pedagogy 20, 85 poetry 27, 54, 64–65, 80, 117, 126–127 politics 2, 9, 15n10, 22, 24; and adult 15n9, 27, 108n6; and speaking 66, 123, 124 Poplak, R. 1, 9–10, 29 post-Apartheid 72, 76, 78, 83, 87 postcolonial theory 7, 77, 79 post-education 10, 12, 73, 74, 76–78, 79, 83, 89, 91n4, 92

150 Index posthuman 74 post-humanist 20, 74, 78, 79, 88 post-humanist education 79, 86–88, 89, 119 post-reality 29 post-slavery 41 pre-political 22, 105, 106 pre-verbal 22, 24 projective identification 62–63; and children 2, 4, 31n3, 27, 66, 108n6, 123; and racism 67; and self-other relations 64; and teaching 62, 64, 68, 71n9; see also projection projection 2, 4, 14n3, 29, 31n3, 32n9, 62, 64, 66, 67, 70–71n6 psychoanalysis 107n1, 111 psychoanalytic reading 30, 108n3; see also affective reading public and education 34, 41, 66, 75, 93, 94; and intellectual 55; library 100; reading 39, 42, 124; and talk 29, 112; thinking 121–123 public lecture 1, 56, 111, 123 public thinking 65, 122 race 11, 34–35, 40, 87, 88, 89, 122 racism 2, 34–35, 42, 52n63, 73, 76, 79, 87, 10, 84 racist and adults 41, 42; and childhood 35, 44; and education 12, 34–35, 86; and history 35; and misogyny 82, 83; society 40, 44, 45, 77; and stereotypes 44 rape 11, 73, 80–82, 84–85, 87, 89; and colonial history 83, 85, 87, 91n6, 91n7; and culture 80–81; and education 82, 84–85; and justice 88; narration 81–82; and student 85, 86; and unreadable 85–86, 87, 91n5; and violent 82, 87 real child 2, 3, 5, 43, 51n7, 52n10, 14n3; see also actual child realism 53 reality 4, 40, 41 relearning 79, 88, 89, 90, 121, 129 reparation 27, 50, 86, 89, 124, 125 The Republic 93, 94, 95, 97, 70n2 resentment 3, 10, 83 rescue missions 7, 46; see also salvation responsibility for children 2, 12, 49–50, 89; and adult 41, 43, 48–49; parental 26; and maternal 42, 78,

95, 107; and teacher 42–43, 66, 78–79, 107, 124 revision 56, 70n3, 78 revolt 20, 22, 24, 26, 27, 45, 50n1, 66, 93, 102–103, 104–106, 122, 124; and pedagogy 107, 127 revolution 7, 34, 76; and children 48 Robinson Crusoe 11, 17–18, 20, 27, 29–30, 32n10, 113, 115, 122 Romantics 80–80, 85, 93, 129–30n4 Rushdie, S. 38–39, 72, 86–87, 88 salvation 3, 7, 12, 43, 48, 49, 47, 54–55, 54, 68, 69, 84, 91n3 school 5, 17, 34, 40–41, 66, 75, 82, 99, 102, 103, 114, 126; and animals 60, 71n8; children 8, 15n9, 40–41, 43, 44, 71n8, 89, 92; and childhood 108n9; and special 106–107; and revolt 104–106; and transference 95, 97 schooling 6, 9, 34–35, 43, 60, 66, 114 schools of thought 67, 71n11 schoolteacher 7, 92, 97, 103, 105–106, 107; see also señor señor 103, 105–106, 107 sensational 3, 25, 37, 55, 59 sentient existence 10, 90 sex 79, 81, 85 sex acts 5, 54; and abstraction 79, 82, 85; and abuse 6, 79; and literary rape culture 15, 73, 80–81, 82; and predation 84; and rape 81; and sexist treatment 79–80; and social hatred 82, 85; and student 73, 80, 84; and theories 104; and violence 54, 79–80, 89 sexism 76, 79, 82; and learned 80–81 sex play 108n3 sexuality and infant 93, 55, 108n6; and children’s education 108n3, 112–113; and desire 3, 4, 7; and pedagogy 7 shame 9, 15n10, 52n10, 56, 83 sheep 52n12, 58, 71n10, 90n2 significance 17, 24, 38, 77, 93, 95, 102, 104, 118, 121, 127, 128 significant and knowledge 8, 31n6, 53, 99, 104, 112; and narrative 19, 20; and others 26, 20n2, 33, 38, 95, 99; and pedagogy 17, 18, 26, 78, 106, 110n13, 121–122 signification 21, 23, 63

