J.M. Coetzee’s Revisions of the Human: Posthumanism and Narrative Form 303029305X, 9783030293055

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J.M. Coetzee’s Revisions of the Human Posthumanism and Narrative Form Kai Wiegandt

J.M. Coetzee’s Revisions of the Human

Kai Wiegandt

J.M. Coetzee’s Revisions of the Human Posthumanism and Narrative Form

Kai Wiegandt Englisches Seminar Universität Tübingen Tübingen, Germany

ISBN 978-3-030-29305-5    ISBN 978-3-030-29306-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29306-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This book grew out of many conversations with colleagues and friends about Coetzee’s work. I am immensely grateful to Andrew James Johnston, Carrol Clarkson, and Russell West-Pavlov for their support and for generously sharing their thoughts and their time. My heartfelt thanks go to those who discussed and commented on my work on Coetzee and gave me advice throughout the years: Derek Attridge, David Attwell, Ute Berns, Martin Bleisteiner, Elleke Boehmer, Renate Brosch, Jan-Peer Hartmann, Julián Jiménez Heffernan, Hilmar Heister, Andreas Höfele, Hans Holleis, Jan Niklas Howe, Wolfram Keller, Elisabeth Kempf, Ewa Kowal, Stephan Laqué, Cordula Lemke, María J. López, Peter McDonald, Kai Merten, Lynda Ng, Claudia Olk, David Palumbo-Liu, Manfred Pfister, Donald Powers, Margitta Rouse, Paul Sheehan, Eckard Smuts, Katrin Trüstedt, Hedley Twidle, Simon van Schalkwyk, Tobias Walser, and Jennifer Wawrzinek. John Crutchfield and Laura Hutton were of invaluable help in preparing the manuscript. A grant of the German Academic Exchange Service enabled me to conduct research at the University of Cape Town for a year. A postdoctoral research grant of the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School for Literary Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and a Heisenberg Fellowship, both funded by the German Research Foundation, provided the time to complete the book. I wish to express my gratitude to the sponsors. A part of Chap. 4 has appeared, in different form, as “J. M. Coetzee’s ‘Dog-Man’ and the Cynicism of Disgrace” in Anglia: Journal of English Philology 131, no. 1 (2013): 121–40. A part of Chap. 5 (on Slow Man) v

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

has appeared, in different form, as “J. M. Coetzee’s Complicated Migrations” in Poetica: Zeitschrift für Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft 48, nos. 1–2 (2016): 145–67. Another part of the chapter has appeared, in different form, as “Humanity and Nationality in J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus” in Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 65, no. 3 (2015): 335–55.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 Method and Matter of the Revisions: Coetzee’s Posthumanist Poetic 17 Coetzee’s Poetic of Revision  18 The Posthumanism of Coetzee’s Revisions  35 3 From Dehumanization to the Minimal Human 59 Dusklands  60 Waiting for the Barbarians  77 Life & Times of Michael K  95 4 The Human, the Animal, and the Body119 Disgrace 121 Elizabeth Costello 142 5 Humanity and Collectivity: Nation, State, and Community177 Slow Man 182 The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus 200

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CONTENTS

6 Epilogue249 Works Cited255 Index271

Abbreviations of Works by J.M. Coetzee

B Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life CJ The Childhood of Jesus D Disgrace DBY Diary of a Bad Year DL Dusklands DP Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (with David Attwell) EC Elizabeth Costello F Foe HC In the Heart of the Country HN Here and Now: Letters 2008–2011 (with Paul Auster) LE Late Essays MK Life & Times of Michael K MP The Master of Petersburg S Summertime SJ The Schooldays of Jesus SM Slow Man SS Stranger Shores: Essays, 1986–1999 WB Waiting for the Barbarians Y Youth

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

[I]t might […] seem as though the essence of divinity is closer to us than what is so alien in other living creatures, closer, namely, in an essential distance that, however distant, is nonetheless more familiar to our ek-sistent essence than is our scarcely conceivable, abysmal bodily kinship with the beast. —Martin Heidegger, “Letter on ‘Humanism’” (248) I wag my tail at those who give, bark at those who don’t and bite scoundrels. —Diogenes of Sinope (Bracht Branham and Goulet-Cazé, The Cynics 96 n. 49) [T]he most you can hope is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were in the beginning, and the middle. —Samuel Beckett, Molloy (Novels II 28)

J.M. Coetzee’s novels have been read as allegories and as instances of late Modernism, as explorations in ethics, as fictional interventions in philosophy, as a prophecy of a new animal ethics. They have been theorized with reference to Lacan, Lévinas, Derrida, and postcolonial criticism. They have been read as comments on South African history and politics and, to a lesser degree, on Australian and global politics. All of these approaches have contributed to our understanding of Coetzee’s novels. The more perspectives are explored, however, the keener the sense that a focal point, where these perspectives meet, remains obscure. This study argues that © The Author(s) 2019 K. Wiegandt, J.M. Coetzee’s Revisions of the Human, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29306-2_1

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the most consistent concern in Coetzee’s oeuvre is a revision of ideas of the human that stress language-use, reason, self-consciousness, autonomy, and God-likeness; that this revision entails a poetic that pits ideas against each other through intertextual references; and that without an acknowledgement of Coetzee’s revisions of the human, other concerns in his novels such as ethics, the status of the animal, or racial politics cannot fully be understood. To illustrate the novels’ exceptional concern with the human, it suffices to name only a few of the questions they raise. What are the limits of the human with respect to the animal? If the human cannot be defined as an animal plus any given number of defining features raising that animal above all other animals, how exactly does the human differ from the animal? Does the human amount to no more than the discourse of the human or is there such a thing as a human nature? Is the human body shaped by discourse? Can it resist discourse? What trajectories has the discourse of the human been following and what interests has it served? Is there a minimal definition of the human, and if so, is there also a minimal human? What does it mean to say that someone has lost his humanity? What is the relation between humanity and the humane? If there is a politics of the human, how can it be changed? As Coetzee’s novels respond to a long tradition of philosophical and anthropological reflection, it is tempting to try and extract a set of fundamental ideas from the closely knit fabric of his narratives. While such a method may help to sketch out Coetzee’s revisions of the human, it will never do justice even to those of Coetzee’s novels that gesture most overtly towards philosophical reflection. Martin Puchner has aptly called Coetzee’s novels novels of thinking rather than novels of ideas because they are premised on the belief that ideas only exist in characters engaged with each other and the world (see “Coetzee’s Novels of Thinking” 5–6, 11–12). As Puchner observes, Coetzee’s novels share this premise with Platonic dialogue, a literary genre designed to explore the embodied nature of thinking, arguing, and debating (see Drama of Ideas 3–35, “Coetzee’s Novels of Thinking” 7–12). According to Mikhail Bakhtin, the Platonic dialogue is a forerunner of the dialogic novel (see Problems 110–11). Friedrich Schleiermacher argued that it is wrong to study Plato’s ideas as if they were dissected body parts, without a view to their function in the whole body. Schleiermacher notes that “form and subject are inseparable, and no proposition is to be rightly understood, except in its own place,

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and with the combinations and limitations which Plato has assigned to it” (Introduction 14). The same can be said of Coetzee’s novels, which suggest that ideas are inseparable from the characters who exchange, enact, or performatively contradict them in evolving situations. Ideas are independent neither of the bodily needs and desires of those who think them nor of the discourse-practices and particular situations in which those individuals are involved. In Dusklands (1974), for example, the ideas of mythographer Eugene Dawn are not as original as he believes. They turn out to be influenced by his troubled relations with his wife, son, and supervisor, as well as by a larger myth of absolute reason ingrained in Western culture. Both the magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) and David Lurie in Disgrace (1999) are forced to discover that the order their minds seek to impose on the world is undermined by their own instincts. The novels demonstrate that ideas are rooted in bodily and historically specific needs and desires and that accounts that ignore these dimensions distort the meaning of those ideas. Coetzee’s novels further insist that being human involves skills, abilities, and constraints, the bodily experience of which is not reducible to the propositional language of ideas and arguments. What it is to be a body— to dress, to feel fear, to fall asleep, and so on—exceeds what biology, medicine, or psychology can teach about the body. When one tries to explain to someone else how to ride a bicycle or tie a knot, one experiences this gap between propositional knowledge, on the one hand, and embodied knowledge, on the other, or between knowing-that and a form of knowing-­ how.1 Humans possess knowledge of being a body (of opening a bottle, putting on clothes, falling asleep, etc.) without being able to explain to others what it is they know or how they know it. The most they can do is show it to others—who can then learn by imitation. Coetzee’s demonstration of the limits of reason is part of his revision of the Enlightenment notion of the human as a disengaged, autonomous thinker. His view of the human as engaged agency has the greatest affinities with ideas developed in theories of posthumanism, materiality, and social practice. A distinctive feature of Coetzee’s critique is that it depends on narrative form as much as it recommends a narrative approach to ideas in general. This point is forcefully made in Elizabeth Costello (2003), which stands out among Coetzee’s novels for thematizing the premise that ideas are not autonomous. As Stephen Mulhall has observed, Elizabeth Costello questions the place of thought in relation to the body and the novel, and thereby intervenes in the quarrel between philosophy and literature. In

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the locus classicus of this quarrel, Plato’s Republic, Plato famously argues that poets are to be banished from the ideal republic because they lack any rational basis that might legitimate their claims and because they claim to understand things that only philosophers, seeing beyond the representations of ideas, can know (see The Republic 307–24). Yet Plato himself delivers his philosophy in poetic images and, even more importantly, condemns the theatre using a method that is fundamentally dialogical and dramatic (see Mulhall, The Wounded Animal 1–3). Plato’s stance towards literature is thus more ambivalent than is generally admitted by those who consider his ideas independently of the form in which they are presented. By choosing a side and seeming to settle the quarrel, Plato actually provides reasons for continuing that quarrel. Elizabeth Costello enters the debate by turning the tables on philosophers who deny literature any claim to truthfulness. The novel presents itself as a test case for the claims that narrative can critically reflect on philosophical problems and that its distinctive ways of reflection represent reality more truthfully than philosophy (see Mulhall, The Wounded Animal 3). If, in Mulhall’s words, “the original sin of philosophy [is] that of attempting to lay down requirements on the reality it aims to contemplate”, and if the “possibility for redemption [is] lying in the attempt simply to attend to what is there to be seen, in all its variety and complexity” (The Wounded Animal 14), then literature offers a means to truthfully reflect on variety and complexity, both of which defy categorization and abstraction.2 Narratives, dramatic enactments, and poetry can convey a vicarious experience of a particular body and how it (he or she) comes to think, feel, and act a certain way in a particular situation. Abstract claims in studies or treatises cannot convey this experience. I will show that narratology has only recently begun to theorize this experiential quality of narrative.3 Elizabeth Costello self-consciously demonstrates how narrative allows the reader to inhabit the character of Elizabeth Costello in the very process of her becoming someone else; how ideas exist as embodied instances of which no disembodied originals exist; how these ideas have a history; and how they are constantly coloured, inflected, distorted, and transformed because the human actor who holds them is always already involved in practices, situations, and moods beyond her control.4 The fact that the reader’s vicarious experience is the effect of artifice does not invalidate narrative’s potential. In the perspective of Elizabeth Costello, this merely means that some narratives will offer a more truthful account than others,

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whereas disembodied and de-contextualizing forms of language will always miss important dimensions of the human. Through their formal properties and word choice, Coetzee’s novels emphasize that their challenges to traditional ideas of the human can never be anything other than artifice; yet it is precisely by raising this awareness that the novels signal their potential truthfulness. Under the simulated conditions of embodiedness and embeddedness that Coetzee labels ‘realism’, they can test which ideas of the human clash and show how others, such as Cartesian dualism or the idea of a private language, are challenged by experience. I will explore this potential of narrative by attempting to read Coetzee’s revisions of the human on their own, narrative, terms. Staying close to the texts, I will show that the content of these revisions is inseparable from their embodiment in characters and their embeddedness in stories. I argue that these revisions often cannot be properly understood without considering the novels’ intertextual references to previous literary revisions of the human by authors such as Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett. I will consider connections between the novels and posthumanist thought (from the ancient Cynics to Heidegger, Agamben, Derrida, and others) when the novels intertextually gesture towards philosophers or invoke ideas that offer a foothold for certain theories, as is often the case. However, I will avoid reading the novels through the lens of any one theory, lest I impose restrictive requirements on the text. This seems particularly important because recent theoretical turns have tended to introduce new subjects of critique rather than new methods of inquiry. When guiding an entire inquiry, a theory can blind the critic to aspects beyond that theory’s scope—whether it be the effects of colonialism (as in postcolonial studies), animals (as in animal studies), or environmental issues (as in ecocriticism). Such inquiries tend to produce readings that flatten texts into mirrors of a given theory’s critical agenda. If we take seriously narrative’s characteristic ways of negotiating ideas, we need to use theories like tools: taking them in hand when the text calls for them, then setting them aside when other, more suitable tools are required. This also applies to the theories or intellectual movements with which Coetzee’s revisions of the human show the greatest affinities and which I will refer to most often: posthumanism, deconstruction, symmetric anthropology, and practice theory. To justify a further methodological choice, it is necessary to jump ahead and state that Coetzee’s novels neither advance a single human essence nor suggest the human to be absolutely malleable. Coetzee attacks

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­ niversal claims about the human and stresses historical particulars that u defy generalization. When his fiction gestures beyond temporal and geographical specificities—for example, when it gives the body precedence over the mind—that body is enmeshed in historical discourses (e.g., discourses denying the animality of that body). Nonetheless, that body retains, in Coetzee’s words, an “authority” (DP 248) that cannot entirely be usurped by the voices that seek to supplant it. Rigorously critiquing essentialist ideas of the human, his fictions do not embrace a universal constructivism that deems all attributes of the human historically variable. Instead, they pit the embodiedness of the human against human embeddedness in discourse-­practices. This implies a tension between the novels’ accounts of the human and the (post)structuralist ideas that gained currency at the time of his earlier novels’ composition and that have continued to influence how the humanities discuss the human. Working as a professor of literature for much of his life, Coetzee has been aware of this tension and has developed his own ideas of the human as much against the grain of (post)structuralist discourse as with it. When I now discuss some affinities and differences between Coetzee’s revisions of the human and (post)structuralist theories of subjectivity, I do so primarily to point out how the differences motivate my decision to speak of Coetzee’s revisions of the ‘human’ rather than of the ‘subject’. Theorists such as Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, who will serve as my examples, have made us wary of the category of the human and have shifted the discussion to the category of the subject. An important reason why (post)structuralist theories have preferred to speak of subjects rather than humans is that the term ‘subject’ evokes the heteronomy of the human actor these theorists seek to demonstrate. Subjects, in their view, are conscious actors subjected to discourse-practices that limit their agency—and that produce them in the first place. The subject of (post) structuralist theory is neither Descartes’ ‘ego’ as reflexive self nor Kant’s, Schelling’s, Fichte’s, and Hegel’s ‘transcendental’ subject as the condition of the possibility of knowledge. The fundamental characteristic of these classical ideas of the subject is autonomy: the subject is an essential core of reflection, agency, and expression transparent to itself. Coetzee shares Foucault’s and Butler’s critique of this subject and demonstrates that some features believed to be human essences are contingent historical-cultural attributions serving political functions. When Foucault and Butler do mention the human, they refer to a catalogue of historically and culturally dependent qualities disguised as

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e­ ssential features. In The Order of Things, for example, Foucault argues that only since around 1800 is the human constructed as a condition of the possibility of knowledge, thus becoming the object of empirical research in psychology, sociology, and anthropology (see 340–86). In Foucault’s view, Kant’s transcendental subject is in reality an empirical subject created by discourse-practices. The question of what the human is becomes the question of which discourse-practices produce a particular human at a given time and place. Concepts like identity and self do not refer to essences but to a culturally dependent self-understanding built into subjectivity. Butler carries Foucault’s constructivism further to show that the sex/gender difference is not natural but the effect of a cultural strategy of essentializing historically and locally contingent performances. Regulatory mechanisms producing subjectivity do not exist predominantly in discourses but in embodied and performed practices. In this perspective, culture is neither primarily mental nor semiotic but repeatedly performed. Race, class, and gender are not discursively presupposed but (re)created through routinized practices. Likewise, the human body is performatively produced. Foucault, Butler argues, considers the body too uncritically as a pre-cultural entity potentially resisting discourse-practices (see in particular Gender Trouble 91–106 and Bodies That Matter 1–55). According to her, the body is part of a catalogue of human qualities that have been illegitimately and deceptively naturalized and universalized. Coetzee has learned from these critiques of the Enlightenment subject, but his fictions suggest that (post)structuralism has not fully answered the question of the human. Coetzee’s novels raise the question of whether Foucault and Butler, while defining the human as an arbitrary catalogue of qualities dictated by hegemonic discourse, paradoxically presuppose a human body that is always already different from the animal’s. As his novels wish to take the body’s materiality into account, they reject the Hegelian idealism that locates the subject in the mental realm only. Neither Foucault nor Butler would assume that a human subject could be produced by applying the regulatory mechanisms of human society to non-­ human bodies. However, they do not explain how human and animal bodies are differentiated in the first place, especially if the materiality of their bodies does not essentially differ.5 Foucault analyses the marginal, excluded subjectivities of the mad, the ill, or the so-called perverse in order to reconstruct ‘normal’ subjectivities in opposition to them. Read alongside Coetzee’s fictions, it is striking that Foucault presents the Other primarily as the human Other. This does not mean that Foucault would

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not allow animals the status of the Other, but his method facilitates overlooking the animal’s constitutive function in the construction of the human. Coetzee’s novels help us see that subjectivation presupposes a previously constructed human/animal difference and that this differentiation serves as a template for the subjectivation of the human.6 In this regard, they agree with Giorgio Agamben’s The Open, a work that enables us to read the incompleteness of (post)structuralist approaches to the human as an effect of the self-concealing symbolic mechanisms in philosophical discourses, which classify and distinguish humans and animals through a dual process of inclusion and exclusion (see 33–38). In this view, Foucault and Butler presuppose the subject to be human without acknowledging that the exclusion of the animal from subjectivity is the condition of the possibility of their ‘subject’. This exclusion is not made on the grounds of essential differences but of political decisions. I speak of Coetzee’s revisions of the ‘human’ to suggest that the human/animal differentiation has been constitutive of the idea of the human and that Coetzee’s novels criticize how the line between human and non-human life is drawn. If Coetzee’s fictions alert the reader to these political mechanisms, this does not mean that Coetzee’s interest in animals only reflects an interest in the human and its limits, or that Coetzee’s revisions of the human exclusively concern the human/animal divide. I will argue, however, that the great interest in how Coetzee’s fictions call for a different attitude towards animals has overshadowed his longstanding questioning of the human. I identify this questioning as an origin of Coetzee’s influential and now well-documented ideas on animals. These ideas often play a role in his revisions of the human, especially so in Elizabeth Costello. Part of my agenda is therefore to put current research positions into perspective.7 I am thus to some extent breaking new ground—a fact that might surprise because both Kafka and Beckett, who show a marked interest in the question of the human in their animalizations or dehumanizations of protagonists, were early identified as major influences on Coetzee. As Kafka and Beckett have had a profound impact on Coetzee’s revisions of the human, I will consider Coetzee’s engagement with them. While all of Coetzee’s novels deal with the question of the human to some extent, some are more invested in this issue than others. I will focus on Dusklands, Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K (1983), Disgrace, Elizabeth Costello, Slow Man (2005), The Childhood of Jesus (2013), and The Schooldays of Jesus (2016) because their intertextual

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dialogues include an unusual number of philosophical, literary, and scientific texts concerned with human nature and because they explicitly tackle the question of the human. As I will show, Coetzee’s poetic of revision puts these voices to the epistemological use of anthropological realism, a realism that Elizabeth Costello suggests can only be achieved by narrative and that is turned into a uniquely self-conscious process by Coetzee. While Coetzee’s interrogation of the human is more muted in In the Heart of the Country (1977), Foe (1986), Age of Iron (1990), The Master of Petersburg (1994), and Diary of a Bad Year (2007), I will discuss salient passages from these works in my readings of the other novels. These detours will shed further light on the issues at hand and highlight continuities and differences between the phases of Coetzee’s revisions of the human. The chronological order in which I discuss Coetzee’s works reflects the development of Coetzee’s grappling with the idea of the human. It is not to be expected that a novelist’s works argue a coherent critique or advocate a consistent idea of the human, and this is certainly not the case for Coetzee’s body of work. It is possible, however, to distinguish phases in Coetzee’s career in which a particular approach to interrogating the human predominates. The chapters of this book each discuss the novels that give shape to one of these phases and demonstrate the similarities, as well as some dissimilarities, in their approach to the human. At the same time, I seek to do justice to the fact that each novel operates on its own aesthetic and formal terms. In an author as experimental and as inventive as Coetzee, whose individual works differ from each other greatly in both form and content, the single novel, not groups of novels or the entire corpus, must remain the primary unit of analysis. I therefore discuss the novels in distinct sections of my chapters. This choice has the added benefit of making observable a process of constant revision and further exploration of consequences that follow from problems laid bare by Coetzee’s previous fictions. David Attwell’s research on Coetzee’s manuscripts has shown that the textual genesis of the individual works is nothing so much as a process of revision.8 The same, I believe, holds for the works in their sequential order, even within a particular phase of Coetzee’s career. In Chap. 2, I discuss Coetzee’s poetic of revision and the intellectual movements with which his revisions resonate. I start with Wolfgang Iser’s theory of literary anthropology and its tenet that literature allows humans to represent the possibilities of being human, enabling a self-reflexivity in which the human permanently transcends itself. This theory sheds light on Coetzee’s poetic but must be modified in order to do justice to the novels’

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concern with embodiedness on the one hand, and embeddedness in historical-­cultural discourse-practices on the other. Both factors, Coetzee’s novels suggest, limit, and enable human self-transcendence. Using recent scholarship on cognitive narratology, I show that Coetzee’s novels reflect seriously on the epistemological potential of narrative to embody the totality of human consciousness. Coetzee’s approach amounts to a performative process of embodying that takes into account its own preconditions as it explores the embodiedness of consciousness in historically and culturally situated characters. I show how Coetzee uses narrative to critique and revise received ideas about the human through a poetic of testing that is both self-reflexive and paradoxical. Drawing on Carrol Clarkson’s characterization of Coetzee’s novels as experiments and tests of intertextually referenced ideas, I show how Coetzee transposes Dostoevsky’s dialogism, as described by Mikhail Bakhtin, from the poetological to the epistemological realm. His dialogic novels use narrative as a form of thinking. Taking my cue from Elizabeth Costello, I define this quality as anthropological realism. Coetzee’s novels enter into dialogue with an eclectic range of writers, including Diogenes of Sinope, Kleist, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Franz Boas, Beckett, and Roland Barthes. Situating Coetzee’s revisions in the intellectual development of posthumanism, in Chap. 2 I go on to demonstrate how these revisions engage with a discourse that has evolved since the nineteenth century and has at times sought to reactivate ideas from classical antiquity. With reference to theorists like Agamben, Donna Haraway, Matthew Calarco, and Cary Wolfe, I show how Coetzee’s novels respond with varying degrees of resonance and dissonance to elements in posthumanism. I trace the development of posthumanism from critiques by Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche of the classical, autonomous subject of Enlightenment humanism to constructivism’s diminished subject in the twentieth century, where the human stands divested of self-sufficient reasoning, free agency, and authority. I explain how the movement continues to the explicit dismantling of the hierarchy between humans and animals, so that the human is decentred in relation to non-human life. I suggest that ‘Cynical posthumanism’ (in the sense of Diogenes’ Cynicism) best captures the general thrust of Coetzee’s revisions. I justify and flesh out this interpretation by examining how Coetzee responds to the theoretical challenge of how to approach the human/animal relation once that binarism has been divested of hierarchy. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s symmetric anthropology and the work of recent practice theorists, I further show

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how Coetzee’s novels show parallels with the co-evolution of posthumanism and practice theory. In its revaluation of the body, posthumanism critiques accounts that overstress the mental and symbolic realms and calls for an embodied account of knowledge, while practice theory insists that interobjective relations constitute a vital but neglected part of the social, thus putting language and reason, which formerly epitomized human singularity, into a more modest perspective. I also highlight here important affinities between Heidegger and Coetzee, particularly their foregrounding of practice and the critique of the human as reflecting subject. But, again, I emphasize that Coetzee’s contribution is unique: where Heidegger objects to the human’s animality and redefines its rationality in non-­ instrumental terms, Coetzee attacks rationality and ‘cynically’ stresses the animality of the human. Chapter 3 deals with the first phase of Coetzee’s concern with the question of the human. In this phase, the preoccupation with the discursive construction of humanity, as evinced by Dusklands, gives way to a radical inquiry into the question of the minimal human in Waiting for the Barbarians and Life & Times of Michael K. I show how Dusklands engages with the role of myth—understood in the sense defined by Roland Barthes—in the construction of the human and the inhuman (‘Hottentots’, Vietnamese, South African Coloureds). Madness comes to serve as a trope for myths’ ability to shape human reason. Dusklands goes beyond a scenario in which the human is either essence or construction and demonstrates that while only the oppressor can make reality conform to his myths, mythmaking is an activity shared by the oppressor and the oppressed. The novel also suggests that the body can violently resist myth and limit constructions of the human. The role of the body becomes much more central in Waiting for the Barbarians, which examines how torture affects the humanity of the tortured and torturer. The novel reveals that there is a disturbingly similar fascination with the body in erotic life and in torture: both appear as versions of a desire to know a human being in his or her singularity as well as to probe the meaning of humanity itself. The novel presents torture as a tearing off of layers from the human in pursuit of an essence that does not exist. ‘Barbarian’ is a term in which violent behaviour and the inability to speak are yoked together: the barbarism evoked in the novel’s title can only be fully understood if seen in connection with torture as a method of disabling speech. Rewriting the torture of Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony”, Waiting for the Barbarians shows how the torturer perverts Cartesian hubris and metaphysics by eliminating the

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soul, the mind, and the voice of others, and by defining (in)humanity through the tortured body alone. I go on in Chap. 3 to read Life & Times of Michael K as an example of a literature that meditates on what constitutes a rudimentary human life. Inviting and thwarting allegorical readings, the novel presents the saint, the animal, the Holocaust survivor, and the concept of bare life as blueprints for K, who resembles, if anything, Kafka’s Odradek from “The Cares of a Family Man”. Both Kafka and Coetzee suggest that even if sovereign power subjugates the bare life of humans, humans are still unable to encounter each other as bare life. The search for the minimal human by stripping away is misguided: bare life is not the minimal version of the human but of life itself. If Agamben claims that politics is essentially biopolitics because sovereign power targets the bare life of its subjects, Coetzee’s novel shows that all life is politics as even bare life is stamped, or masked, with a human or humanoid face to become an intelligible unit in the micropolitics of power. Chapter 4 addresses the phase in Coetzee’s career when the human/ animal distinction and the instinct-driven body become central. I argue that Disgrace places the protagonist David Lurie in opposition to the animal while exploring his animalistic tendencies. The novel dramatizes this by focusing on eros. Its beginning and middle are characterized by Lurie’s double standard concerning eros, and they modify Samuel Beckett’s poetic of drive that pits psychoanalysis against behaviourism. Here, notions of eros from psychoanalysis and Romanticism are played off against one another: which explanation gains the upper hand depends on the protagonist’s mental state. This is not the case in Beckett’s trilogy of novels. Lurie denigrates libido as animalistic but appeals to the concept when it helps him justify his behaviour. He gradually replaces his idea of desire derived from the Romantics (Wordsworth, Coleridge) with an idea of instinct that suggests eros is common to humans and animals. I argue that Lurie ultimately arrives at a stance similar to that of Diogenes of Sinope, Plato’s contemporary, and the main representative of the Cynics. Lurie’s metamorphosis into a ‘dog-man’ becomes readable as a recognition of his own animality, a finding that has decisive consequences for an ethical reading of the novel. I pursue my inquiry into the conjunction of human and animal bodies in Chap. 4 by focusing on Elizabeth Costello. This novel explores how nature-culture (a term I take from Latour) informs human actions and utterances in ways that cannot be conceptualized in the generalizing discourses of either philosophy or the social sciences and suggests that

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­ arrative, which does not abstract from individuals, can approximate it. n The novel validates its implicit claims about the potential of narrative— hinted at above—through the protagonist’s performative critique of the human/animal distinction. Just as David Lurie’s turning into an animal recalls Kafka’s Gregor Samsa from “The Metamorphosis”, Kafka is a particularly important influence on Coetzee’s concept of the human in Elizabeth Costello, where he provides a model for rendering the dividing line between human and animal uncertain. Following this example by invoking Kafka’s Red Peter from “Report to an Academy”, the novel demonstrates that Costello’s theorizing of the difference between humans and animals is embedded in the complex circumstances of her life and that her thoughts and opinions are inseparable from her history and her body’s needs and desires. What allows her to sympathize with animals is the embodiedness she shares with them—an experience of limitation as well as of being full of life, an ecstasy reminiscent of mystic or religious experience. It is noteworthy that while novels like Life & Times of Michael K, Disgrace, Elizabeth Costello, and Slow Man render the limit between human and animal permeable and suggest animal-likeness as a substitute for God-likeness, they rediscover the transcendent in the immanence of bodily pleasure: in eating, dancing, the erotic, and other moments “full of being” (EC 77). In Chap. 5, I read Slow Man, The Childhood of Jesus, and The Schooldays of Jesus as reflections on how notions of humanity are inflected by nationality (as a secondary identity), state institutions, and even basic forms of community, and how a change of nationality or citizenship is comparable both to a metaphorical afterlife and a rebirth bridging nature (birth) and culture (emigration). This is the phase after Coetzee’s emigration to Australia, when the novels explore the human principally as a being-with-­ others and place a particular focus on state, nation, and community. In Slow Man, Paul Rayment’s life in Australia is presented as a second, reduced stage of his life, a metaphorical afterlife. This afterlife implies a dark reading of emigration, equating it with a crippling of the self that not only involves the self’s body but also, as Rayment remarks, its soul. Some part of him, he realizes, will always be French and thus prevent him from ever becoming a homo australicus. Rayment’s insistence on an authentic, complete body is motivated by the memory of his former body, while his yearning for an authentic home is motivated by the memory of his early years in France. Similarly, but on a more fundamental level, The Childhood of Jesus asks whether the nation-state is able to give meaning to human

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mortality in the wake of diminished religious belief, and at what cost. To provide such meaning, the novel suggests, the nation-state has to be the unquestioned purpose of private and public life, and a life dedicated to the eternal life of the nation will necessarily infringe rights and desires that readers will regard as human. To teach humans to be citizens before they are bodies is, according to Étienne Balibar, indeed the ideal of the nation-­ state. The state’s means of breaking down and reconstructing the human according to its needs are education and schooling—institutions that The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus bring into narrative focus. David resists the national pedagogy of Novilla by rejecting man-made laws and asserting metaphysical truths; Simón resists by insisting on the authority of the body. In escaping to Estrella, they seem on their way to forming a religious community that reclaims the space usurped by the nation-state as imagined community. Yet The Schooldays of Jesus introduces a third kind of community: dance emerges as a practised use of one’s body that transcends the language games and rule-following demanded by state, nation, and community. It opens up humanity to a metaphysical realm whose unchanging truths give order to human collectivity. The dancers are guided by immutable laws of numbers and the body. Schooldays’ vision of this community is nostalgic because it pictures humans before the fall from grace, that is, before thinking of themselves principally as epistemic creatures tasked with representing in their minds a world of external objects (including their own bodies), and its vision is utopian because it is embodied in children, that is, a humanity in the making. Pitting the human as dancer against the human as thinker, the novel questions the idea of the purely human in favour of an impure ontology proximate to and continuous with the animal and the divine. What I try to show in the following pages is how relentlessly, comprehensively, and productively Coetzee confronts the question of the human. Indeed, this question encompasses many of the ethical, religious, and metaphysical issues traditionally taken to be Coetzee’s main preoccupations. It is difficult for a writer not to write about the human—but, as I set out to show, rarely since Kafka has it been done in so focused a manner and with such compelling results.

Notes 1. Gilbert Ryle was the first to explicate the differences between ‘knowing-­ how’ and ‘knowing-that’. He stresses that knowledge is not theoretical thought preceding and guiding practice but a simultaneous component of

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practices. Michael Polanyi elaborated on this differentiation and labelled non-propositional forms of knowledge ‘tacit knowledge’. He used the concept most prominently to explain phenomena of emergence in science (see Ryle, “Knowing How and Knowing That” 1–16; and Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension 1–52). 2. As is highlighted by Mulhall’s use of a religious register focusing on sin and redemption, attentiveness to the complexity of reality is not least an ethical imperative. This is illustrated by Elizabeth Costello’s preoccupation with the shared embodiment of humans and animals. Yet to say that the novel’s championing of narrative as a medium of truthfulness is exclusively ethically motivated stops short of the other reason on which that ethical motivation depends: that Coetzee’s novels, including Elizabeth Costello, critique the idea that a human being is essentially a subject of autonomous reason, and that disembodied ideas and arguments best describe it. 3. As this study is concerned with Coetzee’s novels, I henceforth speak of narrative rather than drama or poetry. Embodying ideas in characters and embedding them in social contexts is likewise a virtue of dramatic enactment and can be a quality of poetry. The notion of the ‘story’—the presentation of characters immersed in sequences of events—is crucial here. Narratology has pointed out that prose narrative, dramatic enactment (on the stage or in film), and many poems can be analysed as forms of storytelling. Moving away from its focus on the narrator as the hallmark of prose narrative, narratology has begun to redefine its subject from an intermedial and transgeneric perspective to highlight different genres’ shared narrative quality (see Nünning and Nünning, Erzähltheorie 1–22). 4. It should be added that understanding what it is like to be Elizabeth Costello requires pre-knowledge of what it is like to be a body at all, of what it is like to be in a mood, and to be part of a practice. Readers’ understanding of the Costello character will depend on their individual pre-knowledge. The idea that understanding is circular is as old as Heidegger’s characterization in Being and Time of existence as interpretation (Dasein als Verstehen) and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s discussion in Truth and Method of the hermeneutic circle (see Heidegger, Being and Time 134–43; Gadamer, Truth and Method 142–53). But both accounts are insufficient: while Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s approaches make much of the historicity of understanding, they largely ignore its bodily foundations. 5. The question is not answered, for example, in Butler’s argument that the body is ‘materialized’ in practices, in a text that addresses the pertinent relationship of constructivism and realism (see Bodies That Matter 1–55). 6. It might be objected that theories of the subject can only be theories of the human because subjects are always subjected to cultural discourse-practices and only humans have culture. But that would mean that these theories

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would have to argue that traits such as use of symbols and language are exclusively human—a view that has increasingly been questioned. There are myriad definitions of culture, many of which animals satisfy, as ethologist and philosopher Dominique Lestel shows in his account of animals as subjects of cultures (see “The Biosemiotics and Phylogenesis of Culture” 377– 402). De Waal’s and Tyack’s Animal Social Complexity offers an impressive amount of perspectives on animal cultures. 7. It must be added that the novels not only respond to ideas from literature, philosophy, and the humanities. Scientifically oriented anthropologists, for one, have noted that Coetzee’s revisions of the human speak to their own concerns (see, e.g., Agustin Fuentes, “The Humanity of Animals and the Animality of Humans”). The tension between essentialist and constructivist approaches to the human, so important to Coetzee’s revisions, also informs the field of anthropology (see, e.g., Stagl, “Anthropological Universality” 27–31). 8. The recent accessibility of Coetzee’s manuscripts and papers at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin has greatly helped research on Coetzee’s writing practice. I will repeatedly refer to Attwell’s J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face to Face with Time and other work drawing on the archive.

CHAPTER 2

Method and Matter of the Revisions: Coetzee’s Posthumanist Poetic

What does it mean to say that Coetzee’s fictions ‘revise’ the human? And what do his revisions consist in, or tend towards, when compared with other contemporary conceptualizations of the human? In the first half of this chapter, which examines Coetzee’s poetic of revision, I will begin by turning to literary anthropology, a field within literary studies marked out largely by Wolfgang Iser’s late work, to identify Coetzee’s narrative methods of revising ideas of the human. I will explain what Coetzee’s narratives self-reflexively suggest about the epistemic potential of narrative as such, a potential that hinges on the relation between narrative and human embodiedness. Recent developments in narratology will be helpful in understanding what I will argue is at the root of Coetzee’s revisions: his project of anthropological realism. I will then address what Coetzee’s work suggests about narrative’s relation to human embeddedness in culture and history and address the particular uses that Coetzee’s novels make of narrative’s epistemic potential. I will show that Coetzee’s specific uses of ‘countervoices’ in his narrative tests and experiments serve anthropological realism while enabling a critique of hegemonic discourses of the human. In the second half of this chapter, I will situate Coetzee’s novels in the context of a number of posthumanisms, theories of materiality, and social practice theory to reveal both the parallels between them and the idiosyncrasies of Coetzee’s revisions.

© The Author(s) 2019 K. Wiegandt, J.M. Coetzee’s Revisions of the Human, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29306-2_2

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Coetzee’s Poetic of Revision Broadly speaking, literary anthropology is concerned with the study of how ideas of the human are represented in literary works, how literature allows insights into the human, and what function or functions literature fulfils as a human practice. In literary anthropology, there are thus three basic ways of looking at the relation between literature and anthropology.1 In Perspective One, the critic looks at the human as a theme in literature and puts what a text says or implies about the human in its historical context. Insofar as literary texts deal with human experience, portray thoughts, actions, and emotions, and allow for inferences about the humanity of narrators and characters, literature inherently conveys a sense of what is human and what is not, though some texts are more focused or explicit than others in their representations of the human. The critic can look for discourses of the human that emerge in certain texts, analyse which received or innovative ideas of the human are evoked, and study the narrative strategies employed in their evocation. This perspective promises insights into single works of literature, entire oeuvres, genres, and periods. In order to reconstruct the anthropological knowledge of a specific period, critics often juxtapose literary works with non-literary sources. In Perspective Two, the guiding question is how literary texts produce knowledge about the human. The critic considers literature as a source of truth about the human, and thus enters into the discussion, which has been going on since Plato, on the epistemic value of literature. While social anthropology, cultural anthropology, and evolutionary anthropology study different aspects of humanity in past and present societies, some critics argue that literature is just as valid a source of knowledge about the human, and in some respects even a richer one. Literature, they suggest, is able to present the subjective, inner perspective of being human. Neither does literature address the human merely in its bodily dimension, nor does it locate the human exclusively in the mental sphere: in its characters, literature presents the human as unified body-soul (see Schings, Der ganze Mensch; Iser, Prospecting 262–84). A third way of looking at literature and anthropology is to look for the anthropological function of literature and thereby explain its existence (Perspective Three). Psychoanalysis, philosophical aesthetics, and evolutionary theory have all proposed such explanations, ranging from wish fulfilment to aesthetic pleasure, identity formation, and increase in sexual attractiveness.

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Charting Wolfgang Iser’s influential theory of literary anthropology will help me to identify different ways of reading Coetzee’s revisions of the human—even though, in order to do justice to Coetzee’s novels, I will have to qualify Iser’s account. Iser developed this theory in Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (1989), The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology ([1991] 1993), and a number of articles. He follows the recent tendency in philosophical anthropology to embrace the indefinability of the human (see Stagl, “Anthropological Universality” 33). The myriad definitions proposed since antiquity seem to testify to this indefinability, which is an idea that has a long and culturally diverse tradition encompassing Plato’s Protagoras, elements of Islamic mysticism, and Christian thought (see Assmann, “Neuerfindungen” 90–94). Indefinability does not, however, relieve humans of the need to define and redefine their humanity. The “duality into which the human being is split, suspended between self-preservation and self-transgression” (Iser, “What is Literary Anthropology?” 178), means that humans are engaged in a constant process of self-revision. Iser accordingly needs only one attribute to characterize the human: the imperative to change.2 He explains that constant self-transgression is a means of adapting to new environments which itself has an effect on humans’ lives: Humans transport themselves into what they are not and, in turn, are impacted by their ‘extragenetic, outside-the-skin control mechanisms’, thus launching themselves into a process of self-fashioning. Transporting themselves into and simultaneously being affected by their own externalizations allows human beings to fathom how they negotiate the gap between themselves and their environment. (“What is Literary Anthropology?” 171–72)

Iser follows anthropologists Eric Gans and Clifford Geertz in characterizing cultures as domains of fictions that are “ways of worldmaking”, that is, symbolic orders enabling interaction among individuals as well as between individuals and things. Iser calls these fictions ‘explanatory’ because they make sense by attaching specific meanings to events and actions and thereby guide individuals of a specific culture in their interactions. Iser explains the role of literature by differentiating its fictions from those that constitute cultures: literature is the paradigmatic instance of creating fictions because it is relieved of the pragmatic, or explanatory, dimension essential to real-life situations (see Prospecting 270 and The Fictive and the Imaginary 297). Its fictions “dismantle what can be

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­ erceived as a given reality, or discourse, or social and cultural system” p (“What is Literary Anthropology?” 172). Put positively, literary fictions are exploratory rather than explanatory because they allow humans to experience their plasticity as their only unchanging characteristic, to play out their possibilities without using them up. At the same time, literature confronts humans with the experience that there is no end to these possibilities. Iser’s term for literature’s specific mode of exploration is ‘staging’, an observable play of mutually exclusive possibilities: The staged unavailability of human beings is manifested in a welter of unforeseeable conflicts, which can become tangible only by running the whole gamut of play. Such play is endowed with endlessness, because staging allows the otherwise impossible state that one can experience one’s own inability to have oneself. […] Staging in literature makes conceivable the extraordinary plasticity of human beings, who, precisely because they do not seem to have a determinable nature, can expand into an almost unlimited range of culture-bound patternings. The impossibility of being present to ourselves becomes our possibility to play ourselves out to a fullness that knows no bounds. (The Fictive and the Imaginary 296–97)

In Iser’s view, literature cannot sufficiently be accounted for as an effect of the cultural circumstances in which it is produced. Humans’ existential limitation by history, genetic disposition, sex, race, nation, culture, space, and time can be transcended by literary fictions. According to Iser, this is possible because literary staging does not refer to realities outside the text. Instead, it appropriates other texts, with unpredictable and possibly innovative results: Each text is a rewriting of other texts, which are incorporated and stored in the text concerned. Such a rewriting is a transgression of boundaries, and the fragments brought back from the inroads made into other texts are pitted against one another, thus erasing their contexts, cancelling their meanings, and telescoping even what may be mutually exclusive. The ensuing interconnection may be agonistic, deceptive, subversive, and indeed unprecedented, and this interplay will tease out a semantic polysemy that had never existed before. (“What is Literary Anthropology?” 174)

The fictions that endure, Iser argues, are those that illustrate the ­impossibility of staging a final, definite picture of the human, rather than fictions flattering readers with compensatory wish fulfilment (see “Fingieren” 40–42).

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Iser’s theory combines the three perspectives of literary anthropology. Any particular textual exploration of being human is generated by the constant intertextual recombination of other such explorations (Perspective One). Literature’s unique propensity to stage and telescope the endlessness of human self-revisions as well as the irrepressible need of humans to define themselves (Perspective Two) explains literature’s anthropological function to confront humans with their own suspension between being and self-transgression (Perspective Three). This book is concerned with Coetzee’s particular revisions of the human (Perspective One) and narrative’s ability, explored by Coetzee throughout his oeuvre, to show what it means to be human (Perspective Two). I subscribe to Iser’s observation that narrative,3 in a virtually endless process, intertextually recombines and innovates other explorations of the human (Perspective One), although its intertextuality—here I am not with Iser—is developed to very different degrees in different texts and clearly reaches beyond the literary. Coetzee’s novels are intertextual not only in the poststructuralist sense that all writing is inherently intertextual. They direct the reader’s attention to the manifold intertexts that they draw upon, stage debates with or subject to critique. Many of these intertexts are of philosophical or scientific provenance. As I will show in the following chapters, a large proportion of these philosophical, literary, and anthropological intertexts is centrally concerned with the question of the human. But it is not the scale alone of Coetzee’s often intertextual grappling with the question of the human nor the explicitness with which this question is approached that calls for a study of Coetzee’s literary anthropology. It is the interplay of literary form and thematic concern with the human that marks Coetzee’s novels as unique attempts to think the human through narrative. Coetzee takes seriously the claim that narrative holds a characteristic potential to show the “meaning of humanity” (WFB 136) (Perspective Two). The novels realize this potential by showing thinking, including the idea of the human, under embodied and historicized conditions, and by performing the necessity of these conditions. The novels’ performances of the human validate the revisions they entail by enacting these conditions as a form of knowing-how that cannot be resolved into disembodied and dehistoricized ideas. Coetzee, Narratology, and Human Embodiedness Making humans present to themselves through staging their unavailability is only part of narrative’s epistemic potential. In the last two decades,

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­ arratology has shifted its focus from plot to character and defined experin entiality as narrative’s core function: “the quasi-mimetic evocation of ‘real-life experience’” (Fludernik, ‘Natural’ Narratology 12). Any attempt to make sense of narrative must proceed from the recognition of cognitive emotional states as the basic events of a narrative; it is not the plot that is the essence of narrative but a theory of mind (see Fludernik, ‘Natural’ Narratology 12; Herman, Story Logic 115–69; Herman, “Cognition” 247; Palmer, Fictional Minds 170–239). One of postclassical narratology’s guiding assumptions is that the way in which we make sense of narratives does not essentially differ from the way we make sense of other people: we understand narratives by interpreting the minds of characters and narrators, their intentions, and motivations (see Alber and Fludernik, Postclassical 12). Philosophers have argued since the mid-twentieth century that conscious experience involves non-physical properties, which means that someone who has complete physical knowledge about another conscious being might still lack knowledge about how it feels to have the experiences of that being (see Nida-Rümelin, “Qualia”). Narratological conceptualizations of experientiality have been particularly influenced by Thomas Nagel’s concept of ‘qualia’. These are the qualitative, experiential, or felt properties of mental states, which Nagel characterizes as the sense or feeling of what it is like for someone or something to undergo certain conscious experiences (see “What is it like to be a Bat?”, Levin, “Qualia” 693). Drawing on both Nagel’s and John Searle’s work, narratologist David Herman has argued that narrative is a mode of representation tailor-­ made for gauging qualia. Not only are qualia irreducibly subjective and thus unavailable for inspection in the way we can inspect objects in the world (see Basic Elements 137–54), they also pose a problem for representation. This is because there is no way to step outside consciousness and observe it as it really is, since consciousness simply is the (act or process of) observing, i.e., the qualia associated with observing or experiencing the world from a particular, irreducibly subjective or first-person vantage-point. (Basic Elements 155)4

It follows that the qualia bound up with the content of my consciousness cannot be represented but only experienced. Herman argues that narrative enables us to experience other minds by emulating the what-it’s-like dimension of conscious awareness because it is isomorphic to qualias’ elements of structure (see Basic Elements 157). Herman acknowledges the

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explanatory gap here: cognitive science still has to explain what this isomorphism consists in. His close readings of narratives suggest that prosody, rhythm, sound, and tampering with the chronology of events are linguistic means of performing rather than representing qualia: “Enacting and not just representing ways of experiencing—the what-it’s-like dimension […]—stories capture and sustain our interest because of how their structure maps on to the mind’s own engagement with the world” (Basic Elements 157). If Iser’s theatrical metaphor remains vague, this is because he largely ignores that staging depends on conveying a sense of experientiality, or qualia. Experientiality, in turn, involves being a body—a fact largely ignored not only by Iser but Herman in his discussion of qualia. Narratives can play ideas of the human off against each other only by embodying thought in characters and narrators. To say that narrative stages ideas means that it does not abstract ideas from those bodies that seem to ‘have’ them—ideas, after all, exist only in bodies. Throughout this book, I will use the term ‘perform’ rather than ‘stage’ to foreground the act of embodying rather than its place, that is, the theatre as a privileged space of holding the mirror up to nature. It is embodying, rather than the notion of free play, that is crucial to narrative’s epistemic potential concerning the human. ‘Perform’ emphasizes that whatever a narrative suggests it is like to be human does not and cannot precede, as propositional knowledge, the act of reading the narrative. This is because reading a narrative involves embodied thinking or, in the words of Elizabeth Costello’s titular character, the experience of an “embodied soul” (EC 78). Narratology offers some conceptualizations of embodiedness that are helpful for understanding Coetzee’s revisions of the human. Monika Fludernik has argued that embodiedness is the core of experientiality: The feature that is […] most basic to experientiality is embodiment rather than specificity or individuality because these can in fact be subsumed under it. Embodiedness evokes all the parameters of a real-life schema of existence which always has to be situated in a specific time and space frame, and the motivational and experiential aspects of human actionality likewise relate to the knowledge about one’s physical presence in the world. Embodiment and existence in human terms are indeed the same thing, which explains why some postmodernist texts that refuse the reader the consolation of an embodied protagonist (as in Beckett’s scenarios of a disembodied voice) touch on the one most vital parameter of narrative experientiality, with baffling and disorienting effects. (‘Natural’ Narratology 29–30)