Index  151 silence 3, 6, 18, 31n5, 31n6, 35, 36, 43–44, 47, 50, 84; see also unspeakable Singer, P. 63, 67 Snaza N. 74 social hatred 54, 63, 82, 85, 87, 89, 91n6, 123 Socrates: and Arendt 65; and dialogues 46, 93; and midwife 55, 97–98, 117; and Plato 70n2, 70n5 speaking 17, 18, 31n6, 55, 57, 92, 101, 105, 118, 120, 125, 128; and the animal 57, 63; and children 19, 92, 101, 105; and history 85; and the political subject 66, 105; and truth 105, 123 special duty of teaching 1, 6, 12, 42, 49, 93, 107, 117, 124; see also Arendt speciesism 53 Spivak, G.: on aesthetic education 11, 15–16n, 11, 119; on enabling violence 3, 91n7; on literature 54, 113, 119; on reproductive futurism 3–4; on subaltern subjects 31n6; on unlearning 12, 15–16n11 story-telling 6, 53; and experience 12; and form 54; and history 19, 33, 34, 35, 47, 49; and plot 82, 85; and humanizing 17, 30; and justice 15n15; and pedagogy 17, 19, 30, 88; and renewal 49, 50n2, 71n7, 120, 121, 128n5; and selfhood 19, 30, 34, 36, 101, 108–109n7, 112–113, 115, 121, 122 storying 57–58; and others 118 subject formation 7, 19–20, 25, 50n2, 102 suffering 11, 58, 59, 71n9, 122 Sultan 59–60 survival 104, 105, 123 study 13, 44, 59, 71n8, 73–74, 75, 95, 112 symbol 21, 22, 23, 24, 37 symbolic form 38, 114 symbolic relations 14 sympathetic imagination 54, 61, 81, 119; see also feeling for others sympathy 47, 48, 54, 61, 81, 83 Tagore, R. 125 teacher 5, 13, 14n1, 46, 48, 49, 78, 93; and address of the other 39;

and authority 43, 45; and care 27–28; and character 12, 31n3; and children 34, 45, 92, 106; and conflicts 10, 12, 20, 50, 64, 103, 105–106; and crisis 69–70; and desire for student 18, 28–29; and duty 93; and eros 7; and failure 10–11, 13, 52n10; and figure 6, 11, 73; and history 76–77; and knowledge 24; and literacy 102–103; and love for student 95–96, 99; and learning 8–9, 20, 86; and mother 97–98; and midwife 97–98; and not knowing 24; and novel 27–28; and other people’s children 44–45; and pedagogy 17, 28, 97; and responsibility for children 12, 42–43, 78, 107; and student 18–19; and transference 97, 99; see also pedagogue teacher and whiteness 3, 12, 34, 35, 40, 42, 44–45, 52n11, 52n12, 73 thinking 11, 13, 14, 65, 127; and acting 65, 124; and Arendt 41, 65, 66–67, 70n3, 122–123; and children 60, 106; and confusion 60–61, 67, 70n2, 122; and education 82, 102; and limits to 57, 59–60, 65, 68, 102; man 58, 64, 81; and nonsense 53, 101, 102, 127; and novel 8, 29, 35, 41; and novelist 2 trace 21–22, 44, 56, 70–71n6, 114, 116, 117; and autobiography 30, 32n9, 34, 39 transference 21, 24, 27, 29, 38, 42, 68–69; and education 95–96; and Freud 37–38; and Klein 25–26, 38–39, 62–63; and knowledge 109–110n12; and Malcolm 55; and metaphor 63; and mother 96; and teachers 95–96, 97, 99; and teaching 56, 68, 71n11; and trace 70–71n6; and the novel 55 transference effects 55 transference in reading 30, 39–40 traumatic history 12, 35, 50n2, 72, 87, 93–94 trouble in schools 11–12, 33, 34, 40, 41–42 unbearable 50, 68, 85, 86–87, 88 unborn child 72

152 Index unloved child 123 uncanny 41, 59 unconscious 2, 38, 63, 69, 96, 126; see also trace unheard 23, 30, 31n5, 31n6, 116, 123, 126, 128 unlearning 89 unspeakable 22, 23, 24, 31n5 unthinkable 4, 35, 46, 58, 72, 78, 87, 89, 93, 107n1, 108n6 untold 17, 18, 29–30, 32n10, 35, 37, 52n11 violence 6, 11, 42, 54, 78, 79, 81, 83, 85, 86, 89–90, 94; and man 85–86, 87, 88–89 vulnerability 12, 69 war 6, 33, 44, 45, 63, 79, 88, 102, 122, 123; on children 40, 48, 89 white childhood 14n3, 35, 43, 44, 83 white mythology 58–59, 63, 67, 75, 77, 79–80, 89

whiteness 3–4, 40–41, 41–42, 44–45, 46, 48, 51n8, 51n9, 52n12, 83, 86, 88, 89–90, 91n6, 98 Willinsky, J.113–114 witness 24, 34, 35, 40, 41, 45, 46, 48, 78, 84, 114; and education 88; and history 49, 79, 85; and literature 8, 112, 114; and teacher 120; and unthinkable 89 woman and abuse 6, 82; and dehumanized 87; and less than man 45, 63, 83; and literary treatment 80; and natural mother 99; and old 57, 70n4; and rape 80, 85; and social hatred 82, 85, 91n6; and thinking 65, 122 women 3, 9, 115–116, 127; and children 4; and conflict 34, 57; and mistreatment 79–80, 83; and predation 73, 79, 80, 82, 84; and property 83, 91n6; and rape 80, 81, 85–86, 87; as threat to men 91n4 worst violence 88–89 wounded humanity 33, 68, 44, 47, 71n9, 122, 127–128