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Unless a narrative registers the pressures of both bodily and outside events on an embodied human consciousness—or at least an anthropomorphic one—the narrative will have a disorienting effect on readers. Coetzee puts this effect to use in Life & Times of Michael K, where K’s lack of hunger makes the reader sceptical of K’s embodiedness. Marco Caracciolo has recently refined Fludernik’s approach, bringing narratology yet closer to Elizabeth Costello’s points about embodiedness and embeddedness. Building on Fludernik’s insight that embodiment anchors narrative in experience, Caracciolo takes issue with her claim that narrative with realist intentions is a “mimetic representation of individual experience that cognitively and epistemically relies on real-world knowledge” (‘Natural’ Narratology 28). According to Caracciolo, even if engaging with narrative does involve mental representations of some sort, its experientiality cannot be understood in representational, object-­ based terms. Instead, we should think of experientiality as a kind of network that involves, minimally, the recipient of a narrative, his or her experiential background, and the expressive strategies adopted by the author. At the root of experientiality is, then, the tension between the textual design and the recipient’s experiential background. (Experientiality 49)

The narrator’s and characters’ historically embedded bodies are not principally cognitive representations in the reader’s mind but are pre-rationally inhabited, or enacted, by the reader. As I will show, this pre-rational element of enactment is front and centre in Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello. Taking my cues from Iser, from recent narratology and from Elizabeth Costello, I argue that narrative performs the inherent indefinability of the human and that this leads to a process of revision. These revisions, though virtually endless, are not unconditioned. Narrative revisions of the human are informed by the writer’s bodily constitution and by the discourse-­ practices in which she or he is always already immersed. The terms Elizabeth Costello finds for these biological and historical-cultural conditions of the possibility of thinking (of which writing is a particular form) are ‘embodiedness’ and ‘embeddedness’. Iser pictures narrative fictions as independent of the bodies that conceive, entertain, and proliferate them, as well as of the historically evolving and culturally coded discourses amongst which they emerge (see Schläger, “Cultural Poetics” 77; Sutrop, “The Anthropological Turn” 82). Coetzee’s novels effectively undermine this view: ideas only exist in embodied consciousness immersed in historical

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discourses that condition and inflect thinking, including narrative as a form of thinking. If we take Coetzee’s narrative experiment seriously, then we must reject Iser’s assumption that literary performances of the human, being rewritings of other texts, simply erase context and cancel the meaning of incorporated texts (see “What is Literary Anthropology?” 174). If anything can be learned from Coetzee’s novel Foe, it is that literary texts are not unaffected by hegemonic discourses and are not freely imagined by self-sufficient authors. There is no outside of culture where narrative fictions might operate. If narrative offers privileged access to the openness as well as the limitations of the human, this does not mean that narrative occupies a separate sphere. The border between explanatory fictions of culture and the exploratory fictions of creative narratives is permeable. Myth illustrates this particularly well: it preserves its function as cultural knowledge because it is constantly being reworked in literature, film, and the arts, as Hans Blumenberg has shown in Work on Myth (147–296). In order to understand the epistemic potential of narrative, we must understand that embodiedness and embeddedness are not simply limitations to thought. Embodiedness and embeddedness themselves make possible knowing-how in the form of bodily skills and historically grown, culture-specific frameworks of perception, thought, and feeling. Our being knowing-how is accessible to us only through qualia. As knowledge of the human must involve the qualia of embodiedness and embeddedness, such knowledge requires a narrative approach to the human. Being a body and being in history-culture, as forms of knowing-how, are the conditions of the possibility of knowing-that: they form the background against which propositional knowledge is possible in the first place. Narrative’s unique epistemic potential is that it enables a reader to vicariously experience embodied consciousness: how it feels to be an individual in a particular situation (knowing-how) thinking certain thoughts (knowing-that). As narrative shows ideas in the only form in which they exist—in embodied form—narrative can be said to show ideas ‘realistically’. As Elizabeth Costello explains, “realism is premised on the idea that ideas have no autonomous existence, can exist only in things. So when it needs to debate ideas […] realism is driven to invent situations […] in which characters give voice to contending ideas and thereby in a certain sense embody them” (EC 9). The term ‘realism’ is not used here in the sense of a period in literary history. Any narrative that presents ideas through embodied and situated narrators or characters is realistic. By contrast, the

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sciences and philosophy formulate propositional knowledge, or knowing-­ that, about the human without registering the qualia through which the knowing-how of embodiedness and embeddedness can be accessed. Biology and medicine may claim to be able to give a comprehensive account of the human’s physical nature, but they cannot make intelligible what it is like to be a body in a particular situation. Narrative conveys a sense of what it is like for humans to have conscious experiences (qualia) and does so while presenting the reader with the content of a specific mental state. These contents can be extracted in propositional form, although the proposition’s meaning is inflected by the knowing-how that makes it possible. Narrative, then, can be said to perform the mutual codetermination of conscious thinking, being a body, and being in history, without collapsing one into the other or suggesting the autonomy of either. Human Embeddedness in History-Culture and Coetzee’s Dialogism Before I turn fully to embeddedness—human situatedness in historical and culture-specific discourse-practices—I should clarify that I use the terms ‘history’ and ‘culture’ in the sense in which they are most relevant to Coetzee’s revisions of the human. History, in this sense, is the fabric of the past and evolving discourse-practices in which our bodies are always already entangled: there is no way of being denuded of history, as Coetzee’s Michael K learns. Culture is a shorthand for all present and locally relevant discourse-practices. The term emphasizes the fact that synchronous discourse-­ practices differ across the world. What is common to all historical-­cultural discourse-practices is that they constitute that which is simply a given or a ‘form of life’, to use Wittgenstein’s term from Philosophical Investigations. Forms of life are given in the sense that they cannot rationally be justified. Discourse-practices constitute what one might call the social unconscious: a repository of tastes, prejudices, assumptions, and vaguely formed beliefs that we not only act by but enact in our lives while hardly ever becoming aware of them (see Eagleton, Culture 46–49). For Coetzee, literary fiction is inherently informed by the history-­ culture that gave rise to it but does not necessarily mirror the latter. Coetzee has discussed fiction as the opposite of history in “The Novel Today” (1987), where he argues that novelists should liberate themselves from the oppressive discourse of history that threatens to make the novel

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its supplement. He calls for a novel that “operates in terms of its own procedures and issues” in order to “show up the mythic status of history” (“The Novel Today” 2–3). Coetzee’s later remarks on writing—discussed below—qualify but do not altogether retract this binarism. They suggest that the place of the novel is neither Iser’s realm of fiction liberated from cultural-historical discourses nor Barthes’ or the early Foucault’s realm of signs whose historical orders strictly delimit what can be thought and expressed. His novels have sometimes suggested a relative proximity to the former position, sometimes to the latter, but have never embraced one or the other. Taking her cue from some of Coetzee’s critical texts on writing and authorship, Carrol Clarkson has convincingly charted the poetic that allows Coetzee’s novels to hold this middle ground. I turn to her analysis to show that Coetzee’s poetic, drawing on narrative’s ability to perform qualia and concerning itself fundamentally with the relation between historical discourses (including other narratives) and the act of writing, is grounded in the project of anthropological realism. Coetzee’s critical statements on writing and authorship attune these notions to the idea of narrative as a performance of the human that hinges on the interplay between codetermination by the body and history-culture on the one hand, and narrative’s ability to play human possibilities out to a fullness unmatched by other forms of thinking. Such attuning, it should be clear, is necessary not just because narratives are written by authors. It is necessary because humans, as humans, author the revisions in which humanity transcends itself. “Writing is not free expression”, Coetzee has stated. “There is a true sense in which writing is dialogic: a matter of awakening the countervoices in oneself and embarking upon speech with them. It is some measure of a writer’s seriousness whether he does evoke/invoke those countervoices in himself, that is, step down from the position of what Lacan calls ‘the subject supposed to know’” (DP 65). Clarkson has shown how Coetzee draws on and remodels Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas on dialogism, developed in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, to take embeddedness in historically and culturally specific discourses into account. Coetzee turns dialogism into a writerly norm by positing that a “serious” author, that is, an author committed to the limitations and potentials of writing, must openly embrace and reinforce the inherently dialogic nature of writing instead of trying to hide it: the author must produce a text inflected by an invisible interlocutor. As in the case of Dostoevsky’s novels, this process leaves the novel

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without a dominating, authorial consciousness. The reader is left with a number of competing voices and discourses. Yet Coetzee suggests that the novel must showcase this very process of undermining authoritative claims to truth (see Clarkson, J. M. Coetzee 7–8). Bakhtin’s idea of a ‘double-voiced discourse’ and the way Coetzee’s novels draw attention to their double-voicedness are crucial to understanding how Coetzee’s novels openly embrace dialogism. Double-voiced discourse relates both to the objects of its reference and to another speaker. It can serve a parodic purpose or may carry on a hidden polemic with another voice or engage in a hidden dialogue with it. Coetzee radicalizes this idea by transferring what Bakhtin describes as Dostoevsky’s poetic strategy to the epistemological realm. His novels and critical statements suggest that writing as such is double-voiced because meanings submerged in the history of language cannot be prevented from surfacing as countervoices. Coetzee’s texts showcase this dialogism when the technical, rational language of Dusklands’ “The Vietnam Project” invokes Enlightenment beliefs, or when the diction of Foe echoes Daniel Defoe’s prose, or when Magda’s voice mimics Hegel or Blake, carrying out a hidden polemic or philosophical discussion. Coetzee’s explicit intertextuality, then, is an “attempt to be alert to countervoices, by responding to questions, to sources of literary inspiration, to philosophical ideas” (Clarkson, J. M. Coetzee 81) in which the narrative is always already embedded. Coetzee’s responsiveness to countervoices has been understood in ethical terms by both Derek Attridge and Clarkson (see Attridge, J. M. Coetzee 9–12, 40; Clarkson, J.  M. Coetzee 70–71). Yet to think something or someone in conditions that allow the content of thought fully to emerge is an epistemological as much as an ethical task: it is to recognize something or someone, where ‘recognize’ refers to both the epistemological sense of ‘knowing’ and the ethical sense of ‘acknowledging’. Coetzee’s novels demonstrate that epistemology is not restricted to propositional knowledge and rationality because embodiedness and embeddedness, as knowing-how, are parts of being human that are accessible to narrative thinking but remain inaccessible to propositional thought. Recognizing the Other is ethical insofar as the Other is seen as an embodied—mortal and vulnerable—and embedded creature exposed to the pressures of history-­culture. If, for Attridge, reading literature “entails opening oneself to the unpredictable, the future, the other, and thereby accepting the responsibility laid upon one by the work’s singularity and difference” (J. M. Coetzee 111), then narrative allows the encounter with the singular

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Other because it permits the reader to encounter this Other as this particular body embedded in this specific situation. I share Attridge’s view that to allow these encounters, the reader must not read Coetzee’s narratives as mere allegories of ideas or arguments (see J. M. Coetzee 39, 61–64). Instead, alertness to the formal oddities and singularities of Coetzee’s work—including awareness of the transgressions of narrative boundaries (metalepses) that make characters ‘real’ and make readers ‘co-responsible’ for the creation of storyworlds (see Effe, J. M. Coetzee 1–23)—allows the reader to live through the pressures, possibilities, and limits in which the characters find themselves (see Attridge, J. M. Coetzee 6). This is because it is primarily through their particular form and rhetorical texture that Coetzee’s narratives convey to the reader the specific knowing-how of being this body in this situation. However, to read literally rather than allegorically, and to be attentive to form, does not preclude awareness of the ideas and arguments that Coetzee’s characters and narratives seem to gesture towards. The reader’s task is to read these ideas and arguments as inflected, that is, realized through their embodiedness and embeddedness while at the same time reading the singular human characters against the background of the categories and arguments they resist; for these categories and arguments are part of epistemes, and as such they embed and encroach on humans’ singularity. The extent to which Coetzee’s novels use intertextuality to factor in embeddedness, and the openness with which they do so, becomes clear when we consider scalar criteria of intertextuality. Highly intertextual works do not merely invoke other texts but often also explicitly refer to them, depend on them to communicate and generate meaning, exhibit awareness of this dependence, refer to other texts iteratively and structurally rather than in single instances, and draw on intertextuality in order to generate tension between the ideological and semantic profile of texts (see Pfister, “Konzepte der Intertextualität” 25–30). All of these strategies can be found in Coetzee’s novels (see López and Wiegandt, “Introduction” 115). Amongst the most prominent, sustained, and influential countervoices raised in the novels are discursive and narrative explorations of the nature of the human by Diogenes of Sinope, Kleist, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Boas, and Beckett. This thematic focus is no coincidence. Only if an author does not merely fill the category ‘the human’ with different meaning, but instead inscribes difference into thinking itself by fitting the form of his narrative to his subject, can she or he seriously revise the human through narrative.

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Bakhtin suggests that the desire to fundamentally rethink human nature motivated Dostoevsky’s displacing of the central, authoritative voice of the traditional novel through dialogism. According to Bakhtin, it is the desire for defining humanity, coupled with the impossibility of arriving at a final definition due to the human’s radical resistance to definition, that constitutes the root and hidden subject of Dostoevsky’s dialogism. The most basic impulse in Dostoevsky’s characters, Bakhtin writes, is to rebel against being defined, as they “all acutely sense their own inner unfinalizability, their capacity to outgrow, as it were, from within and to render untrue any externalizing and finalizing definition of them. […] One of [Dostoevsky’s] basic ideas […] is precisely the idea that man is not a final and defined quantity upon which firm calculations can be made” (Problems 59). These descriptions make it seem plausible that Dostoevsky has been such a profound influence on Coetzee in terms of method and matter precisely because the Russian writer’s revisions of the human and the novel as narrative form depend on each other. Moreover, Bakhtin’s characterization of Dostoevsky helps us to recognize the differences between Bakhtin’s idea of dialogism, Iser’s literary anthropology as unfinalizable recombination of texts, and Coetzee’s poetic. Transferring what Bakhtin describes as Dostoevsky’s poetic strategy to the epistemological realm, and overtly problematizing the dialogic nature of writing as such, Coetzee’s novels push, each in their own way, the limits of known ideas and ideological positions. They push these limits towards something not yet named, something that is in-between, or beyond, the known ideas and positions they reference. The reader experiences this pushing as the sense that the narrative, self-conscious though it may be, does not know where it will arrive but wants to arrive somewhere else. This, I think, is what Clarkson suggests when she calls Coetzee’s novels “experiments in prose fiction […] with a heightened degree of consciousness about that process” (J. M. Coetzee 8). The idea of ‘experiment’—if not necessarily its practice—hinges on certainty of method combined with uncertainty of outcome. Narrative, for Coetzee, is a medium of thinking that, unlike philosophy or criticism, allows for thought experiments—or better, experiments in thinking—that can result in something genuinely new and unexpected. Narrative can do so even while its own poetic can be clearly laid out and explained, and even while that poetic highlights narrative’s limitations by embodiedness and embeddedness. The terms ‘test’ and ‘trial’, offered by Clarkson as complements to ‘experiment’, further sharpen the specificity of Coetzee’s revisions of the human:

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[I]f an ‘experiment’ has do with objective physical phenomena of empirical science, it is, at the same time, a ‘test’, a ‘trial’ a ‘procedure adopted in uncertainty whether it will answer the purpose’, an ‘action or operation undertaken in order to discover something unknown’ (OED, my emphasis); the approach in an experiment is not deductive in the way that the structuralist enterprise so explicitly announces itself to be; the results of an experiment, by definition, are not known a priori. In his own fiction Coetzee goes on to experiment with the possibilities that are at once limited, and opened up by linguistic structures. Just as philosophers develop thought-­ experiments, Coetzee develops formal and literary ones, setting up various conditions of possibility within language for aesthetic play and therefore, contingently, for historical and ethical awareness. (J. M. Coetzee 13)

‘Test’ and ‘trial’ capture the tentative, attempt-like, essayistic dimension of Coetzee’s novels in which ideas are juxtaposed combined and played with in a way that has to legitimate itself instead of following established methodologies. They present their play of ideas with an inscribed awareness that narrative, hedged in by historical-cultural discourses—and, we must add to Clarkson, by embodiedness—can lead to genuinely new thoughts. This applies to the reader, but also to the author, as Coetzee himself has remarked: The feel of writing fiction is one of freedom, of irresponsibility, or better, of responsibility toward something that has not yet emerged, that lies somewhere at the end of the road. When I write criticism, on the other hand, I am always aware of a responsibility toward a goal that has been set for me not only by the argument, not only by the whole philosophical tradition into which I am implicitly inserting myself, but also by the rather tight discourse of criticism itself. (DP 246)

Within their ‘realistic’ limits, which exert pressure on the form of Coetzee’s novels, these novels are able to test and revise ideas of the human in a way that conveys the knowing-that of arguments of ideas informed by the knowing-how that is embeddedness and embodiedness. Coetzee tests ideas of the human by testing them in the individual novel and in the novels’ serial succession (e.g., the literary anthropology of Dusklands versus that of Life & Times of Michael K), always through intertextual references to literary and intellectual history. Testing may seem to take the form of a lecture or an argument between characters. Ultimately, however, even explicit arguments about the human are embodied and embedded and

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thus tested in the plot. David Lurie’s ruminations on romantic, psychoanalytic, and behaviouristic accounts of human motivation in a plot involving seduction and rape (Disgrace) are an example of this, as are Elizabeth Costello’s arguments in her lectures, at a dinner with faculty and in her encounters with her son John, which only appear to have little to do with the thoughts she presented at an academic award ceremony. Whatever else these tests reveal, they reveal the singular physical and situational condition of individuals. What Clarkson writes about reading Diary of a Bad Year page by page applies to all of Coetzee’s novels, even if their page layout does not highlight this quality as much as Diary does: they dramatize “the experience of human existence itself as a site of turbulent interpellations—of (for instance) abstract thoughts, physical desires, public personae, private selves, the passage of time, self-centredness, and obligations and accountabilities that are at once personal, social and national” (J. M. Coetzee 97). Experimentation with and testing of countervoices; the new and unexpected that can be revealed in these experiments/tests: these key elements of Coetzee’s poetic are evidently similar to Iser’s theory of literary anthropology involving fiction’s inherent intertextual play and its capacity to generate genuinely new views of the human. Yet Coetzee’s turning embeddedness and embodiedness of the human, and of literature as a cultural practice, into key elements of his poetic gives his tests and experiments a status different from what Iser theorizes. Coetzee’s narratives showcase that fiction is not a sphere of free play set off from culture but is part of culture and subject to its pressures. Being part of culture limits fiction’s autonomy, but asserts its demand to be read, heard and made sense of in that culture: the reader is called upon to read the revisions of the human emerging from Coetzee’s narrative tests and experiments back into culture. Even if the experiments do not leave the reader with an alternative idea of the human, which they often do, insight into the contingency of ideas of the human in itself weakens the cogency of the common view, whatever that view entails. As Coetzee’s novels demonstrate that the history of discourses is informed by imbalances of power—a subject treated in many articles focusing on coloniality and postcoloniality in Coetzee— his revisions of dominant yet contingent definitions of the human can be read as critiques of politically motivated anthropologies. Narratives about the origin and nature of the human, such as etiological myths or religious texts, are amongst the countervoices that speak most powerfully through any narrative revision of the human and are

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therefore often explicitly invoked by Coetzee with critical intent. It is illuminating to compare Coetzee’s revisions of such grands récits with the method of reading them suggested by Jacques Derrida in The Animal That Therefore I Am. As do Coetzee’s novels, Derrida here uncovers the centrality of politically rather than scientifically motivated human/animal distinctions. Derrida deconstructs the Book of Genesis to show that Genesis seeks to prioritize the human by separating it from the animal. Today, Derrida argues, differences between humans and animals are commonly made by naming animals in terms of biology, genetics, and zoology, but naming is still part of the human’s narrative self-definition beginning with Genesis’ tale of man’s becoming master of the animals. The first narrative of Genesis tells how God creates the animals and how he then creates man in his likeness; man is given authority over the animals. Only in the second narrative of Genesis does God have man (not woman) name the animals that were created before him. Derrida interprets this as God’s will to give animals an example of the power of man who was created in his image. This narrative is questioned by the gaze of the animal, reminding humans that animals existed before being named by them, and even before the human came into being (see The Animal 15–18). Derrida reads grands récits like Genesis as attempts to immunize the human insofar as they seek to instal a solid border between the human and the non-human. However, this very immunizing movement threatens to infect the human with the non-human: the human needs the animal to define itself and therefore has to include it in its self-definition. This is why animality continually threatens to take over the concept of the human (see The Animal 24, 47, 54–57). Derrida calls narratives such as Genesis ‘autobiographies of the human’, including in the genre philosophy’s answers to the ‘question of the animal’ since Greek antiquity. For Derrida, autobiography is an act of auto-­ affection, which occurs when the affecting agent is also the affected. Auto-­ affection is necessarily hetero-affection: when I think about myself, I can only do so by admitting a minimal distance between me and the self I am thinking about. The ‘I’ is split into subject and object. Derrida explains what this means for autobiographies of the human and their relation to the non-human: “If the auto-position, the automonstrative autotely of the ‘I’, even in the human, implies the ‘I’ to be an other that must welcome within itself some irreducible hetero-affection […], then this autonomy of the ‘I’ can be neither pure or rigorous: it would not be able to form the basis for a simple and linear differentiation of the human from the animal”

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(The Animal 95). Derrida exploits the ambiguity of the statement that man ‘follows’ the animal to illustrate the paradox that man has to include the animal in his autobiography in order to separate himself from it: man is ‘after’ the animal in the hunt but also comes into the world ‘after’ it. Autobiographies of the human hide their attempt at immunizing the human against its other—its writing a trace of itself for itself—behind the ‘I’. On the one hand, these autobiographies claim to present the truth about this ‘I’, namely to be in accordance with a scene of witnessing, and on the other hand they decline all responsibility because that truth is, from all beginnings, only the ‘I’s truth and not a quotation from others, that is, the following of other traces. Coetzee’s narrative revisions of such grands récits involve performing, through characters entangled in plots, their inherent contradictions and underlying motives, but differ more markedly by pitting alternative narratives against them. If Derrida answers the fiction of Genesis with an unravelling of the hidden motives behind its arbitrary hierarchy, Coetzee fills the vacuum left by exploded myth with alternative versions that demonstrate the arbitrariness of the original narrative and at the same time invite the reader to picture a truth between or beyond the original as well as its revision. It is a mark of Coetzee’s seriousness, or realism, that he insists on submitting his own convictions to the same critique, even if acknowledging his own narrative’s entanglement with culture and embodiedness necessitates the affirmation of the authorial voice. As Clarkson has shown, he acknowledges that, despite all narrative strategies to thwart the attribution of opinions, beliefs and attitudes to speakers and listeners, writers and readers, the writing still is a product of the authorial voice (see J. M. Coetzee 97). In a critical remark on Bakhtin in Stranger Shores (2001), Coetzee explains why dialogism does not render the category of the author redundant. What is missing in Bakhtin, he writes, is the acknowledgement “that the dialogism as exemplified in the novels of Dostoevsky is a matter not of ideological position, still less of novelistic technique […] Dostoevskyan dialogism grows out of Dostoevsky’s own moral character, out of his ideals, and out of his being as a writer” (SS 145–46). The decentring of the authorial voice in dialogism does not relieve the author of personal involvement and accountability, but to the contrary is a mark of his integrity because he does not exempt himself from the test of convictions to which he submits those of opposing viewpoints. Coetzee’s narratives show how contingent cultural or personal beliefs are, but it is precisely their respon-

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siveness to countervoices that affirms the singularity of the authorial voice (see Clarkson, J.  M. Coetzee 105). Clarkson takes Coetzee’s critique of Bakhtin at face value when she reads an ethical motive into his reaffirmation of the authorial voice. As I have shown, this ethics is anchored in a deeper concern with anthropological realism. The experimenter cannot be subtracted from the experiment but is, realistically speaking, part of that which he tests.

The Posthumanism of Coetzee’s Revisions My focus throughout this study will be on Coetzee’s literary performances of revising the human, rather than on extracting what could be formulated as a philosophy or an anthropology. It cannot be extracted without loss: this is what Elizabeth Costello contends, as I will show. Assembling a list of revisions would only present the reader with a collection of bones, torn from a living body immersed in an ongoing history. It takes narrative to come to terms with the embodiedness and embeddedness of the human, and turning Coetzee’s fictions into an anthropological digest would rob them of their claim to truthfulness. I will therefore attempt to analyse Coetzee’s literary performances of revision without tearing the narrative fabric entirely apart. I will attempt to explain in terms sufficiently general to be intelligible while conveying as much of the narrative’s singularity as possible—its sequence of events, characters, form, and verbal texture—to prevent my own discourse from knotting into philosophical abstraction. I find that this is what Elizabeth Costello implies literary criticism can and ought to do. Whether this study fulfils this potential, only the reader can decide. I have already argued that Coetzee does not present a coherent sketch of the human, and as generalization comes at the price of truthfulness, my analyses of the novels’ strategies of revising the human will remain the primary results of this study. Conscious that the following generalizations can only prepare and supplement the analyses, I will now consider the broader context of contemporary conceptualizations of the human. A secondary, significant goal is to understand how Coetzee engages with contemporary discourses of the human and to identify in this engagement a direction that is not necessarily indicated by each novel’s compass. Like Michael K, the novels invite and actively resist classification. They approach the human by tending towards a particular combination of philosophical and literary models—provided by Diogenes, Kleist, Kafka,

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Beckett, and others—and are equipped with barbs designed to prevent appropriation by these models. Two of the most prominent cases of claiming Coetzee for social movements and philosophies illustrate this: readings that explain the novels as interventions in support of animal liberation and as examples of Lévinasian ethics. It is true that the Australian citizen and author J.M.  Coetzee is a public advocate of animal liberation, and that Lévinas is a palpable influence in several of his novels. However, the novels do not all fit with the concerns of these movements or philosophies, and even those that seem to, do not do so in all their parts. The end of Disgrace, so cynical in the colloquial as well as the philosophical sense, is hard to reconcile with the tenets of animal liberation, with Lévinas or even with Elizabeth Costello’s “The Lives of Animals”. Coetzee draws and even depends on Kafka and Beckett but modifies, complicates, and reverses their narrative logic (e.g., in a reversal of motivation in the reworking of Kafka’s “The Burrow” in Life & Times of Michael K). Deconstruction clearly influences Coetzee’s fictions, but it does so without making the novels any more Derridean than they are cynical in the tradition of Diogenes of Sinope. The novels’ built-in evasiveness is the main reason that the major affinities and differences between Coetzee’s revisions of the human and contemporary philosophical and anthropological discussions are seen only from a bird’s eye view of distant reading that blurs the details of the particular work. Coetzee, the writer, is then seen as partaking in a slow process only half visible to those involved. “Geese fly in echelon” (D 68), David Lurie observes after he has left the circumscribed horizon of Cape Town for the uplands of the Eastern Cape: they move in coordinated patterns beyond their control, leading and being led. Unavoidably and at most half-consciously, Coetzee, too, is part of intellectual shifts in which movement is as much effect as cause and in which individuals are as much themselves as parts of the flock’s collective intelligence. Posthumanism and the Shift from (Post)structuralism Towards Practice Theory Seen from this perspective, Coetzee is part of two co-evolving developments. The first is posthumanism. Posthumanism has been a development rather than a stance and existed in practice long before it became known as an intellectual agenda. It originates from nineteenth-century critiques of the classical, autonomous subject of Enlightenment humanism, beginning

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perhaps with Charles Darwin’s relegation of human reason to one tool for survival among many, Karl Marx’s demonstration that the material world determines the scope of the human mind, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s and Sigmund Freud’s diagnoses that reason has no insight into the biological and psychological foundations which influence it.5 Darwin’s, Marx’s, Nietzsche’s, and Freud’s critiques of human autonomy and reason not only usher in a deepening scepticism about human powers that comes to be reflected in some of Modernism’s formal innovations (e.g., fragmentation, decline of omniscient narration) but also make it harder to argue for a radical dissimilarity of humans and animals. The development leads, in the twentieth century, to the diminished subject of constructivism, where the human is robbed of self-sufficient reasoning and free agency and stands nude, as it were, while clinging to the shreds of lost authority. The movement continues to the explicit dismantling of the hierarchy between humans and animals that is now called posthumanism, where the human is decentred in relation to non-human life and accepts itself as animal amongst animals. In the sense in which I will use the term, posthumanism does not claim the human to have given way to a technologically enhanced form of being—this would be the claim of transhumanism—but considers the place of the human after humanism. Posthumanist thinkers as different as Heidegger, Agamben, Derrida, Cary Wolfe, and Matthew Calarco all argue for a change in the description of the human rather than in the human itself.6 Before I consider Coetzee’s relation to different posthumanist thinkers, I must turn to the second, interrelated development of which Coetzee is part and which concerns shifts in the methodologies of philosophical and social inquiry and their effects on literary representation. These shifts have had consequences for the assessment of the human but also for other fields and came to bear upon the development towards posthumanism when the materialist paradigm in social thought gave way to constructivism. They entered a new phase in the late twentieth century as (post)structuralist theories were superseded by theories of practice that bypassed the realism/constructivism and nature/culture binarisms of both earlier accounts. They let go of what Coetzee’s autrebiography Youth (2002) calls the “either-or” (Y 160) and sought to embrace unified natures-­ cultures reminiscent of the “and-or” (Y 160) desired by Youth’s protagonist John. John fears that working as a programmer will lock him irreversibly in the binary logic of “either-or” and bemoans that “either-or” replaced “and-or” at some point in history. One of Coetzee’s concerns in

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his fiction has been to put the “and-or” back into thought, and to go beyond the oppositions of nature/culture and essentialism/constructivism. As Andreas Reckwitz has shown, Marx, Simmel, and Durkheim still held that the material world produced all cultural phenomena and that the human could be explained in all respects by material factors. In the twentieth century, (post)structuralists like Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, and Derrida reversed the direction of explanation by arguing that the material is only relevant as symbolic representation of the material; the supposedly natural is decoded as culturally constructed, and things only exist as constructed symbolic items featuring in particular interactions and discourses. Nevertheless, the opposition between nature and culture still holds. Two forms of constructivism can be discerned: mentalism and textualism. In Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism, for example, the symbolic orders are unconscious codes that reside in the mental sphere (see Structural Anthropology 1–27). On the other hand, the early Foucault of The Order of Things and Archaeology of Knowledge as well as the Roland Barthes of Mythologies conceive of the symbolic order as textual: the human is shaped by linguistic signs independent of the mind. Both approaches are Kantian in that they differentiate between a social world of representations and a material world of things as such (see Reckwitz, “The Status of the ‘Material’” 202–06). Coetzee’s Dusklands shows a particularly strong affinity with both mentalist and textualist constructivism. This is apparent in its reliance on Barthes and Boas in anthropological inquiry and in its reflections on the relationship between myth, madness, and history. It is significant, however, that in this early work, the bodies of the protagonists resist full assimilation into mentalist or textualist orders. Read with Coetzee’s later fiction in mind, the body already gestures beyond structuralism’s and poststructuralism’s critique. This gesture beyond mentalist and textualist (post)structuralism becomes more pronounced from Waiting for the Barbarians onwards (with its exploration of the magistrate’s and the barbarian girl’s tortured bodies). Here and in the later works, textualism is complemented and critiqued by a view of the human that gives precedence to the body. Even Foe, a work concerned with authorship and discursive textualism to an extreme degree, contains a thoroughgoing discussion of the body. Coetzee’s characteristic poetic of testing, now fully operative, critiques and qualifies (post)structuralism’s constructivism. The following pattern emerges: whenever there are traces of (post)structuralism in Coetzee, he debunks classical notions of the autonomous subject of reason as myth,

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and in each case, this debunking is balanced against a body that serves, in Coetzee’s words, as a “standard” (DP 248). It is thus not theory that provides the standard, or measure, but the human body. Foe, for example, unfolds a scenario in which all characters are ‘written’ by one another, and in which power determines whose account will finally be read. The novel seems highly compatible with discourse analysis when it deconstructs Western ideas of the human as ideologies built upon arbitrary assumptions. At the same time, the staging of the protagonists’ bodies—in this case particularly Friday’s mute body—highlights that the main problem of (post)structuralist theories of the subject is that they rely on an overly intellectualized idea of the human while presupposing a human body that is always already different from the animal’s. Only in this way is the subject always already human. On the one hand, there tends to be an unacknowledged human/animal distinction and thus an unacknowledged philosophical realism with regard to nature, while, on the other hand, there is a disembodied constructivism with regard to culture—an inadmissible double standard in asymmetric approaches to nature and culture (see Latour, We Have Never Been Modern 24–27). The representations of poststructuralism, referring only to other representations, are not even mental phenomena but exist in disembodied language.7 This is what Life & Times of Michael K finds wanting when K escapes all camps and categories provided by power’s hegemonic discourse. It is not by coincidence that the novel’s revaluation of the body— in its exploration of the minimal human—takes a further step towards a full-fledged posthumanism. By highlighting the centrality of the body to the human and showing the importance of discourse to have been exaggerated, Coetzee’s novels critique the implicit anthropocentrism of poststructuralism—specifically, its focus on representations to be made sense of by a human consciousness that might as well be disembodied. When Coetzee started publishing his novels in the 1970s, he found himself in an intellectual climate where structuralism and a budding ­poststructuralism had left the human diminished and decentred. A more explicit posthumanism was already written on the wall (see Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? xii), but Coetzee’s novels hint that deconstructing the human pretence to mental superiority is not enough. The positive part of revaluing the human body and its relation to the animal is missing in Lévi-­ Strauss, Foucault, Lacan, and the Derrida of that time and will be sufficiently supplied neither by the later Foucault nor by Judith Butler (see Reckwitz, “The Status of the ‘Material’” 206). The question of where to

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locate the body is the nexus in which Coetzee’s posthumanist agenda and his dissatisfaction with constructivism meet. When Waiting for the Barbarians and Life & Times of Michael K engage overtly with this challenge posed by the body, they imply a critique of those posthumanists who cling to an asymmetric anthropology in which nature matters only insofar as it is represented in discourse. At the same time, the novels suggest less radical revisions of the human than do Donna Haraway (Primate Visions; Simians, Cyborgs and Women; When Species Meet) and Katherine Hayles (How We Became Posthuman). In the late 1980s and the 1990s, Haraway and Hayles proposed posthumanist approaches that highlight the prosthetic nature of the human in order to deconstruct universalist claims about humanity. Coetzee emphasizes the amalgamation of human and animal in the human, but little in his fiction suggests that the hybrid character of the human can also be prosthetic in nature—the only exception being Rayment’s crutches in Slow Man. Elaborating the concept of the cyborg, Haraway and Hayles initially suggested that the inanimate and the human are not mutually exclusive. Like other recent thinkers of posthumanism, however, they have since shifted their attention to the question of the human’s relation to the animal. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello, published around the turn of the millennium, address the human/animal distinction most directly and could be seen as symptomatic of this larger trend in posthumanism—had Coetzee’s earlier novels not already been invested in this concern. For posthumanist theory, meanwhile, the shift from cyborgs to animals has meant that the genealogy of posthumanism itself now becomes traceable to the beginnings of Western philosophy and particularly to Aristotle’s definition of the human as a composite of human and animal parts. The human was never as remote from the animal as Enlightenment humanism suggested.8 Agamben spells out this genealogy of posthumanism when he argues that politics has always been biopolitics, targeting the bare life of humans in the same way in which animal life is produced and processed. He shows that, from Aristotle on, the human has been conceived as a hybrid of purely human parts and parts shared with animals, and that the boundary drawn between exclusively human and animal composites within the human has been the instrument of biopolitics. My reading of Life & Times of Michael K will demonstrate the extent to which the novel seems to anticipate this diagnosis while thwarting any reading that wishes to accommodate the singularity of Odradek-like K in Agamben’s account of the human.

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A consistent feature of Coetzee’s revisions of the human is that they challenge the alleged superiority of the human. The question is thus not whether Coetzee’s fictions are posthumanist but what kind of posthumanism they embody. I suggest that ‘Cynical posthumanism’ best captures the general thrust of Coetzee’s revisions because he contests the hierarchies inherent in traditional human/animal distinctions—not only in Life & Times of Michael K, Disgrace, and Elizabeth Costello but also, though more obliquely, in Dusklands, In the Heart of the Country, Waiting for the Barbarians, and Foe. One must remember that posthumanism continues Cynicism’s deflation of human pretensions to superiority and that ancient Cynicism was as concerned with rehabilitating the body as with humiliating the human mind. I see Coetzee’s revisions of the human taking their place in that same tradition when I read him as rehabilitating the body from the disgrace of Descartes’ asymmetric account of the human. This is not to deny that other influences are at play in Coetzee’s poetic of testing. One could argue that a revaluation of the body could just as well draw on Montaigne, and even on the Christian doctrine that in Christ, God formed a union not only with a higher faculty of the human, but that he accepted human life in its corporeality and mortality, excluding no part from salvation.9 Such thought is not alien to Coetzee, whose vocabulary of grace and confession constantly gestures towards the religious. Coping with a crippled body that retains the memory of wholeness, Slow Man’s Paul Rayment faces what feels to him like an afterlife. The Childhood of Jesus pictures a rebirth with a new, unmarked body without memory in what appears to be a civitas Dei as much as a rudimentary nation-state. Christian accounts of the human do not fit posthumanism’s critique of the divine creation of man, but Coetzee’s poetic of testing allows room for these accounts, even if neo-Cynical revaluations of the body in Nietzsche’s tradition play a greater role.10 One of the most important theoretical challenges for posthumanism today is how to approach the human/animal relation once the binarism is divested of hierarchy. One possibility is to adopt an ecocritical perspective. Ecocriticism can be said to depend on posthumanism’s decentring of the human, but it focuses on ecology. Ecology is the science of the interdependence (rather than hierarchy) of all forms of life in ecosystems (see Garrard, Ecocriticism 5), where ecosystem means a genuine intermingling of parts in which there are no discrete entities (see Evernden, “Beyond Ecology” 93). Whereas posthumanism focuses on the position of the individual human or non-human animal after humanism, ecocriticism ­

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considers “the biospheric and indeed planetary conditions without which human life, much less humane letters, could not exist. Ecocriticism thus claims as its hermeneutic horizon nothing short of the literal horizon itself” (Tucker, “From the Editors” 505). This planetary scope is much wider than Coetzee’s, whose novels show little concern with plant life or environmental pollution. When they break down hierarchies between the human and animals, and when they suggest that our treatment of animals must change, the novels do so by pointing to ethical demands issued by individual non-human animals, not by invoking ecological arguments of interdependence. Coetzee’s revisions of the human might further the ecocritical “project of reorienting literary-critical thinking toward more serious engagement with nonhuman nature” (Buell, The Future of Ecological Criticism 90). Generally, however, his novels show greater affinity with posthumanism than with ecocriticism. This becomes particularly clear if we consider the novels in the light of the five most important movements within ecocriticism (see Garrard, Ecocriticism 16–32). Environmentalism—the first of these movements—is often accused by ecocritics of valuing the environment only as far as it benefits human life, and it plays no part in Coetzee’s posthumanism. Deep ecology, by contrast, claims that nature has an intrinsic value. While Coetzee’s novels concur in the case of animals, they do not support deep ecology’s central claim: that all parts of the environment are equally worthy of protection because their mutual interdependence is what sustains the ecosystem. For better or worse, the horizon of Coetzee’s novels remains the individual human or non-human animal, each one of which is inherently more valuable than trees and ponds. Social ecology and Eco-­ Marxism are hardly more compatible with Coetzee’s posthumanism, for they presuppose an anthropocentrism and base their claims on the idea that environmental ills are side effects of human domination of other humans, rather than effects of anthropocentric attitudes. Heideggerian eco-philosophy makes much of the philosopher’s argument that humans are responsible for the ‘earth’, which in their hands becomes a ‘world’, and that they have a duty to let things ‘disclose themselves’ in their own inimitable way, rather than forcing them into meanings and identities that suit humans’ instrumental values. Coetzee draws on Heidegger’s critique of the human as a principally rational (rather than practically engaged) being. He takes issue, however, with Heidegger’s claims that the animal is ‘poor in world’ and that the human body differs from the animal’s because the human can interrupt and reflect on his or her animality. Heidegger’s

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thoughts on earth and world, however, lending themselves easily as they do to ecocritical readings, seem to have left no traces in Coetzee’s novels. Finally, ecofeminists like Greta Gaard (“New Directions for Ecofeminism”) and Val Plumwood (Feminism and the Mastery of Nature) point out that women are routinely associated with nature and men with culture, and that the anthropocentrism that legitimated human domination of nature went along with an androcentrism legitimating the suppression of women. We find similar mechanisms of domination in Coetzee’s fiction, but almost always couched in racial and colonial terms, for example when Jacobus Coetzee pictures Hottentots as animals. There is only one notable exception: David Lurie’s descriptions of his daughter Lucy and of other women are indeed reminiscent of the terms criticized by ecofeminists. While these comparisons show Coetzee’s revisions to have little in common with ecocriticism, ecofeminism throws into relief how his revisions of the human tend to be revisions of man. Only In the Heart of the Country and Age of Iron—two novels less concerned, by Coetzeean standards, with the question of the human—adopt a sustained female perspective. In Foe, Susan Barton’s voice is constantly challenged by her male ‘foe’, and the narratives about Elizabeth Costello are often focalized through men (her son John in “The Lives of Animals”, Paul Rayment in Slow Man). It could be argued that Coetzee is reluctant to inhabit female characters because he wants to avoid patronizing—he is likewise reluctant to inhabit black African characters. But this does not change the fact that Coetzee’s revisions of the human sit on a narrow basis, given the notable lack in his novels of voices that are not male or white. Adopting an ecocritical perspective is not the only option for posthumanism once the human/animal relation is divested of hierarchy, and it is illuminating to consider Coetzee against the background of alternative theoretical choices. Among recent contributions to posthumanism, including those of Derrida, Martha Nussbaum, and Cora Diamond,11 two features stand out. One is the claim that embodiment and mortality make humans morally obligated fellow creatures of animals. The other is that an animal ethics has to be founded on this shared ground rather than on the particular capabilities of either humans or animals. It bears repetition that posthumanism does not suggest that we are ‘after’ the human in the sense that we are about to transcended embodiment. Cary Wolfe, for example, explicitly calls for renewed attention to embodiment and to the specific materiality of the subject in order to consider humans and animals on equal terms (see Zoontologies xiii). He argues

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that one of humanism’s mistaken assumptions is that the human is achieved by repressing not just its animal origins in nature but “by transcending the bonds of materiality and embodiment altogether” (What Is Posthumanism? xv). My readings will present ample evidence of Coetzee’s focus on embodiment and on the ethical implications of the fact that humans and animals share embodiment and mortality. In fact, Coetzee’s fiction has inspired and influenced ethical approaches by philosophers like Diamond and Raimond Gaita (see Diamond, “Difficulty” 46–56; Gaita, The Philosopher’s Dog 35–37, 45–48). Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello make the ethical implications of shared embodiment most explicit, suggesting that the Cynicism of Coetzee’s posthumanism does not stand in opposition to ethics. On the contrary, it is precisely humans’ and animals’ shared animality that serves as the ground for ethics. But Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello also illustrate a danger inherent in posthumanist conceptualizations of embodiment. As these conceptualizations justify the ethical obligations of humans towards animals, they associate the body almost always one-sidedly with pain and mortality. Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am exemplifies this tendency, and in Coetzee, too, suffering and mortality outweigh embodiment’s pleasures and other benefits. The lesson “On Eros” in Elizabeth Costello makes this tension explicit in its playful discussion of mortals’ and immortals’ mutual envy, but it might take a posthumanist like Alphonso Lingis to help us appreciate more fully the moments scattered throughout Coetzee’s novels in which embodiment reveals its positive side (see “Animal Body, Inhuman Face” 165–72, 180–82). Bodily experiences of the erotic and of food grant moments of bliss to the magistrate, to Michael K, and to others. These moments of jouissance, if not of transcendence, reveal the Enlightenment subject to be an overly intellectualized idea of the human no less than they demonstrate how the body limits the autonomy of reason. The same critique applies to poststructuralism’s subject caught in the textual grid of discourses. Lingis’ reflections on posthumanism can ­demonstrate how skilfully Waiting for the Barbarians and Disgrace in particular teach this lesson. These novels feature protagonists of considerable reflective powers who experience the limits their bodies pose to their minds in pain as well as in erotic impulses that they are unwilling or unable  to control. Only occasionally has Coetzee given prominence to embodiedness as a source not merely of pain and suffering, but also of joy and of moments that can be called epiphanies of secular grace. The Schooldays of Jesus portrays dance as a medium that bridges immanence and

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transcendence, and validates, through the unlikely medium of the body, definitions of the human reminiscent of Christian theology and Romantic aesthetics. Some posthumanists have proposed that the human/animal distinction should be abandoned altogether for the sake of a fairer treatment of animals (see, e.g., Calarco, Zoographies 149). Others deny the superiority of the human but insist that biological and/or cultural differences between humans and animals matter. Amongst this group of theorists and scientists, one faction sees only a gradual difference between humans and animals, whereas the other claims an essential difference by singling out a capability that is exclusively human.12 There have also been attempts to find a middle ground between both camps by arguing that no single capability differentiates the human from animals but a different (neither more complex nor better) combination of the same capabilities, a specific way of organizing and living with them (see Midgley, “Human Nature” 53–63). Coetzee’s suggestion that humans’ and animals’ shared embodiment has ethical consequences evidently does not prompt him to collapse the human/animal distinction. There are instances in his fiction where singularly human traits seem to be identified: for example, when Slow Man suggests that if there is a difference between human and non-human animals, it might consist in the fact that not all animals are prosthetic creatures, or when Elizabeth Costello claims that only humans can denude themselves and behave ethically (hence the term ‘humane’) (see EC 147–55). Yet such identifications are immediately subjected to the dynamic of testing that is the heartbeat of Coetzee’s fiction and are played off against other points of view. Derrida claims that there is no single capability that all humans but no animals possess, yet he still insists that considering human and non-human animals as indistinct would be a mistake (see The Animal 30). Coetzee likewise preserves the distinction despite his general undermining of human singularity. However, while deconstruction crosses out one certainty after another by pointing out inherent contradictions, Coetzee’s narrative makes alternative views clash, forcing the reader to pass judgement. My readings will demonstrate that these clashes tend to qualify ideas of the human, rather than collapse them into each other or into the idea of the animal. Instead of bluntly arguing reason away, for example, Coetzee’s fictions diminish it: for example, when they suggest that reason and language might be specifically human ways of approaching, taxing, and understanding the world but have no intrinsic value that justifies ­hierarchies

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between humans and animals; or when they show reason’s operations to be qualified by embodiment and embeddedness in historically informed interests (this is explicit in Elizabeth Costello and implicit in Diary of a Bad Year, where JC’s opinions are revealed to be unwillingly informed by former experiences and by desire). Particularly Coetzee’s later fictions critically test the posthumanist tenet that the human is a prosthetic creature co-evolving with various non-human forms of technicity and materiality (see Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? xxv). In Slow Man, Paul Rayment, having lost a leg, resists wearing a prosthesis lest he also lose his authenticity. The novel is sceptical of some posthumanists’ view that humans can construct their own bodies, but it allows for the reading that Rayment’s emphasis on origins and authenticity is pregnant with irony because the prosthesis could also be said to restore, rather than alter, Rayment’s body. Coetzee’s works also leave room for the view that the difference between humans and animals “may indeed start out as a biological difference, but [that] it becomes something for human thought through being taken up and made something of—by generations of human beings, in their practices, their art, their literature, their religion,” practices that enable us to “imaginatively read into animals” expectations that originate in the human (Diamond, “Experimenting on Animals” 351). Disgrace shows how a tradition of animal sacrifice has shaped the human image of the animal, which reflects back on the human’s own animality and suggests an aspect of self-sacrifice in Lurie’s becoming-animal. Waiting for the Barbarians and Life & Times of Michael K demonstrate, in a vein largely compatible with Agamben, that such traditions are not contingent but an essential part of politics: in targeting the bare life of citizens, politics has increasingly focused on biopolitics. Definitions and narratives of the animal codetermine the ways in which humans are subjected to biopolitics, since the animal serves as a template for bare life. Coetzee’s Cynical ­posthumanism, it is fair to conclude, exhibits parallels with a number of posthumanisms but remains idiosyncratic. Engaged Agency and Symmetric Anthropology I return once more to the observation that, as Coetzee grasps the problem of the body at its material root as well as at the level of its discursive representation (the level given too much weight by poststructuralism), his oeuvre follows a shift from poststructuralist constructivism to a view of the human that bridges the nature/culture, materialist/idealist, and realist/

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constructivist divides. The latter view characterizes recent practice theories and informs Bruno Latour’s symmetric anthropology, which I will shortly discuss. The late Foucault and Butler admit that mentalism and textualism are too one-dimensionally geared towards the intellectual aspect of the human, privileging reason and propositional knowledge while side-lining embodied non-propositional knowledge that cannot be fully explained. The best tennis player could not adequately explain how to play tennis, and it is almost impossible to explain how to tie a shoelace—whereas it is easy to show someone how to do it. The body is not an instrument for executing mental acts; the human is the body in practice and performance. Embodiedness and embeddedness—the terms so important for Coetzee— do not originate from practice theory but they reflect its insight that epistemology can neither be purged of the body nor of practices shaped by history and politics. In this light, reading Elizabeth Costello’s performances in various academies is an exercise in practice theory. While her body has a say in her argument, the practices of reasoning in which she is embedded inflect the bodily performance of her lectures even if she wants to break with protocol (and rationality altogether). If, in their concern with history, Dusklands and In the Heart of the Country are steeped in the (post)structuralist emphasis on discourse, and if they already feature bodies resisting being dissolved in discourse and history, it is with The Master of Petersburg that history appears in truly embodied form for the first time. That novel’s exploration of the generation as a hybrid of nature and culture is a step in overcoming the nature/culture divide and the corresponding object/subject binarism. The idea of embodied history returns in Disgrace in the vicissitudes of Lurie’s erotic desire that is as much bodily as it is conditioned by apartheid and its prehistory, reaching back to the origin of the Coloureds in the Dutch settlement of Southern Africa’s Cape. It is impossible to discuss Coetzee’s bridging of the nature/culture and subject/object divides without referring to Heidegger, who prepared the ground for modern practice theories as well as for Latour’s symmetrical anthropology. Focusing on humans’ engaged agency, Heidegger was the first to offer a proper alternative to the human as disengaged thinker. The first part of Being and Time (1927) contains Heidegger’s account of the specific ways in which humans are always already involved in material practices (see 49–83) and puts into doubt the assumption that the world is divided into two substances, matter and mind. Heidegger argues that epistemology, as the bridging of the gap between both, is not the human’s

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principal task and insists that philosophy should start with humans’ quotidian commerce with things. When a man puts on clothes, for example, he does not know the clothes primarily as something represented; the clothes are as much part of implicit knowledge as the movements of his legs, his arms, and his hands. Humans are embedded in such goal-oriented practices involving things before they can take an abstracting view that considers clothes as clothes, a pen as a pen, and so on. These goal-oriented practices involve knowing-how that must reside in the body and the practice in which that body is presently involved.13 Both body and practice form the background of human thought and action. This background is, in Charles Taylor’s words, “that of which I am not simply unaware […] because it makes intelligible what I am uncontestably aware of; but at the same time I cannot be said to be explicitly or focally aware of it, because that status is already occupied by what it is making intelligible” (“Engaged Agency” 325). In order to understand the thoughts or actions of a human being, it is necessary to have a sense of what it means to be a body in specific, historically contingent practices. One needs to share knowing-how that cannot be explicated, as explication makes sense only by referring to the background of the body and the social context. It is illuminating to compare the anthropological revisions performed by Coetzee’s fictions with Heidegger’s “Letter on ‘Humanism’”, which combines Heidegger’s thoughts on human being-in-the-world with a critique of humanism. Sharing a number of concerns with the “Letter”, Elizabeth Costello disagrees with some of its most important claims. Heidegger finds fault with the metaphysical definition of man as animal rationale, criticizing both parts of the term. Taking into consideration how different the forms of humanism can be in the original Roman humanism (introducing the animal rationale), in Christianity, in Marxism, and in the positive sciences, Heidegger argues that these definitions all rely on unquestioned, metaphysical interpretations of nature, history and the world. Not only do they fail to clarify the relationship between being and human existence, they also serve to prevent this question from being asked. In this view, metaphysics resembles the whole of philosophy as characterized by Diamond: it deflects human attention from a reality that  is excessively difficult to grasp (see Heidegger, “Letter on ‘Humanism’” 245–47). Elizabeth Costello shares Heidegger’s critique of ratio as self-reflexive and instrumental reason when she critiques Wolfgang Köhler’s experiments on apes, or when she insists on the embodiedness of human thought.

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She debunks reason as a metaphysically posited false essence of the human. But whereas Costello concludes that this fetishization of reason creates an artificial limit between humans and animals to hide their shared animalitas, Heidegger argues that the term animal rationale uncritically presupposes the self-reflexivity of the human qua reason and the animality of the human. Heidegger argues that by the time of Roman humanism the definition of the human via animalitas had been taken for granted. The human had been assigned its place between god and animal in the tripartite Aristotelian model and had thereby been relegated to one amongst several forms of beings (see “Letter on ‘Humanism’” 245–47). Instead of unnecessarily tying the human to the animal, Heidegger continues, philosophy should accept that only the human exists in the mode of ek-­ sistence: through language, the human becomes non-identical with being and is able to reflect on being in general (see 247–49). For Heidegger, self-reflection through language is the condition of the possibility of rationality, not vice versa. The human must not be defined by ratio narrowly understood as instrumental reason. Forms of languages that eschew logic and grammar (Heidegger champions Hölderlin’s poetry) give fuller scope to human reflection than a language fitted to a merely instrumental use of reason—domination of the world and of nature through technology— which constitutes a limitation and abuse of ratio (see 257–61). Costello’s critique of instrumental reason and her claims about non-rational language are evidently similar to Heidegger’s (she champions Ted Hughes’ poetry). Heidegger wants to go back before Aristotle in order to think the human differently, and such a destruction of metaphysics is also undertaken by Costello. Both find fault with humanism but draw different conclusions in their respective revisions of the human. Blanche’s argument, in Elizabeth Costello, that the animal is the wrong point of comparison with the human (as the human must be defined in relation to the Christian God) brings home how theological Heidegger’s argument actually is, even though Heidegger does not argue for the human need for redemption or the immortality of the soul. When Heidegger conceives of the human as the ‘guardian of Being’, equipped with the ability to reflect on being, he puts the human in a God-like position. Heidegger’s association of the human with God is possible only because on the question of the body a deep gap divides him from the otherwise quite Heideggerian Costello. This divide is all the more interesting as both agree that human immersion in practices precedes disengaged thinking. For Costello, this immersion is first and foremost bodily. If Costello points

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out that God and the human have been conceived as sharing reason, the difference consisting only in degree (see EC 67), her critique of reason results in dissociating the human from God and recognizing humans’ and animals’ shared embodiment. Heidegger, by contrast, defines worldly immersion in a way that attempts to bypass the materiality of the body. For him, human ek-sistence renders the human body different from the bodies of animals (see “Letter on ‘Humanism’” 247–49). Empiricism may mystify us, warns Heidegger, but we must not be mistaken. Humans feel empirically akin to the animal in the sense that we have bodies that the sciences find no different from animal bodies, and yet we are entitled to feel conceptually dissimilar from animals, for only humans ek-sist. The human is thus faced with what Diamond would call a difficulty of reality. In Heidegger’s words: Of all the beings that are, presumably the most difficult to think about are living creatures […]. However, it might also seem as though the essence of divinity is closer to us than what is so alien in other living creatures, closer, namely, in an essential distance that, however distant, is nonetheless more familiar to our ek-sistent essence than is our scarcely conceivable, abysmal bodily kinship with the beast. (“Letter on ‘Humanism’” 248)

Coetzee’s novels suggest that this thought is mistaken, as our body is precisely what allows us to conceive our “kinship with the beast”. It allows us to sympathetically imagine their vulnerability, pain, and mortality. What is “most difficult to think about” is mortality itself, not the thought that we share it with animals because we, too, have animal bodies. In fact, both Coetzee and Heidegger testify to the unhinging effect of thinking death. In Being and Time, Heidegger defines human existence in the world as hermeneutic: humans exist by understanding their being in the world and this understanding is guided by care for one’s existence (see 123–85). But, according to the second part of Being and Time, a complete account of human existence must include an account of its death. This leads to an impasse because death remains unintelligible until it is experienced, and experience ceases with death. Death is thus part of existence while resisting incorporation into it. It poses another ‘difficulty of reality’ and may be the critical juncture between the difficulties of reality and those of philosophy. We can only grasp death through what is graspable in our existence. In this way we can understand Costello’s simultaneous concealing and revealing of the wound of human life that is touched on in everything we

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do (see Mulhall, The Wounded Animal 99–101). When Costello wonders why no one else is disturbed by our treatment of animals, a Heideggerian would explain that our normal mode of existence entails deflecting attention from our mortality. If this is the case, our ignorance of what we share with non-human animals is the norm, and Costello exhibits the exceptional, that is, authentic, stance of being-towards-death when she denies herself all comforting illusions. However, neither in “Letter on ‘Humanism’” nor The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics does Heidegger concede that the human body is an animal body. Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello demonstrate strikingly that the decisive difference between Coetzee’s and Heidegger’s revisions of the human is that Coetzee considers human and animal bodies to be of the same kind. If Heidegger argues that the human must be defined by thinking the humanitas, not animalitas, of the homo humanus (see “Letter on ‘Humanism’” 268), Disgrace and Costello’s lectures can be read as rebuttals of Heidegger’s attempt to drive a wedge between the bodies of humans and animals, even if Coetzee’s hidden polemic with Heidegger is grounded in distant agreement. Heidegger and Coetzee thus point to different visions for posthumanism. Both criticize the conception of the human as animal rationale. But where Heidegger objects to its animality and redefines its rationality in non-instrumental terms, Coetzee attacks rationality and ‘cynically’ stresses the animality of the human. The most important affinity between Heidegger and Coetzee remains their foregrounding of practice and their critique of the human as reflecting subject. In Coetzee’s fictions, the body links the primacy of practice with the posthumanist association of human and animal. The body’s privileged position vis-à-vis the mind accounts both for Coetzee’s inclining the human towards the animal and for his stress on embodied knowledge that is relevant in practical versus propositional knowledge. If we look at more recent practice theories granting the body a similar position, Theodore Schatzki’s Social Practices (1996) seems to fit best. Schatzki takes his cue from sources highly compatible with Coetzee—Heidegger’s Being and Time and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations—and reinterprets these with a strong concept of the body. Schatzki sees practices, not subjects, at the centre of the social. A practice is “a temporally unfolding and spatially dispersed nexus of doings and sayings” (Social Practices 89) governed by a typified understanding of that practice. Typified understanding means not only rules but first of all implicit knowing-how. This definition rests on insights that are also central to Coetzee: that the human does not

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exist before practices but is always already embedded in them, and that practices are not first of all discourses but embodied knowledge: “Mind […] is the expressed of the body” (Social Practices 53), and the body is the expression of knowing-how that cannot be translated into propositional terms. According to Schatzki, there is no mental or textual structure behind historically contingent practices. We find the idea that the human embodies practices in which it is embedded most memorably staged in The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus, where David’s deep antipathy towards rules serves as a test of whether social life without common rules is possible. Training in the practices of a new form of life emerges as the only way of learning how to live with others because rules do not define all aspects of practices and because there is no lowest common denominator shared by all practices that would allow for deducing a stable rule. Slow Man, Diary of a Bad Year, and the Jesus novels all consider nationality as a set of such practices: nationality shapes humans as it entails social practices in which the human is embedded. This focus allows the novels to present an integrated view of nature and culture in the making of the human, as nationality informs the body through routinized practices while the body resists this routinization if it has previously been trained in other routines. Paul Rayment’s adjusting to his mutilated body is Coetzee’s most striking image for the process. His painful adjustment to a new nation with new practices illustrates, too, that practices may be routinized but not reliable. Schatzki argues that the knowledge needed for performing practices successfully is implicit knowing-­how in the body and in objects (see Social Practices 88–132). Things, such as Rayment’s crutches, are materialized understanding and become part of the body when used. Schatzki’s theory of practice and Coetzee’s revisions of the human converge in critiquing the mind/body dualism and reason-based conceptions of the human. But although Schatzki has a stronger notion of the body than Heidegger, his account does not clarify the body’s status in relation to the animal. This supports Reckwitz’s observation that practice theories as different as those of Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu, Laurent Thévenot, and Schatzki have shifted the focus from ‘subjects’ and ‘texts’ to ‘social practices’ in subtle ways but have insufficiently rethought the status of the non-human and the material within the social world (see “The Status of the ‘Material’” 210). This neglect concerns things, dealing with which constitutes a large part of social activity—but Coetzee helps us to see that it also concerns the body and the animal. His novels suggest

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that if practice theory wants to draw a more adequate picture of what it means to be human, then it must incorporate theories of materiality, and that if theories of materiality and practice theories parted ways some decades ago, it is time to think both together by considering the body as the link between the two. The most influential theory of materiality today is Bruno Latour’s symmetric anthropology. Using Heidegger’s idea that handling objects constitutes a large part of the social world, Latour approaches human as well as non-human actors in a non-hierarchical manner and seeks to abandon the matter/culture difference. He argues that the human is subjected not only to social factors and discourses but also to technological networks of which its own body is part. Many of these practices rely on artefacts that cannot be replaced by other artefacts; the possibility of actions is conditioned by things. Latour suggests that former theories’ neglect of the non-human is a structural characteristic of modernity. Modernity systematically de-­ materializes society, as it is only since its arrival that nature is explained without reference to the social, and the social without reference to nature. Nature and culture are purged of each other and constitute two separate ‘chambers’ although nature has always been socially constructed and society dependent on material factors. In other words, we have in fact never been modern (see We Have Never Been Modern 13–48). Latour calls for a consciously non-modern thinking that goes back before Enlightenment rationalism’s explicit dualism of nature and culture in which subjects (humans) and objects (things) were thought to exist independently of each other. Social theory must not consider the material world only in terms of representations. The human is not to be dissolved in words, language games, discourses. The human is no more in discourse than in nature—and cannot, vice versa, be completely described by science (see We Have Never Been Modern 137). Unduly prioritizing discourse leads either to a radical cultural relativism that reduces nature to contingent representations or to a Eurocentric universalism that acknowledges every culture’s own view of the external world but believes the West to have found in scientific empiricism a more adequate view than all others: in the end, all cultures will convert to the standard of scientific reason (see Reckwitz, “The Status of the ‘Material’” 208). Elizabeth Costello’s critique of Wolfgang Köhler’s testing for instrumental reason in apes lodges the latter critique against the measure of reason in speciesist terms. Her accusation is anthropocentrism, not Eurocentrism, when she argues that reason as a specialty of the human

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mind cannot serve as a measure of living beings. Coetzee shares Latour’s diagnosis that modernity mistakenly assumes instrumental reason to be a mode of thought that is not culturally conditioned but the natural way our minds work, and that modernity rests on the assumption that the West has discovered this fact whereas other cultures lack insight into it. Latour insists that reason is always culturalized. It only exists in natures-cultures and is no different from the systems of thought of Papua or Renaissance Europe (see We Have Never Been Modern 130–32). Coetzee repeatedly invokes Descartes’ mind/body dualism and the subsequent separations into subject/object and nature/culture, particularly in Dusklands, In the Heart of the Country, Elizabeth Costello, Slow Man, and the Jesus novels. This invocation fulfils a function analogous to Latour’s description of Thomas Hobbes’ and Robert Boyle’s quarrel over the adequate explanation of social and natural phenomena and its detrimental, specifically modern result of separating natural facts and social constructions (see We Have Never Been Modern 15–32). Both events in intellectual history mark the beginning of a modernity Latour and Coetzee want to move beyond by restarting from a position before its inception. Influenced by Heidegger’s dismantling of Western metaphysics and the archaeological method Foucault derived from it, both Latour and Coetzee believe that a revision of the human is only possible by revising modernity. They both associate modernity with the arrival of a humanism that relies on the exclusion of the non-human. When Latour demands that human and non-human actors be considered equally, he explicitly counts animals amongst those non-human actors: The ethnologist of our world must take her position as the common locus where roles, actions and abilities are distributed—those that make it possible to define one entity as animal or material and another as a free agent; one as endowed with consciousness, another as mechanical, and still another as unconscious and incompetent. Our ethnologist must even compare the always different ways of defining—or not defining—matter, law, consciousness and animals’ souls, without using modern metaphysics as a vantage point. (We Have Never Been Modern 15)

This also describes Coetzee’s attempt to situate humans and animals without recourse to metaphysical assumptions, that is, to consider them relationally rather than by positing an essence for each. Latour assumes that the same forces of natures-cultures act on humans and animals, which is

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why he can ask: “Where are the Mouniers of machines, the Lévinases of animals, the Ricoeurs of facts?” (We Have Never Been Modern 136). However, this question also points to Latour’s limitations. It is possible to demonstrate with Latour that things such as David Lurie’s pick-up truck or Michael K’s self-built cart make these characters’ ways of being possible in the first place and that these things are actors in this sense. But Latour claims that humans, animals, and things all possess the same kind of agency. Not only is it problematic to make no distinction between the agency of humans and things (see, e.g., Bloor, “Anti-Latour” 81–112), Latour also denies animals a specific kind of agency.14 While his ‘flat ontology’ is highly compatible with the ecological idea that all human and non-­ human actors in an ecosystem are equally important, a novel like Elizabeth Costello, dealing with the mass slaughter of animals at the hands of humans as well as with the influence of Costello’s ageing body on her thoughts, calls for a more nuanced approach to human and animal agency. Coetzee’s narrative explorations of the generation (The Master of Petersburg) and of sexual drive (Disgrace) provoke a rethinking of the nature/culture opposition along the lines of Latour, who claims that culture exists no more in itself than nature does and that there are only equally valid natures-­cultures (see We Have Never Been Modern 103–05). However, these explorations also suggest that animals, humans, and things possess specific kinds of agency and that the distinction between these kinds must principally be made on the grounds of the different practices in which these actors are involved. Further criticisms could be added.15 As I end this chapter, however, more important than spelling out how Coetzee’s novels intervene in the debate over the human is pointing out, once again, that they do in fact intervene in it. It is true that only a translation from narrative to theoretical representations of knowledge can make a fiction writer directly ­comparable to a theorist, and that such a translation necessarily comes at the cost of generalization and partial distortion. The reason why I have nevertheless attempted it here is that narrative and theory deal, if differently, with the same universe of ideas. I hope this study will show that if Coetzee’s revisions of the human along the lines of historical discoursepractices and the body have some plausibility, we should credit narrative with something that literary studies has until recently been reluctant to acknowledge: potential truthfulness. Truthfulness to what? To being a body, always and ever engaged in historical practices. In Taylor’s formulation: to that which I cannot simply not know because it makes intelligible

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what I am incontestably aware of, but of which I cannot be said to be explicitly aware because that status is already occupied by what it is making intelligible. It takes narrative to see that this is the human.

Notes 1. I draw on Tilmann Köppe’s and Simone Winko’s “Anthropologie der Literatur” (313–17) in my discussion of these different perspectives. 2. Kenneth Burke—one of Iser’s precursors in the field of literary anthropology—needs five attributes. In “The Definition of Man”, Burke sums up his main tenets and lists five characteristics of the human: use of symbols, use of negation and norms, separation from the environment by self-made instruments, striving for perfection, and hierarchical thinking (see 2–24). Burke sees literature as an archive of basic human motivations and actions. Burke’s deductive anthropology, as well as Northrop Frye’s theory of literary archetypes, are accounts of an inherently anthropological function of literature. Both attempt to distil ‘essentially human’ motifs and motivations from literary texts and to interpret literature itself as a record of these. Looking at literary history in a synoptic manner, Frye explains literary works as complications of a number of simple formulas that can be traced back to so-called primitive cultures (see Anatomy of Criticism 16–17). Coetzee’s revisions of the human fit neither Frye’s nor Burke’s approach to literary anthropology because his revisions are overt, self-reflexive, and often paradoxical. They deconstruct Eurocentric assumptions and, most importantly, do not seek to carry on traditions but to critique them. 3. I use the term ‘narrative’ rather than ‘literature’ because I am concerned with Coetzee’s novels in relation to narrative in general, not to literature as such. I believe, though, that the category of narrative is also central to genres other than prose (see footnote 3 in Chap. 1). 4. In this citation and in all following citations containing italics, the italics are part of the original text. They were not added by me [KW]. 5. For accounts of the early stages of posthumanism’s decentring of the human, see Burrow’s The Crisis of Reason and Evolution and Society, as well as Norris’ Beasts of the Imagination. 6. I follow Cary Wolfe’s differentiation between posthumanism and transhumanism (see What Is Posthumanism? xv–xxiii). Other substantial discussions of humanism versus posthumanism and transhumanism include Calarco, Zoographies 1–14, and Roden, Posthuman Life 9–34. 7. The early Derrida’s critique of the voice and his rehabilitation of writing in Of Grammatology is a relevant example.

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8. For an account of Enlightenment humanism, see Riedel, Subjekt und Individuum 53–145. Some Renaissance thinkers and artists, by contrast, had already pictured the human in proximity to the animal as they grappled with the elusiveness of the idea of the human. Machiavelli’s anti-humanist ideas on statesmanship, and particularly his advice to political leaders to emulate animals, are a case in point (see Höfele and Laqué, Humankinds 1–11). 9. The body’s eligibility to salvation has been central to Christianity ever since the second century AD when the early Christians, in order to give unity to the New Testament, excluded all writings that denied the full incarnation of God (see Theißen, Das Neue Testament 120–21). 10. For an account of affinities and differences between Coetzee and Nietzsche concerning the body and desire, see Dvorakova, “Coetzee’s Hidden Polemic with Nietzsche” 366–74. 11. Derrida (The Animal), Nussbaum (“Beyond ‘Compassion and Humanity’”), and Diamond (“The Difficulty of Reality”) all start from the tenet that shared embodiment, mortality, and finitude make us the fellow creatures of animals. They all argue against the usual human properties like language and reason as dividing factors and are claimed by Wolfe for the posthumanist project (see What Is Posthumanism? 62–63). 12. The problems of traditional taxonomies are discussed in Ereshefsky, The Poverty of the Linnaean Hierarchy. Wilson’s Species offers an interdisciplinary overview of recent debates on essentialism. 13. I write “must reside in the body” rather than “resides in the body” to indicate that I interpret rather than paraphrase Heidegger here: as I will show, Heidegger’s account attempts to bypass the body. 14. An example of this shortcoming is Latour’s justification of considering human and non-human actors equally in The Parliament of Things. Although Latour gives examples of animal agency, he insists that this agency is in no way different from that of things (see Politics of Nature 70–87). Like Latour, other theorists of materiality—notably the objectoriented new ontologists and new materialists—have attempted to introduce ‘flat ontologies’ that collapse the subject/object and nature/culture divides. Many of them take their cue from Thomas Nagel’s essay “What is it like to be a Bat?”, in which Nagel critically assesses the possibility of an objective ontology whose goal would be to describe “the subjective character of experiences in a form comprehensible to beings incapable of having these experiences” (see 449). The essay is likewise central for Elizabeth Costello who, in her lectures on “The Lives of Animals”, defends if not the possibility of an objective ontology then at least the possibility of the sympathetic imagination of alien experience. However, this possibility is put into question by the narratives embedding her lectures, where Costello has

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little sympathetic imagination regarding her son John and other humans close to her; Coetzee’s other fictions likewise evoke more failures than successful examples of sympathetic imagination. The new ontologists, however, try to reach an understanding of the non-human by extending Heidegger’s category of ‘Dasein’, reserved for the human in Heidegger, to everything that is (in Heidegger’s terms: to ‘Seinendes’; see Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, and Harman’s Tool Being and Guerrilla Metaphysics). The new materialism, including thing theory, chooses the opposite direction to understand the non-human world and see the human in a new, non-human light: it seeks to define the human as an object among other objects (see, e.g., Brown, A Sense of Things, and Grosz, Becoming Undone). 15. For example, in comparison to Coetzee’s novels’ constant concern with the body, Latour pays the body, paradigmatic hybrid of nature-culture, conspicuously less attention than other hybrids. A possible reason for this is that greater attention to the body would suggest a difference between the agency of humans and animals, which would both fall into the category ‘embodied’, and of the agency of things. Should not the body, it is possible to ask with Coetzee, serve as the conceptual link between Latour’s theory of materiality and practice theory?

CHAPTER 3

From Dehumanization to the Minimal Human

In a notebook that he kept while working on In the Heart of the Country, Coetzee writes in 1974 that history is “a stable but changing fiction of origins” and that “there is no reason why within a fiction one should subscribe to this myth. One may equally well construct a fiction against an historical background of a history which is one’s own fiction.”1 Coetzee is here defining history as a construction whose arbitrary nature should be laid bare rather than concealed by the novelist who chooses a supposedly historical setting for his narrative. The fact that the historical moment of In the Heart of the Country is obscured by references to horse-carts as the principal means of transportation, on the one hand, and airplanes, on the other, can be read as implementation of Coetzee’s reasoning. The notebook entry is suggestive beyond the scope of the novel, however, because it characterizes Coetzee’s approach to history in his earliest phase as a writer. In this phase, humanity is principally a myth, a discursive construction concealing its arbitrary nature—but only principally so. The unresolved paradoxicality of “stable but changing”, untypical of Coetzee’s published criticism, testifies to his unease about the supposedly absolute discursive malleability of history. It is this tension between the accidental and the essential that marks Coetzee’s first phase of revising the human—a tension in which the body, as ‘stable’ part of humanity, is gradually claiming more authority, from Dusklands to Life & Times of Michael K.2 Dusklands engages with the role of myth in Western constructions of  the human and the inhuman (‘Hottentots’, Vietnamese). Parodic © The Author(s) 2019 K. Wiegandt, J.M. Coetzee’s Revisions of the Human, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29306-2_3

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­ emystification of these historical constructions is the impulse animating d the novel. And yet, the bodies of the protagonists and their African and Asian Others partly resist the discourses that seek to subject them: a resistance to radical constructivism and to linguistic categorization as such. However, it is not until Waiting for the Barbarians and Life &Times of Michael K that Coetzee definitely moves beyond demystification to experiments and tests in which a playing off of ideas generates unexpected and new views on the human. In these novels, the reader witnesses the protagonists’ bodies standing the trials of political violence. The novels pose the question of what minimal humanity could be and whether we would be able to recognize it as human at all.

Dusklands The only time J.M. Coetzee agreed to write a blurb for the dust jacket of one of his books was when his first novel Dusklands was to be published by Ravan Press in 1974. Unaware that his letter to the publisher would be quoted verbatim on the back cover, he summarized what was to become the bipartite novel’s second part, “The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee”: “A megalomaniac frontiersman wreaks vengeance on his Hottentot captors for daring to see him as a man, fallible and absurd, rather than as a white god” (Kannemeyer, J. M. Coetzee 247). The question of what it means to be human pervades Coetzee’s first novel, where representatives of Western civilization assess the humanity of Hottentots and Vietnamese while themselves exhibiting behaviour far from humane. Dusklands addresses the question of the human through a critique of the racist contestation of others’ humanity. It is unsurprising that Coetzee’s questioning of the human should start in such a way. As Coetzee suggests in Boyhood, his first awareness of the shakiness and political inflection of the concept of the human originated from his puzzlement over race relations in South Africa. There is, for instance, a Coloured boy whom the protagonist John sees on a Saturday morning, and whose innocence and grace triggers pangs of guilt in the young John. John feels that the boy’s status is compromised in embarrassing ways, although he is in all respects more beautiful, more accomplished, and more worthy than John himself. John has had some glimpses of South Africa’s history and tries to make sense of who belongs in this land:

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One can dismiss the Natives, perhaps, but one cannot dismiss the Coloured people. The Natives can be argued away because they are latecomers, invaders from the north, and have no right to be here. […] But against the Coloureds there is no such recourse. The Coloureds were fathered by the whites, by Jan van Riebeeck, upon the Hottentots: that much is plain, even in the veiled language of his school history book. In a bitter way it is even worse than that. For in the Boland the people called Coloured are not the great-great-grandchildren of Jan van Riebeeck or any other Dutchman. He is expert enough in physiognomy, has been expert enough as long as he can remember, to know that there is not a drop of white blood in them. They are Hottentots, pure and uncorrupted. Not only do they come with the land, the land comes with them, is theirs, has always been. (B 61–62)

John is right that the Hottentots were the first on the now colonized land. It embarrasses him that he clearly shares a common humanity with the Coloured boy, while in the eyes of the other whites the boy appears somehow less than human and is treated accordingly. This awareness comes with a strong sense of place as a source of ethnic variants of humanity and of his colonial self-being in the wrong place. As Coetzee’s biographer, John Kannemeyer, explains, Coetzee began to write “The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee” while he was still at the University of Buffalo, New York. He started to write on 1 January 1970 when he was deeply concerned about the Vietnam War, a conflict that, for him, strangely resonated with the Dutch colonization of the Cape. After Coetzee returned to Cape Town in 1971, he unsuccessfully tried to publish the “Narrative” on its own, and only then wrote the other part, “The Vietnam Project”, to create the more easily publishable Dusklands (see Kannemeyer, J.  M. Coetzee 204–59). Writing about South Africa in the USA and about the USA in South Africa, Coetzee wrote the novel from reversed positions, which facilitated both reconnection and critique (see Attwell, J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing 59). He invested the narratives with a strong sense of both place and displacement. In Buffalo and Cape Town, Coetzee was in a sense himself displaced, first as an emigrant to the USA trying to connect with his home soil through writing, then as a South African forced by the US government to return home. Dusklands suggests that the most striking parallel between the American policy in Vietnam and the Dutch colonization of the Cape is the role of myths and mythmaking. Both the American and the Cape colonizers’ myths are local in origin and evince a particular idea of humanity. Moreover,

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they both represent an attempt to counter and supplant local myths of humanity. On the one hand, the novel suggests, all cultures explain their own existence by etiological myths that serve as autobiographies of the people. On the other hand, myths complement the people’s autobiography by defining, in a biographical gesture, the humanity or inhumanity of others. Exploring these mechanisms, Dusklands goes beyond a scenario where the human is either an essence or constructed. It demonstrates that, while only the oppressor can make reality conform to his myths, mythmaking is an activity shared by the oppressor and the oppressed, uniting both in a humanity that the oppressor’s myths deny. In the following, I will show how Roland Barthes’ semiology of myth illuminates the construction of the human in Dusklands, and how Coetzee complicates Barthes’ approach by drawing on Franz Boas’ The Mind of Primitive Man, a book that pits an essential similarity of human races against a radical cultural relativism. Accordingly, I will read Eugene Dawn’s descent into madness from his own propaganda as a performative self-­ deconstruction of the belief that the so-called primitive and the civilized mind are radically different. I will then assess the relationship between myth, humanity, and madness that is central to the novel and address the way in which the body interacts with madness and thereby interferes with the construction of the human. Eugene Dawn, the protagonist of Dusklands’ first novella, is occupied with propaganda and psychological warfare in a Californian military think tank. He writes a report outlining a strategy supposedly in touch with Vietnamese folk mythology to strike down the rebellion of the Vietnamese ‘sons’ against their imperial father, the USA. Dawn claims that conservative propaganda has relied too much on the doubting self introduced by Descartes in the first of his Meditations (see 23–31), this doubt driving a wedge between the individual’s body and mind. According to Dawn’s report, this model is not applicable to Vietnam because the Vietnamese think as a collective, not as individuals, and because their culture differs in other ways from the dusklands of the West (see DL 20–25). Dawn claims the Vietnamese collective believes in a myth of the father in which the sons usurp the father’s place, and he quotes Robert McAlmon to make his point: In origin the myth is a justification of the rebellion of sons against a father who uses them as hinds. The sons come of age, rebel, mutilate the father, and divide the patrimony, that is, the earth fertilized by the father’s rain. Psychoanalytically the myth is a self-affirming fantasy of the child powerless to take the mother he desires from the father-rival. (DL 25)

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In Mythologies (1957), Roland Barthes defines myth as a second-order semiological system that parasitically uses available signs by imposing further meaning on them. This extra meaning does not eradicate the sign’s literal meaning. Barthes gives the example of a magazine image of a young black man saluting the French flag. In this image, the man ceases to have a personal history and becomes a sign for the greatness of the French colonial Empire where all sons of the Republic, regardless of colour, serve the Nation. When myth imposes itself on the first-order sign of the image, its literal meaning, the black man saluting, recedes to the background. However, the myth can always hide behind that literal meaning which in this way becomes an alibi for a value judgement (see Mythologies 114–25). Myth dehistoricizes the signs it robs, it naturalizes itself, that is, it transforms history into nature by presenting the robbed sign as a reason rather than as a motif for the myth of the greatness of the French colonial empire: “[E]verything happens as if the picture naturally conjured up the concept [i.e., the greatness of the French Empire], as if the signifier gave the foundation to the signified: the myth exists from the precise moment when French imperiality achieves the natural state: myth is speech justified in excess” (Mythologies 129–30). McAlmon implies just this when he says the myth’s original function is to justify the rebellion of the sons against the father. Where there is only equivalence, the reader of myth sees a causal process because signifier and signified are linked by an apparently natural relationship (see Mythologies 131). Barthes argues that those living with a particular culture’s myth of self can imagine others only as human beings conforming to this myth; there is no sense in which others can appear as irreducibly other (see Mythologies 151–52). The latter fact will prove problematic for Eugene Dawn and Jacobus Coetzee. When theorizing Vietnamese culture, for example, Dawn first resorts to the Freudian myth of the primal horde. The sons and fathers of this myth are not humans with particular life histories but examples of the-human-as-father and the-human-as-son, and the workings of their minds are modelled on Western thought as exemplified by Freud.3 At the same time, the myth that Vietnamese society is founded on authoritarian father-son relationships makes it appear natural that now that the Vietnamese rebel against the USA, they are in the position of the sons. Thus, genealogy appears to justify American rule. The development and maintenance of such a myth is facilitated by Dawn’s refusal to go on a familiarization tour of Vietnam: “Vietnam, like everything else, is inside me, and in Vietnam, with a little diligence, a little

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patience, all truths about man’s nature” (DL 14).4 Myth here appears as detachment from reality and historicity and is therefore related to paranoia. For Freud, paranoia is a detachment of libido from the world. In an essay on censorship in South Africa, Coetzee argues that in the case of the white South African, this detachment has taken the form of the inability to imagine a future for himself in South Africa. This inability manifests itself in end-of-the-world fantasies in which a total onslaught of hostile forces threatens the existence of the Afrikaner (see Coetzee, “Censorship in South Africa” 328–29). Dawn’s development highlights parallels between the South African and the American context and illustrates dangers inherent in paranoid mythmaking. Barthes explains that the mythmaker has a particular way of reading myth which does not allow the myth to enmesh him in paranoia. The mythmaker focuses only on one of myth’s halves, namely, the language that could be appropriated to propagate a particular myth (see Mythologies 128). This is the position Eugene Dawn starts from before giving in to paranoia, but instead of appropriating first-order signs of Vietnamese culture, he turns to Vietnamese myths in an attempt to superimpose another myth on them. Barthes describes this technique as follows: It appears that it is extremely difficult to vanquish myth from the inside: for the very effort one makes in order to escape its stranglehold becomes in its turn the prey of myth: myth can always, as a last resort, signify the resistance which is brought to bear against it. Truth to tell, the best weapon against myth is perhaps to mythify it in its turn, and to produce an artificial myth: and this reconstructed myth will in fact be a mythology. Since myth robs language, why not rob myth? (Mythologies 135)

Dawn knows that the “answer to a myth of force is not necessarily counterforce, for if the myth predicts counterforce, counterforce reinforces myth. The science of mythography teaches us that a subtler counter is to subvert and revise myth. The highest propaganda is the propagation of a new mythology” (DL 24–25). Dawn therefore wants to replace the Vietnamese father-myth with a myth in which the mother-earth is supplanted by the goddess of techne. He proposes a “marriage of the sky-god [i.e., the American air force] with his parthenogene daughter-queen” (DL 26), that is, with military techne like napalm or Agent Orange. Crucially, Dawn’s new myth severs the genealogical ties between father and sons by disclaiming the Earth-mother and replacing her with techne, a

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barren entity that is not related to the Vietnamese and their allegedly primitive culture (see DL 26). The myth denies that the Americans and Vietnamese share humanity. The Americans would have accepted the Vietnamese had they been gods; as men like themselves the Vietnamese are intolerable. In the words of Eugene Dawn: We bathed them in seas of fire, praying for the miracle. In the heart of the flame their bodies glowed with heavenly light; in our ears their voices rang; but when the fire died they were only ash. We lined them up in ditches. If they had walked toward us singing through the bullets we would have knelt and worshipped; but the bullets knocked them over and they died as we had feared. […] Having proved to our sad selves that these were not the dark-­ eyed gods who walk our dreams, we wished only that they would retire and leave us in peace. (DL 17–18)

Dawn’s switch from presupposing a shared humanity to denying its existence is mirrored by his dealings with his wife and his superior. He comments on the topic of sex with his wife Marilyn: “She cries when I do it but I know that she loves it. People are all the same” (DL 10). This generalization is contradicted shortly afterwards when Dawn says of his superior Coetzee: “His mind does not work like mine” (DL 15). When Dawn leans towards the second view—the dissimilarity of humans—he distinguishes not only between the minds of Americans and Vietnamese but also between creative people like himself and uncreative people like his superior Coetzee.5 Dawn imagines a similar gulf separating men and women when he feels that there is no use explaining his work to Marilyn because he presumes she will not understand. Dawn exhibits an attitude that Raimond Gaita discovers in a mother grieving over her dead son. When the mother of Gaita’s example sees Vietnamese mothers on television grieving over their children killed by American bombings, the mother claims that it is different for Vietnamese mothers because they can just have more children. People like the mother, accustomed to the myth that Asians must not be seen as individuals but as a collective (see DL 20), deny that the Vietnamese can be hurt in the same ways as Westerners. “In the most natural sense of the expression”, Gaita writes, these people “see ‘them’ as ‘less than fully human’” (The Philosopher’s Dog 86). At stake in differentiating Westerners from Vietnamese, creative from uncreative people and women from men is the definition of the properly human. Eugene Dawn, the white, male, heterosexual citizen of

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empire, takes himself as the measure of humanity but finally loses his reason—the Western hallmark of humanity—in the mazes of paranoia. Marilyn hopes that “reinsertion into civilization will tame and eventually humanize” (DL 10) Dawn, but the end of “The Vietnam Project” suggests that the novella can instead be read as a parodic quest for the human, undertaken by a man who gradually loses his humanity because he is caught in his own myths of absolute reason. Essential Similarity Versus Cultural Relativism of the Human While Barthes illuminates the semiology of myth, it is necessary to turn to Franz Boas, the German-born American sociologist referred to by Dawn in his report, to fully grasp the relationship between myth and humanity in Dusklands. Dawn writes in his report: Our propaganda services have yet to apply the first article of the anthropology of Franz Boas: that if we wish to take over the direction of a society we must either guide it from within its cultural framework or else eradicate its culture and impose new structures. We cannot expect to guide the thinking of rural Vietnam until we recognize that rural Vietnam is non-literate, that its family structure is patrilineal, its social order hierarchical, and its political order authoritarian though locally autonomous. (DL 20)

In the early twentieth century, most anthropologists believed that races had different potential for cultural development. By contrast, in The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), Boas contributed significantly to the rise of cultural relativism in the academy by arguing that any culture can only be comprehended from within itself. At the same time, he argued that cultures determine individuals, and he convinced most of his colleagues that racial differences were not the result of physiological fate but historical circumstances. This meant that anthropology had to understand all factors shaping the history of different people: migration, nutrition, child-raising customs, disease, as well as the movements and interrelations of peoples and their cultures (see Ritzer, Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Sociology 321–22). The mind of so-called primitive man, Boas argued, does not substantially differ from supposedly more civilized minds, and there is no close connection between race and personality. Boas’ books were burned by the Nazis, damned by those who supported racial segregation in the USA and banned by South Africa’s

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a­ partheid regime. In his entry on race in the volume General Anthropology (War Department Educational Manual EM 226), published by the United States Armed Forces Institute in 1938, Boas argues that every human type shows excessively human characteristics in certain directions. Thus the Eskimo have the largest brains and a slight amount of body hair; but proportions of limbs are not as excessively human as those of the Negroes, who also excel in development of the lips. The European has a marked narrowing of the face and elevation of the nose, most pronounced among the Armenians. At the same time their body hair is much more fully developed than that of the East Asiatics or Negroes. A scale of races in regard to their similarity to animals cannot be formed. (“Race” 115–16)

Eugene Dawn, who writes his report in 1972–1973, might have been trained on this or similar material (see DL 49). Boas explicitly addresses propaganda and mythology in the War Department Educational Manual and other writings. Discussing the effects of propaganda on the minds of ‘civilized’ and ‘primitive’ minds, he gives examples of how propaganda has successfully manipulated people in Western civilization. Boas concludes that in Western civilization, too, popular thought is primarily directed by emotion, not by reason (see The Mind of Primitive Man 210). Eugene Dawn goes mad through creating propaganda, as if to perform the proof that the ‘primitive’, ‘irrational’ mind and its ‘civilized’, ‘rational’ counterpart are essentially similar. However, what makes Dawn’s choice of Boas so interesting is that Boas does not merely argue for the essential similarity of minds but also for the radical difference of cultures. It is precisely because Boas argues for the essential sameness of the human mind across the globe that he can argue for the pronounced differences of cultures without abandoning the concept of the human. The different systems of beliefs, rituals, and myths Boas finds among various peoples stem not from differences in nature but from the vastly different forms of nurture the human mind receives in different parts of the world. This is what Dawn focuses on, giving Boas’ sociology a dark reading when he argues that one must either manipulate Vietnamese culture’s own myths or eradicate this culture so as to be able to impose new myths. Nevertheless, humanity’s Janus face of sameness and difference, nature and nurture, troubles Dawn’s consciousness, recalling Marlow’s marvelling in Heart of Darkness when he sees the Congolese natives: “[T]hat was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being

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inhuman […] what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity— like yours—the thought of your remote kinship” (Conrad, Heart of Darkness 62–63). In Dawn’s account, the unsettling double nature of racial others gives rise to the wish that they be divine rather than human like himself; it is not their otherness but their similarity that makes them loathsome and prompts Dawn’s call for their annihilation. Jacobus’ description of the Hottentots in “The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee” also follows this logic, as Jane Poyner and Coetzee himself have observed in different contexts. It is known that Europeans tended to regard the Cape’s indigenous people as idle. When Jacobus calls the Hottentots idle, he deflects this quality from himself while retaining the threatening feeling that the Hottentots are similar to him (see Coetzee, White Writing 13–37 and Poyner, J. M. Coetzee 22–23). Jacobus’ myth that the Zeno beetle survives no matter how many of its limbs are severed also belongs to the strategies of denying similarity with the Hottentots. When Jacobus applies the myth to himself, he makes mere survival the criterion for humanity, a myth that asserts his, that is, the survivor’s, humanity while justifying the killing of the Hottentots (see DL 96–99). Dawn’s myth of the indestructibility of the US military, illustrated by the pictures he carries with him (see Castillo, “Coetzee’s Dusklands” 1114–16), mirrors Jacobus’ myth of the beetle. Whereas Jacobus shoots the Hottentots with his gun, Dawn’s report recommends testing the Vietnamese with napalm to find out who passes the test of survival. Jacobus Coetzee tends to act out what Dawn can only imagine. He goes on an expedition into the interior of the Western Cape in the 1760s, falls ill amongst the Hottentots and is humiliated, left by his servants, and later returns to take revenge on the Hottentots and those who abandoned him.6 It is through knowledge of Dawn’s mythmaking and its consequences that one understands Jacobus’ narrative to be likewise grounded in myth. Here, myths of the human and non-human assert the superiority of the oppressor’s culture, too, and are at the same time the site where superiority is contested. Jacobus argues that even if the Hottentots adopt Christianity, they will not be truly Christian; an essential difference remains. He claims that the Bushman is a different creature altogether, a wild animal like a baboon (see DL 57–60). When assessing the Hottentots, whom he generally does not hold in high esteem, Jacobus comes up with the idea of the wild savage. He praises the natural pride of the ‘wild’ Hottentots in contrast to the lack of dignity of the ‘tamed’ ones (see DL

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65). A man described as a healthy animal is suddenly higher in rank than a man who progressed from such a state to a civilized one. As in “The Vietnam Project”, more and more contradictions become visible in the protagonist’s allotment of the positions of animal, man, and god. If Dawn fancies the American bombers as sky-gods and at other times wishes the Vietnamese were gods, Jacobus first muses that perhaps “on my horse and with the sun over my right shoulder I looked like a god, a god of the kind they did not yet have” (DL 71). The Hottentots are “primitive people”, they have neither “a special relationship with the sky-gods nor a Hottentot astrology” (DL 71). What Jacobus cannot accept is that they do not treat him as a god but as a man. Jacobus complains that the Hottentots only half-heartedly acknowledge the existence of a god and do not marvel at the existence of the world, and even joke that without them, god could not live a wink. It is ironic that in Jacobus’ descriptions the Hottentots’ stance towards the divine resembles the Enlightenment stance of pure rationality going back to Descartes, for whom everything that cannot be proven must be doubted (see Meditations 23–31). It is the same doubting rationality Dawn submits to, no less than Jacobus, who employs techne in the form of his gun to prove that “there exists that which is other than oneself” (DL 79). The fact that he needs to use his gun as a means of defence against the threat of solipsism inherent in Cartesian thought shows that he is caught up in the doubt he condemns in the Hottentots. Myth, Madness, and the Self-(De)construction of the Human These contradictions in Dusklands are what Coetzee, in his essay “Erasmus: Madness and Rivalry”, demonstrates to be the madness of reason. To make his point, Coetzee discusses Foucault’s reading of Descartes’ exclusion of madness in the first of the Meditations. It is important to note that Coetzee writes his first novels in the aftermath of the anti-psychiatric movement of the 1960s, of which Foucault’s Madness and Civilization was a cornerstone. Foucault’s book is an attempt to return authority to madness by establishing it as a countervoice to the voice of reason, and it sparked the debate between Foucault and Derrida that Coetzee’s essay discusses. While the debate focused on whether madness can offer a viable alternative to reason or whether it is a priori caught up in the workings of logos, Foucault and Derrida agreed that the discourse of reason—and specifically the psychiatric discourse on madness—is characterized by blindness to its own status. Foucault, in particular, sought to show that the

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silencing of madness by psychiatrists is itself mad, since they claim to base their actions on full knowledge of themselves as the voice of reason, whereas theirs is only the voice of a certain power (see Coetzee, “Erasmus” 84–85). When Eugene Dawn and Jacobus Coetzee exhibit contradictory stances towards savagery and rationality, the reader glimpses what the protagonists do not see: that they believe they possess full knowledge of themselves as the voice of reason but are, in fact, merely exponents of a certain power. Why does Descartes loom so large in Dusklands? It is correct to assume he does because he decisively influenced Western ideas of the human by drawing a line between the subject’s mind and body, and by locating humanity exclusively in the mind. But this is not the whole truth. Reading Coetzee’s oeuvre, it seems only a slight exaggeration to say that Descartes’ separation of mind and body marks the point at which Western philosophy chose the wrong path in defining the human, the point of origin for modern racism, and the industrial-scale exploitation of animals. It must not be forgotten, however, that Descartes splits body and mind because he suspects that all external things, that is, all bodies, deceive him and so give rise to madness. In other words, in Descartes as in Coetzee, the concerns with body, mind, and madness cannot be separated from each other. Dawn’s final madness is thus readable as an effect of his obsessive, Cartesian separation of body and mind: an ironic reversal of madness through the very operation by which Descartes sought to guard against madness. For Foucault, the key moment in the silencing and repression of madness indeed occurs in Descartes’ first Meditation, when the philosopher counters the demon suspected of deceiving him. Descartes begins from the methodological premise of doubting everything he can and assessing what remains. The senses are first to be doubted but, surprisingly, Descartes does not doubt the most obvious certainties communicated through them: [H]ow could it be denied that these hands or this whole body are mine? Unless perhaps I were to liken myself to madmen, whose brains are so damaged by the persistent vapours of melancholia that they firmly maintain they are kings when they are paupers, or say they are dressed when they are naked, or that their heads are made of earthenware, or that they are pumpkins, or made of glass. But such people are insane, and I would be thought equally mad if I took anything from them as a model for myself. (Meditations 25)

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Descartes’ rejection of doubt about the senses by calling such doubt madness becomes intelligible—though no more convincing—if one considers that he does not deem madness a form of thought at all, and therefore no source of doubt. His dogma that doubting the most immediate sense perceptions would be madness is the quasi-theological foundation of his epistemology, and its blind spot. For Descartes, a man can be mad but a thought cannot, for thought is tantamount to reason, as Shoshana Felman summarizes: “I think, therefore I am not mad” (Writing and Madness 39). Madness is thus exiled from thought and from language. In response to this silencing of madness, Foucault sets himself the task of finding a new form of discourse that undoes both exclusion from and inclusion of madness in reason (see Writing and Madness 39–42). In the Heart of the Country wrestles with the same problem, whereas Dusklands applies Barthes’ demythologizing techniques to debunk reason as myth and to reveal the madness hidden behind it. Even though Coetzee’s poetic will later move away from demythologizing, already Dusklands testifies to the fact that Coetzee’s decade-long concern with the body starts with his critique of Descartes, and that his concerns with the body and with madness have the same point of origin. As I hope will become clear in this study, one of the most persistent operations in Coetzee’s re-envisioning of the human is to emphasize the bodily constitution of the human while questioning the validity if not the sanity of reason. In this regard, Coetzee’s project is akin to Nietzsche’s, of whom the following aphorism survives: “‘Man’ signifies ‘thinker’: There lies the madness” (cit. aft. Felman, Writing and Madness 33). As has already been pointed out, Coetzee is also indebted to Foucault, a student of Nietzsche. Coetzee’s early attempts to debunk ideas of absolute reason as madness (Dusklands) and to envision folly as an alternative to the either-or of madness versus reason (In the Heart of the Country) are part of an emergent re-envisioning of the human that increasingly focuses on the body. Madness and the body have shared the fate of serving as repressed counterparts to reason, particularly since Descartes. Coetzee sets out to overcome the imbalance by questioning this binary opposition. As we have seen, Dusklands realizes this re-envisioning through contradictions visible only to the reader, a form of irony in which the reader learns that the circumstances under which speakers make pronouncements invalidate their pronouncements. It is worth considering an instance at greater length. Nowhere does Jacobus’ unease about the similarity of the Hottentots become clearer than near the end of his first journey:

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But were they true savages, these Namaqua Hottentots? Why had they nursed me? Why had they let me go? Why had they not killed me? Why had their torments been so lacking in system and even enthusiasm? Was I to understand the desultory attentions paid me as a token of contempt? Was I personally unexciting to them? Would some other victim have aroused them to a pitch of true savagery? What was true savagery, in this context? Savagery was a way of life based on disdain for the value of human life and sensual delight in the pain of others. (DL 97)

This reformulation of humanity and savagery in moral terms entails unwitting self-indictment. Jacobus is the ‘savage’ and foreshadows Coetzee’s concern with the ‘barbarian’ in Waiting for the Barbarians. The Hottentots have shown humanity in their care for Jacobus when he was sick. When, on his return to his farm, Jacobus fancies himself a “white-skinned Bushman […] Even the white skin could go” (DL 99), savagery and humanity seem to have changed bodies. It is the supposedly natural man, not the civilized, who is properly human. Rousseau’s ideal of the Noble Savage appears on the novel’s horizon—as a myth that will be debunked by the acts of madness to follow. Both novellas portray how myths of the human fail to naturalize history because these myths inflict madness on their makers and thus rob them of reason, the Cartesian hallmark of humanity. What comes to the fore in Jacobus’ and Dawn’s mental deterioration is both the madness of the myth of absolute reason and the physical constitution of the human. Myth and body are interdependent in this process, for the body subjected to the myth of absolute reason becomes the medium of myth’s madness by rebelling against it. Even if the body is a reality behind the myth that gave rise to the subject’s madness, the body asserts its authority by a psychosomatic reaction that is indistinguishable from the madness of this myth. From their inception, the forms of madness exhibited by Dawn and Jacobus involve psychosomatic symptoms. The symptoms suggest that although the protagonists’ entrapment in their own myths more or less directly gives rise to their madness, the madness itself is not a mental construction like myth. The body, and particularly the dysfunctional body, becomes visible as the reality behind myth. As David Attwell observes, there is a pathological rift between the minds and bodies of the protagonists, a rift that can be read as a critique of Western scientific rationality that goes back to Descartes’ philosophical rationalism and that, in Hugh Kenner’s words, brings about a “dehumanization of

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man” (see J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing 37–38; Kenner, Samuel Beckett 132). Patrick Hayes similarly draws attention to Dusklands’ insistence “that the aspiration towards a single rational basis for human identity and political life is best understood as a ‘white’, tribal myth that enshrouds an essentially calculative will to power” (J. M. Coetzee 25). Dawn’s and Jacobus’ mental preoccupations are the making and furthering of their myths of superiority and of independence from the body. The more both characters believe in these myths, the more paranoiacally do they observe their bodies. As Dawn writes his report, his fingers clutch and curl in his palms, he has a tic of stroking his face, and his toes curl into the soles of his feet. He begins to observe his limbs with distrust as if they were autonomous entities. Jacobus obsessively pinches the boil near his anus because the pain serves him as proof that he is not merely mind, a possibility entertained when he imagines himself to be “a spherical reflecting eye moving through the wilderness and ingesting it. […] There is nothing from which my eye turns, I am all that I see” (DL 79). Jacobus would like to encompass everything like a god, but it remains a fact that neither his first nor his second expedition would be possible without reliance on the help of Hottentot or Griqua slaves. As death by the gun proves the inhumanity of other races and the existence of an external world, the pain radiating through his body from the boil prevents Jacobus’ mind and body from falling apart. The oppressor’s myth of the superiority and independence of pure reason proves irreconcilable with rationality. This is also the case for Eugene Dawn who, in Barthes’ terms, started as a mythmaker looking for pieces of language which could be appropriated to propagate a myth and who now receives his own myth uncritically, buying into the causal relation between first-order sign and the meaning of myth (see Mythologies 128–31). Dawn eventually believes in the myth of the primal horde that predicts that the sons will kill their father. Anticipating this event, he stabs his son Martin. The frontiersman Jacobus’ corresponding psychosis occurs when he experiences fever, “hallucinated vision” and “delirium upon delirium” (DL 76), the difference being that  Jacobus never truly awakes from myth. His hallucinations merely intensify the grandiosity he maintains from beginning to end, even if this grandiosity is at times punctured by the Hottentots’ troubling humanity. Foreshadowing In the Heart of the Country, myth in Dusklands is comprehensive enough to make history itself, in the sense of the prevailing myth of the colonizer, appear mad. For Jacobus, there seems to be no way of telling what reality looked like before myth shaped it, not even the

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­ ossibility that history could ever have existed without the myth accompap nying it because he, the allegedly all-seeing eye, never sees myth as myth. The difference between Dawn’s fractured consciousness and Jacobus Coetzee’s complete blindness also informs the shape of their narratives and their acts of writing. Jacobus’ “Narrative” is not tinged by doubt but instead relates moments of hallucination and delirium that could potentially lead Jacobus to question his chosen path to the divine. In other words, the divine ennobles and justifies Jacobus’ madness when it produces raptures and revelations of a quasi-religious nature: “My fevers came and went, distinguishable only by the flexing of the soul’s wings that came with fever and the lumpish tedium of the return to earth” (DL 77). The text debunks Jacobus’ divine inspirations as pathology by emphasizing the bodily side of his madness, namely, his infirmity, his incontinence, the fragility of his animal being, as well as through the afterword of an editor named S.J. Coetzee, a translator’s preface (the narrative is allegedly translated by J.M. Coetzee himself), and an appendix containing the supposedly original “Deposition of Jacobus Coetzee” (1760), all of which reveal the ideological forces that informed the writing of the “Narrative”. Eugene Dawn’s madness, by contrast, is modelled on a modern discourse of madness that, according to Foucault, begins when madness is for the first time defined as a medical problem.7 The madman must hold himself responsible for disturbing social life and has to internalize guilt although he roams freely in the asylum; he is forced into self-observation and consciousness of his defects (see Madness and Civilization 192–98, 230–35). While keeping in mind that Foucault’s account focuses on France alone and that it has not gone uncontested, the last part of “The Vietnam Project” clearly models Eugene Dawn on such a mad subject forced to observe himself. Even earlier, Dawn observes and attempts to control the involuntary movements of his body (see DL 1–5). As Foucault shows, self-observation and observation by others become the dominant if subtle micro-mechanisms of power that is no longer centralized in personal authority but internalized by the subject even before it becomes mad or criminal.8 Permanent watchfulness means a constant production of one’s humanity through conscious and rational analysis of the inner self. One medium of self-observation is, of course, the diary. Eugene Dawn’s writing of his report turns more and more into the writing of a diary. As in the case of Jacobus Coetzee, the text debunks this ‘rational practice’ as a technique that subverts its own purpose: instead of producing the human as an autonomous thinker and agent, Dawn’s writing it conditions a

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warped passive body that considers itself the result of others’ mistakes rather than a free, independently thinking agent (see DL 49). Dusklands, In the Heart of the Country, and the Turn to Testing Dusklands demystifies the humanity of Westerners and the inhumanity of non-Westerners as political mythologies. The body’s resistance to these mythologies is, above anything else, a means of this demystification. The body defines the human negatively, showing that the human is not what the overarching myth of rationality suggests. And yet, the body’s negative resistance in Dusklands is the kernel of Coetzee’s poetic of testing that will, in Waiting for the Barbarians, supplant the poetic of demystification: the suffering body will anchor these tests in its undeniable authority and prevent testing from slipping into mere playfulness. The main thrust of In the Heart of the Country is still one of demystification, this time recognizably aimed at the doctrines of apartheid that go unquestioned in South Africa of the 1970s rather than the mechanisms by which the ‘Dusklands’ (an allusion to Oswald Spengler’s The Downfall of the Occident) have constructed the human and the inhuman. Yet In the Heart of the Country focuses less exclusively on demystification than does Dusklands. It re-evaluates madness as a Janus-faced phenomenon: it is simultaneously an effect of oppression painfully afflicting mind and body and an alternative to apartheid discourse, which is itself mad. Whereas Dawn’s hijacking of myths and his creation of a new mythology remain stuck in the tracks of Western rationality, Magda’s madness strives to establish, through the authority of the suffering body and mind, a counter-­ discourse to the one that surrounds her. She does so not by negating the propositions of the dominant discourse but by positively inventing a discourse with altogether different rules that produces—or rather restores— her full humanity. Coetzee first theorizes the shift in his poetic shortly after the publication of In the Heart of the Country in “Four Notes on Rugby” (1978). Despite the concrete subject of its title, this essay illuminates Coetzee’s insistence on the autonomy (literally: self-legislation) of fiction. Similar to Wittgenstein’s method in Philosophical Investigations, his argument begins with an observation of how children play together. Coetzee distinguishes between a phase in which the rules are worked out and a phase in which the game is played. If the second phase allows for the development of

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excellence, the first phase allows for more creativity. Coetzee claims that particularly in schools, sports are defined solely in terms of the second phase and are carefully separated from free play. In this way, sports train the child to bow his knee to the state, that is, to play the game of the Other. This, according to Coetzee, is where art and sports, the two most complex forms of play, part ways. In the creative arts, the artist both composes his game and plays it. He thus asserts an omnipotence that the player of sports yields up. This helps to explain why sports are so easily captured and used by political authority, while the arts remain slippery, resistant, undependable as moral training grounds for the young. (DP 125)

The passage offers an explanation for the fact that Coetzee never again gave as much space to the oppressor as he did in Dusklands: “The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee” closely follows the game outlined by the oppressor. Although the novel relies heavily on parody to demystify the mindset of its protagonists, Jacobus’ and Dawn’s thoughts are writ large and wield power over the reader’s imagination. In the Heart of the Country tries to find a third way beyond either adopting the officially reasonable language of the oppressor or cancelling that language in wilful unreason or exaggeration (the latter option would be the parody of Dusklands). It is helpful here to remember Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, in which Benjamin explains how the historical materialist must write a history that is not the history of the oppressors. He argues that the version of history that has come down to us is invariably written by the oppressor and thus forces us to empathize with him (see Illuminations 256–57). If, for Benjamin, it is the historical materialist’s job to detach himself from the perspective of the oppressor, In the Heart of the Country seeks to recover a ‘history’ rivalling the dominant account: not to empathize with figures such as Jacobus Coetzee or Eugene Dawn, but to try to give a voice to those made less than fully human by history because they are women (Magda) or racial others (the barbarian girl of Waiting for the Barbarians). If giving them a voice is doomed to failure, what the novel can and must do in any case is tell the stories of their bodies whose s­ uffering gives the narrative an authority which the official record cannot fully usurp (see DP 248). Magda’s pitting of counter-myths against those structuring a society such as apartheid South Africa may be backed by suffering that In the Heart of the Country brings more viscerally to life than any other Coetzeean

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novel. Still, her myths remain unacknowledged and thus permanently open to doubt. The dead-end into which Magda manoeuvres herself is ultimately also one that entraps the novelist attempting to break free from the rules of the official game and to establish an independent poetic of revising the human. If Dusklands provokes the reader to doubt and critique Eugene Dawn’s and Jacobus Coetzee’s construction of the human, the lesson to be learned from In the Heart of the Country is that humans cannot live on doubt alone. They need to recognize and be recognized as substantial bodies, even if recognition is couched in myth. Magda thus has no option other than to succumb to dominant discourse, to “yield to the spectre of reason” (HC 138). In order to fully realize his poetic of revision, Coetzee will move towards a novel that is staked on the process of testing ideas rather than on belief in any one idea of humanity that is pitted against the hegemonic discourse. In Coetzee’s fictions, this process is grounded in the embodiedness and embeddedness of ideas but is essentially open in its results, even if the suffering body remains the “standard” (see DP 248) that anchors free play. This anchored openness is why the novelist’s work cannot easily be appropriated by the victors, who find it “slippery, resistant, undependable” (DP 125). The novel in which Coetzee first achieves the transition from demystification to such testing is Waiting for the Barbarians. What is tested in Coetzee’s intertextual dialogue with Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” are the ideas of barbarism as violence and as inability to speak, of torture as a tearing of layers from the human in search of an essence and as unmaking of speech. What is ultimately at stake is the meaning of the body in a definition of the human. If the human body is able to resist, to whatever slight degree, the discourses in which it is embedded, how far can the human be reduced to the body and remain human?

Waiting for the Barbarians During the course of the interrogation contradictions became apparent in the prisoner’s testimony. Confronted with these contradictions, the prisoner became enraged and attacked the investigating officer. A scuffle ensued ­during which the prisoner fell heavily against the wall. Efforts to revive him were unsuccessful. (WB 7)

This is the report of Colonel Joll, the representative of the Empire in Waiting for the Barbarians. Joll’s explanation of the prisoner’s death

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shows parallels with reports concerning the death of Stephen Biko in 1977, as issued by security policemen at a subsequent inquest. The memory of Biko’s torture and killing were still fresh in many minds when the novel came out in 1980 (see Attridge, J. M. Coetzee 42). Biko’s death had drawn attention to the apartheid system’s reliance on torture, and as David Attwell has observed, the event gave Coetzee a new and crucial focus when working on the novel that, despite its unspecific setting and time, in its published form responds with remarkable candour to Biko’s torture and killing (see Attwell, J.  M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing 73–74; J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing 113–14, 117–18). Biko’s death shifted Coetzee’s work-in-progress towards a sustained inquiry into torture and, more generally, the effects of violence on intimacy. It helped Coetzee invent the character of the tortured barbarian girl, and the unfocused desire of the magistrate became a fascination with the traces of torture on the girl’s body (see Attwell, J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing 121–28). The novel remains Coetzee’s most sustained and insightful exploration of torture. Just as Dusklands scrutinized the effects of oppression on the oppressor, Waiting for the Barbarians draws attention to the dehumanizing effects of torture on the torturer, as when the magistrate asks himself whether Joll washes his hands after inflicting torture on a victim, or when he asks Mandel how he can eat a meal after torturing (see WB 14–15, 149). However, the novel is primarily concerned with examining how torture affects the humanity of tortured persons. One of the novel’s key ideas is that an erotic fascination with the body cannot be separated from a fascination with the body undergoing torture (see Attridge, J.  M. Coetzee 43), and it can be said that both are versions of a desire to deeply know an individual and discover the meaning of humanity itself. As I will show, the novel pictures torture as a tearing of layers from the human in pursuit of a kernel, a pursuit that is misleadingly called a search for true information to be communicated by the tortured person’s voice. Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain helps us to understand that torture is an undoing of the human in the course of a pseudo-medical probing into the human body and that torture systematically deconstructs the tortured person’s voice, language, and thought. For Scarry, torture is a “twofold denial of the human, both the particular human being being hurt and the collective human present in the products of civilization” (The Body in Pain 43). Torture is literally “a form of savagery” whose structure is “based on the nature of pain, the nature of power, the interaction between the two, and the interaction

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between the ultimate source of each—the body, the locus of pain, and the voice, the locus of power” (51). Scarry’s idea of torture as savagery and as a way of disabling speech may point to the deeper connection between torture and barbarism, a term in which the inability to speak and violent behaviour are yoked together in ambivalent ways. I will return to Scarry’s claims as I discuss Coetzee’s novel.9 Barbarism, Language, and Torture Barbarism and civilization are complementary terms: the former has traditionally been defined by a lack of intelligible language, whereas the latter has claimed such language as its fundamental characteristic. The complementary opposition is apparent in the novel’s literary namesake, with which it also shares some themes, Constantine P. Cavafy’s poem “Waiting for the Barbarians”. When the barbarians fail to appear at the gates of the Roman Empire, Cavafy’s poem closes with the lines “Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?/Those people were a kind of solution” (Collected Poems 18). From the perspective of the Empire, the threat of barbarians maintained civilization because it forced the populace into obedience. The imaginary barbarian threat compels the Romans to define themselves against barbarism and to produce and defend civilization. The civilization/barbarism opposition was particularly important during the Vandals’ attacks on Rome, but it had already become established in ancient Greece during the Persian Wars. The etymology of the Greek word ‘barbarian’ imitates the incomprehensible mumblings (“bar bar”) of the language of foreign peoples. The barbarian’s inability to speak the language of those who consider themselves civilized implies that the barbarian is defenceless against the construction of his identity through civilization (see Boletsi, “Barbaric Encounters” 68). According to Judith Butler, the civilized subject has internalized the barbarian “as its own founding repudiation” (Bodies That Matter 3). Coetzee’s novel shows that denouncing barbarian language as a language of madness is part of that repudiation. Whereas in In the Heart of the Country Magda’s language drifts towards the unintelligible but retains roots in European language— particularly Spanish and, by extension, Latin—Waiting for the Barbarians is interspersed with barbarian language that is truly outside the dominant discourse. Both barbarian utterances and barbarian writing remain a mystery, and the magistrate, questioning his allegiance to the Empire, is the first to dissociate barbarian language from madness and fathom a meaning

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in the incomprehensible poplar slips that may well surpass the account of events that he himself wishes to write. Reversals of the hierarchy between the barbarian and the civilized subject go back as far as the school of the Cynics, to the Iliad, Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Politics, and Lucian. The figure of the “noble savage” became popular with Enlightenment writers such as Montesquieu and Jean-­ Jacques Rousseau, both of whom were sceptical of the merits of civilization. However, these reversals were in many cases founded on the Eurocentric views they purportedly questioned and reinforced rather than obliterated the opposition between barbarism and civilization. In fact, Coetzee’s portrayal of Friday in Foe, by staging Friday’s resistance to accommodation within familiar binary oppositions, is an attempt not to reproduce these oppositions. If Friday is a barbarian because he cannot speak, his silence also empowers him because he cannot be read or understood by Cruso or Susan Barton. In the nineteenth century and particularly in the context of colonialism, barbarism became a signifier for violence, danger, and cultural and racial inferiority in order to justify Western imperialist enterprises: the barbarian was constantly ‘at the gates’ and had to be held in check by the same forces that offered to civilize him (see Boletsi, “Barbaric Encounters” 68–69). Around the fin de siècle, both Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud showed civilization’s beliefs and mechanisms to be more precarious than commonly assumed. Freud’s comments on the subject are particularly incisive for an understanding of barbarism in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. Freud was first to offer the diagnosis that barbarism is not exterior to Europe but internal to civilization and every individual. Rather than a different race, the barbarian other is an aspect of our unconscious that civilization seeks to keep in check (see Freud, “Civilization and Its Discontents” and “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death”). Hence the importance of dreams in Coetzee’s novel: they invert the terms civilization and barbarism and expose their ambivalence—an agenda that is in step with anticolonial movements in literature going back beyond Joseph Conrad. While the notion of the barbarian has not traditionally been part of the racial lexicon in South Africa, the novel puts it to use by implicating the apartheid regime’s treatment of native peoples, who were left to their own devices in segregated bantustans outside of white civilization. Eighteenth-century historians had already exploited the irony of the term ‘barbarian’ when applied to a civilization that maintains order through policing parts of the population and raised the question of who

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the true barbarians were. This irony is certainly prominent when the notion of the barbarian is evoked in the context of South Africa in the late 1970s (see Attwell, J.  M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing 74–76). In Waiting for the Barbarians, the barbarism of the barbarian girl consists in her inability to speak the language of civilization, yet this inability to communicate is principally limited to verbalizing her pain during torture. This irony is part of the novel’s inversion of barbarism and civilization. Barbarism characterizes only Joll, Mandel, and those who torture in the name of civilization, but the effect of their torture produces the speechlessness that gives barbarians their name. Scarry explains that the confessions extracted by torture are part of that speechlessness: “Torture inflicts bodily pain that is itself language-destroying, but torture also mimes (objectifies in the external environment) this language-destroying capacity in its interrogation, the purpose of which is not to elicit needed information but visibly to deconstruct the prisoner’s voice” (The Body in Pain 19). Interrogation is nearly always part of torture because it demonstrates to subjects that they are not in command of what they confess. Eliciting truth, however, is only the pretended purpose of interrogation, for the tortured person will eventually answer what the torturer wants to hear—a fact that is known, though perhaps unconsciously, even to the torturer. The tortured subject’s answers are relegated to meaningless sounds produced at the torturer’s will; they give proof of the destruction of language and mind as essential parts of humanity. Dreams of (In)humanity The magistrate’s dreams provide a way to understand the novel’s use of the rich ambiguity of the term ‘barbarism’. The dreams are discussed in most critical works on Waiting for the Barbarians, but most critics do not establish the connection between dreaming, the unconscious, and barbarism that Freud compellingly proposed and that is crucial for any reading of the novel (see The Interpretation of Dreams 25–50). The reader first learns about dreams in a dismissive remark by the magistrate on the ­citizens’ fear of barbarians. There is no woman, the magistrate muses, “who has not dreamed of a dark barbarian hand coming from under the bed to grip her ankle, no man who has not frightened himself with visions of the barbarians carousing in his home, breaking the plates, setting fire to the curtains, raping his daughters” (WB 10). The magistrate concludes

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that these dreams are the consequence of too much ease. Are his own dreams, setting in soon after his comment, the consequence of too much strain? Very likely so; but the point is that they, too, might be concerned with barbarians and barbarism. “You were tossing in your sleep, you told me to go away, so I decided I would sleep better here” (WB 26), the magistrate is told by a young prostitute with whom he sometimes spends the night. “You pushed me out with your hands and feet. Please don’t get upset. We cannot help our dreams or what we do in our sleep” (WB 27). Instead of soothing the magistrate’s unease, the last remark alarms him, supposedly because his violent behaviour during sleep seems to reveal more about himself than he wants to know; in fact, he might prefer the blindness provided by Colonel Joll’s dark glasses to such glimpses of aggression that link him to the torturer. He tries to remember what nightmare tortures him when he pushes the girl away, but he fails. All he can do is tell the girl to wake him if he does it again. For this is the uncomfortable question raised by the dreams: does the individual’s true self show during waking or dreaming? If dreams are wish fulfilment, as Freud argued, and if desires participate in the constitution of the subject, is it implausible that the magistrate should face his real self in sleep and harbour aggression towards the girl lying next to him? The suggestion is that the civilized subject shows his barbarian face during sleep. During waking, there are glimpses of the barbarian face to be seen, for example, when the magistrate tenderly takes a tortured barbarian boy’s hands between his because it “has not escaped me that an interrogator can wear two masks, speak with two voices, one harsh, one seductive” (WB 9), or when the magistrate begins to “face the truth” that he is trying “to obliterate the [barbarian] girl” (WB 55) in his mind. Moreover, the magistrate’s dreams appear to be metamorphoses of a single dream. They feature a group of children in the snow and particularly a single child whose face cannot be seen. The inability to see is central to the dreams, suggesting that what he sees in his dreams is the very blindness that troubles him in his waking life: “[t]here has been something staring me in the face, and still I do not see it” (WB 183). Even if the metamorphoses of the dream do not progressively clarify what the ­magistrate fails to see, the reader learns to read the metaphors that deflect the magistrate’s vision to more harmless and acceptable images. The principles underlying the magistrate’s dream-work can arguably best be grasped in the following dream:

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Only one figure remains, a hooded child sitting with its back to me. I circle around the child, who continues to pat snow on the sides of the castle, till I can peer under the hood. The face I see is blank, featureless; it is the face of an embryo or a tiny whale; it is not a face at all but another part of the human body that bulges under the skin; it is white; it is the snow itself. (WB 43–44)

The child’s face metamorphoses from one metaphor of unseeing to the next. First, it is an abstract blank, and then it becomes vaguely recognizable as a tiny human face that seems indistinguishable from an animal, alluding to the fact that in the early stages of pregnancy the embryos of humans and whales cannot be told apart. In the next moment, the face is an animal part of the human body, before finally turning into something inanimate. The series illustrates that the uncanny nature of the magistrate’s dreams is often due to a metamorphosing of living human beings into animal and inanimate forms and vice versa. The progressive dehumanization must be read as an attempt of the magistrate’s conscience to disown responsibility for the girl. It is noteworthy that in Waiting for the Barbarians animals are customarily hunted. The magistrate is a hunter, too, until he finds one day that some force he cannot pin down prevents him from shooting a buck (see WB 47). The parallel event in his dreams is the second metamorphosis of the barbarian girl into a thing. Violence done to animals cannot be considered torture in a culture accustomed to exploiting non-human creatures. However, the magistrate begins to doubt the culture of the Empire. It becomes uncertain to him whether animals can be tortured, but things certainly cannot. Picturing the barbarian girl first as non-human and then as non-animal in his dream relieves the magistrate of the truth he sees only towards the end of the novel: that he and the torturer have more in common than he thought, and that it was a human being he held in his cruel care—a notion he jokingly dismisses in his waking life when he tells the girl that “[p]eople will say I keep two wild animals in my rooms, a fox and a girl” (WB 41). The self-blinding in dreams and jokes is not only highlighted by Freud (see Jokes, part 3) but also by Scarry who argues that the act of disclaiming […] assists the torturer in practical ways. He first inflicts pain, then objectifies pain, then denies the pain—and only this final act of self-blinding permits the shift back to the first step, the inflicting of still more pain, for to allow the reality of the other’s suffering to enter his

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own consciousness would immediately compel him to stop the torture. […] It is not merely that his power makes him blind, nor that his power is accompanied by blindness, nor even that his power requires blindness; it is, instead, quite simply that his blindness, his willed amorality, is his power, or a large part of it. (The Body in Pain 56)

This partly explains the magistrate’s blindness as to his complicity with Joll, but the example of the magistrate also complicates Scarry’s remarks.10 Coetzee shows self-blinding in its manifold guises of rationalizing denial, dreams, jokes, and the washing of broken feet. In contrast to Joll, the magistrate does not will his amorality, and his blindness is neither willed nor powerful. It is weakness that makes the magistrate look away, but he doubts whether this makes looking away more forgivable. Torture, Pain, and the Unmaking of the Human The hooded child of the dreams appears to be the avatar of the barbarian girl because both girl and child escape the magistrate’s vision. It is a stock claim in criticism on Coetzee’s novel that the magistrate cannot ‘read’ the barbarian girl’s body. But why, exactly, does he want to read her scarred body? At face value, the magistrate’s desire to decipher the barbarian girl’s body confirms Peter Brooks’ observation that the body and the desire to know have always been seen in close connection, particularly with regard to carnal desire. Brooks argues that while the sociocultural body is a construct, the physical body appears pre-cultural to humans, and its sensations of pleasure or pain appear to be pre-linguistic. According to Brooks, this is why the physical body, the vehicle of mortality, promises humans access to more archaic and possibly also more animal parts of human nature. The means of bringing the body back into culture appears to be its transfer into language, if necessary by marking it, in any case by reading signs inscribed into the body as the magistrate reads the barbarian girl’s broken feet and her eye injuries. Brooks reminds us of the returning Odysseus being recognized by his old nurse Eurycleia: she knows him by an old scar on his body. Such identity marks on the body look like linguistic signifiers and promise to return the body to the semiotic realm, even if these marks could only be read as indexical rather than symbolic. The marking of the body therefore not only creates identity but also promises to transfer the body into literature and readability (see Brooks, Body Work 5–8, 21). The magistrate’s desire to read the girl’s body goes beyond a desire to return her body to the realm of meaning. He first has the girl take off her

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boots and unwrap her bandages. The girl runs a finger down her ankle and says that this is where the foot was broken, and the magistrate inquires: “Does it hurt?” He passes a finger “along the line, feeling nothing” (all WB 32). One evening, the magistrate notices a greyish puckering in her eye, and the girl informs him that her torturers touched her there. “Does it hurt?” the magistrate asks again. The barbarian girl finally tells him that “it was a fork, a kind of fork with only two teeth. […] They put it in the coals till it was hot, then they touched you with it, to burn you. […] The man brought it very close to my face and made me look at it. They held my eyelids open. But I had nothing to tell them. That was all” (WB 48). The magistrate always inquires as to whether the wounds still “hurt”; despite now knowing what was done to her, he still does not know the pain she has suffered. The elusiveness of her pain makes him continue to question her. It is her pain that he is seeking, but he can be no surer of having felt it in a sympathetic act than a penitent can be sure of having divulged the truth and only the truth instead of fictions that serve unconscious ulterior purposes (see Coetzee, “Confession and Double Thoughts”). To a person in pain, Scarry remarks, that pain is so incontestably present that having pain may come to be thought of as the most vibrant example of what it is to have certainty. Coetzee likewise states about the body that “the proof that it is is the pain it feels. The body with its pain becomes a counter to the endless trials of doubt” (DP 248). For a person regarding this body in pain, however, the pain is so elusive that hearing about it may be the paradigm for what it is to have doubt: “Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language” (Scarry, The Body in Pain 4). This insight is directly opposed to the philosophy of Colonel Joll, for whom, as the magistrate puts it, “[p]ain is truth; all else is subject to doubt” (WB 6). Joll believes there is “a certain tone”, a tone of truth, in the voice of the tortured person. Through this tone, Joll maintains, pain is directly accessible to the torturer. The magistrate is highly sceptical of this theory, but he also looks for the pain the barbarian girl felt during torture. He does so unsuccessfully, for Scarry remains in the right and Joll in the wrong; no matter how carefully the magistrate scrutinizes the girl’s body and its mutilation, she remains inaccessible to him. But why does he desire to gain access to her past pain in the first place? At face value, he desires to feel her pain because it would enable him to sympathize with her—something he will only be able to do when he is tortured himself. But he becomes increasingly aware that he also desires

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access to her pain because this pain, visible only in her often-invoked incompleteness and inhumanity, stirs his erotic desire, and that this constitutes the shocking kinship between him and the torturer Joll. He explicitly admits this kinship in the end: “I was not, as I liked to think, the indulgent pleasure-loving opposite of the cold rigid Colonel. I was the lie that Empire tells itself when times are easy, he the truth that Empire tells when harsh winds blow. Two sides of imperial rule, no more, no less” (WB 160). This might, after all, be the truth that was staring him in the face and that he could not see because he could not bear to see it. This might also be why, in his dreams, he cannot bear that it is the barbarian girl he is creeping towards in a way that reminds the reader of the citizens’ dreams of dark barbarians gripping ankles and raping the Empire’s daughters (see WB 10). The magistrate had ridiculed these dreams, but in his own dream, the avatar of the barbarian girl is a child. As the magistrate gradually takes more of an erotic interest in the girl, the dreams evoke a scenario of paedophilia in which the magistrate, creeping towards the child, plays the role of the barbarian terrifying his fellow citizens in their dreams. The dreams make the magistrate realize that his erotic advances towards the girl are akin to the torturer’s relation to his victim’s body: how natural a mistake to believe that you can burn or tear or hack your way into the secret body of the other! The girl lies in my bed, but there is no good reason why it should be a bed. I behave in some ways like a lover—I undress her, I bathe her, I stroke her, I sleep beside her—but I might equally well tie her to a chair and beat her, it would be no less intimate. (WB 51)

The aggressive content of the magistrate’s dreams is also suggested by the fact that the barbarian girl is woken by the magistrate during the night. He was shouting in his sleep, she says, but does not seem to know what he was shouting. She asks whether the magistrate had a dream but he cannot remember any. “Can it be that the dream of the hooded child building the snow-castle has been coming back?” he muses. “If it has, surely the taste or the smell or the afterglow of the dream would linger with me” (WB 56). “Surely” provokes the reader’s objection that the magistrate might not remember the dream precisely because it was about the hooded child standing in for the mutilated girl lying next to him. In his dreams, the magistrate’s blindness is centred on the faces of the children and especially on the hooded child’s face. When he finally sees a face in the snow-covered landscape, he is not dreaming anymore: the

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group of children at the end of the novel is real, and so are the surroundings. The children are building a snowman, settling the head on the body and dressing it with pebbles for eyes, ears, nose, and a mouth: a complete face, but the arms are missing. Although the creation is incomplete, it is enough to fit the prototype of a snowman. The snowman is inanimate, but it is alive to the children in the sense that it is recognized as a man. The eerie metamorphosing of the girl’s living flesh into animal flesh and then into inanimate matter has given way to a reverse process of dead matter turning into a human shape. The incompleteness of this act of creation makes it no less human than the unmaking of the barbarian girl’s humanity in torture, at least to the magistrate. In this sense, the snowman is a Christ-like resurrection of the hooded child of the dream, a hopeful reinterpretation of the incompleteness that is at the heart of the idea of the barbarian as not quite human because lacking in speech. As an oblique reference to God’s becoming man in Christ, the snowman adds a dimension to the magistrate’s sequence of dreams that transcends the Freudian logic of dream work. Dying on the cross and returning to walk the earth, Christ transcends the difference between death and life, God and man, as well as the narrow limits of psychological realism which, according to Coetzee, is not enough to give stories true depth. In an interview, Coetzee has said he admires Dostoevsky and Tolstoy for opening a dimension beyond psychology, as they are the heirs of a Christian tradition more vital than Western Christianity. Freud, by contrast, is committed to science, which has no ethical content: what psychoanalysis says about ethical impulses has no ethical weight, for whatever the psychological origins of love or charity may be, one still has to act with love and charity (see DP 244–45). In other words, the snowman returns the magistrate’s dreams of humanity from the realm of psychology to that of morality. As Coetzee observes in his programmatic essay on writing about torture, “Into the Dark Chamber”, such a return befits a time “when humanity will be restored across the face of society, and therefore when all human acts, including the flogging of an animal, will be returned to the ambit of moral judgment” (DP 368). Snowmen are bound to melt. Like humans—and unlike gods—they are mortal, but they do not scream when someone hacks into their bodies, and they do not respond when they are spoken to. The ontological status of snowmen is the same as that of wish fulfilment unmade when dreams end. The novel, having dealt on nearly every page with the dehumanization of human bodies, ends with the humanization of inanimate snow. As

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in Coetzee’s later novels, the human, the animal, the inanimate, and even the gods metamorphose into one another as the characters act, or fail to do so, under psychological, political, and ethical pressures. As the limits between these categories become less defined, so does the limit between civilization and barbarism in Waiting for the Barbarians. When Joll, after the captured barbarians are flogged with canes, presents to the crowd “an ordinary four-pound hammer used for knocking in tent-pegs” (WB 125) and threatens to strike the prisoners, he shows how easily torture can turn the inventory of civilization—literally the tools used to build civilization— into a means of destruction. The most common objects surrounding the prisoner in the cell—a door, a wall, a cement floor—are easily turned into weapons: what distinguishes the hammer as a tool from the hammer as a weapon is not the object itself but the surface upon which it falls (see Scarry, The Body in Pain 173). The perfidy of turning civilization into barbarism does not end here, for while the hammer, if it struck a prisoner, would make him feel the most acute pain, to the gaping citizens the hammer would signify pain only metonymically. The hammer would turn actual pain into a sign of power that denied the suffering (see Scarry, The Body in Pain 16). Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” and “the Meaning of Humanity” The magistrate allows himself dehumanization and even deanimalization only in dreams or jokes and is shocked to see them performed in the marketplace. “Not with that!” he shouts. “You would not use a hammer on a beast, not on a beast!” In that moment “[g]odlike strength” possesses him, whereas the prisoners hold “their hands clasped to their faces like monkeys’ paws”. The magistrate gets up to deliver his great speech: “We are the great miracle of creation! But from some blows this miraculous body cannot repair itself! […] Look at these men! […] Men!” (WB 127). When the magistrate is struck down, he thinks about the turn of phrase he has just used—“miracle of creation”—and it occurs to him “that we crush insects beneath our feet, miracles of creation too, beetles, worms, ­cockroaches, ants, in their various ways” (WB 127). God, men, and beasts are huddled together in this paragraph. Just as it is unclear who is the barbarian and who the civilized, it is unclear who is beast, man, or god. The barbarian prisoners resemble “monkeys” but are treated worse than a “beast” when hit with a hammer, and yet they are “men”. In his prison cell, the magistrate has built his day “around the hours when I am fed.

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I guzzle my food like a dog. A bestial life is turning me into a beast” (WB 94), but now he is of “[g]odlike strength”, whereas the only people clad in proper clothes, as befits “men”, are Joll, the soldiers, and the citizens who exhibit barbaric behaviour in flogging and humiliating the helpless prisoners. The thought occurs to the magistrate that Joll and Mandel are not the exception because that miracle of creation, man, kills beasts on a daily basis. The confusion of barbarism and civilization reaches its climax in a scene in which heaven and earth are turned upside down. Its meaning becomes fully clear only when held against the paragraph in which the magistrate is shown what he calls “the meaning of humanity”: [M]y torturers were not interested in degrees of pain. They were interested only in demonstrating to me what it meant to live in a body, as a body, a body which can entertain notions of justice only as long as it is whole and well, which very soon forgets them when its head is gripped and a pipe is pushed down its gullet and pints of salt water are poured into it till it coughs and retches and flails and voids itself. They did not come to force the story out of me of what I had said to the barbarians and what the barbarians had said to me. […] They came to my cell to show me the meaning of humanity, and in the space of an hour they showed me a great deal. (WB 136)

Barbara Eckstein has drawn attention to the relation of these passages to the idea of the Great Chain of Being, in which humanity, as described by Augustine, resides between the animals and the angels because humans are both body and soul. Descartes raised the human self above its own body by virtue of its ability to think and articulate without any dependence on the body, even the brain. In Eckstein’s reading, the torturer perverts Cartesian metaphysics (and hubris) by eliminating the soul, the mind, and the voice of others, and by usurping the definition of the humanity of others as the body alone (see “The Body, the Word, and the State” 190–91). The magistrate suggests that Joll and Mandel have inverted animal and angel, barbarism and civilization, and have thereby damaged their own humanity. The disturbance of what we see as clear distinctions between animal, human, and god, which is characteristic of many of Coetzee’s novels, here takes the form of an ethical verdict. There are two direct representations of torture in Waiting for the Barbarians, and both are written in the spirit of “Into the Dark Chamber”. Both portrayals abstain from “looking on in horrified fascination as the blows fall or turning one’s eyes away” (DP 368). One instance of torture is the magistrate’s being made to climb a ladder leading into the crown of

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a tree until he slips and hangs from a rope put around his neck. The other is the flogging of barbarian prisoners in front of the citizens and the magistrate, who has escaped his prison cell. A wire runs through the hands and cheeks of the prisoners, making them meek as lambs. The colonel rubs a handful of dust into each prisoner’s naked back and writes the word “enemy” with a stick of charcoal. Then, the beating with cane staves begins; the charcoal marks and dust begin to run with sweat and blood, and the magistrate finally understands the rules of the game: to beat them until the prisoners’ backs are washed clean (see WB 123–25). The portrayal of Joll and Mandel does not show the torturer as god-like in his attempt to unmake what, in the traditional view, God has created. Although their doings command the fascination of the citizens who look on, the reader breaks free from fascination by witnessing events through the magistrate who gazes at those gazing at the spectacle. The magistrate observes an impressionable little girl who, in a “silent, terrified, curious” way, takes in the sight of the naked men being beaten. He sees the same expression all around him: “not hatred, not bloodlust, but a curiosity so intense that their bodies are drained by it and only their eyes live, organs of a new and ravening appetite” (both WB 125). Just as the pain totally absorbs the tortured subject, the spectacle transforms the onlookers—and the torturers themselves—into creatures that respond involuntarily to particular stimuli. Only through inserting a mediating lens does the novelist interrupt the current between spectacle and reader, diverting the reader’s attention from the action to its context. The idea of a Great Chain of Being is as much part of this context as an intertextual reference to Kafka that enables the reader to interpret the action from a different angle. Kafka’s fable “In the Penal Colony” was conceived by an author who was self-admittedly obsessed with the subject of torture (see Alt, Franz Kafka 485–86). The fable is set in an outpost of an empire, at the threshold of civilization and barbarism, but critics have only lately taken its colonial setting seriously (see Auerochs, “In der Strafkolonie” 212). As in Coetzee’s novel, torture demarcates the limit where one turns into the other. An officer demonstrates to a visiting explorer the workings of a machine that kills convicts by inscribing a sentence on their bodies. To Kafka’s liberal explorer, “[t]he injustice of the procedure and the inhumanity of the execution” are “undeniable” (The Complete Stories 176), and the executing officer fears the explorer will tell his (the officer’s) superior, the Commandant, that in his own “‘country the prisoner is interrogated before he is sentenced,’ or [that they] ‘haven’t

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used torture since the Middle Ages’” (180). The Commandant might say: “‘A famous Western investigator, sent out to study criminal procedure in all the countries of the world, has just said that our old tradition of administering justice is inhumane’” (181). In Coetzee, the inhumanity of torture likewise generates the central conflict between the magistrate and other representatives of Empire—with the difference that he is tortured at the hands of the Empire’s men, whereas Kafka’s officer tortures (and executes) himself when the visiting explorer openly declares the torture apparatus inhumane. In Coetzee’s transformation of the story, Kafka’s characters undergo an intriguing change of position in the hierarchical setting of the outpost. In Kafka’s colony, the Commandant who supervises the officer never arrives but is said to be keen on making the penal colony a place that meets the progressive humanitarian standards of the Empire’s mainland. The colonial officer, by contrast, turns barbarian when he resorts to torture after showing the visiting explorer the execution machine. In Coetzee, the Commandant, who was a marginal character in Kafka, takes centre stage as the magistrate. The magistrate is a colonial officer like Kafka’s torturer, but he is liberal, progressive and suffers from pangs of conscience at the sight of the apparatus. The barbaric officer Joll, on the other hand, comes from the centre of the Empire. The significance of the shift of positions is clear: the cruelty of torture is not a minor representative’s aberration but inherent to the Empire. Kafka discreetly characterizes the condemned soldier as a barbarian. He is “condemned to death for disobedience and insulting behaviour to a superior” (The Complete Stories 165). He is thus part of the Empire, but rather than an ethnic member he is an indentured servant. He is ignorant of the language spoken by the officer and the explorer and inspects the machine full of curiosity while the officer explains its construction and functioning. The condemned soldier does not know the sentence that has been passed on him, and the officer notes that there would be no point in telling him because “[h]e’ll learn it on his body” (170). Like Coetzee’s magistrate, Kafka’s colonial officer is a judge and therefore entitled to search for evidence, pass judgement, and determine the punishment—the legal process that, according to Scarry, torture reverses (see The Body in Pain 41). Coetzee’s magistrate, who used to oversee trials, is subjected to the reverse process of torture that unmakes one of the pillars of civilization—the law—in the same way it unmade the domestic use of the hammer. Whereas in Kafka it is the officer’s “guiding principle” that “guilt is

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never to be doubted” (The Complete Stories 170), in Waiting for the Barbarians that principle is not the magistrate’s but Joll’s, again suggesting that torture is inherent to Empire. In Kafka’s fable, the carving of the sentence into the condemned man’s body is at one and the same time producing evidence (to “burn or tear or hack your way into the secret body of the other” [WB 51]), sentencing the convict and punishing him. That is the genius of the apparatus: while the officer represents not only the legislative but the judicial and executive branches of ‘civilized’ government (see Alt, Franz Kafka 482), the apparatus fuses into a needle three distinct phases of the legal process. Kafka makes it plain that this hacking, tearing, and uncovering is in fact an act of inscription by which meaning is created rather than found. Rather than finding inhumanity in the condemned man by tearing away body tissues, the apparatus inscribes inhumanity in his body, as if the magistrate is right in saying that by demonstrating what it is “to live in a body, as a body”, his torturers showed him “the meaning of humanity” (WB 136). If the body is humanity, inhumanity cannot be found in the body but must be inscribed on it, and inscription must remain hidden by pretending to be as natural as the body itself. Kafka’s officer suggests this is possible when he says that the explorer has “seen how difficult it is to decipher the script with one’s eyes; but our man deciphers it with his wounds” (The Complete Stories 175). The writing of the machine denies its reliance on language because the letters inscribed on the body appear illegible and meaningless to the explorer, who only sees “a labyrinth of lines crossing and recrossing each other, which covered the paper so thickly that it was difficult to discern the blank spaces between them”. The officer explains that “the script can’t be a simple one” (174), and the reason seems to be that the clash between body and language must hide behind an act that seems to be purely natural unless it reveals itself to be an arbitrary ascription of guilt. In this way, Kafka goes beyond Scarry’s observation that torture separates the body and the voice or language of the condemned, leaving only the body emphatically present (see The Body in Pain 45). The condemned is only superficially barbarian, that is, unable to speak because he does not understand the executing officer’s language. Torture makes him truly barbaric by robbing him of his voice. Kafka also shows that the torturer’s voice hides behind such physical ‘evidence’ created by torture. Kafka provides Coetzee with a precedent for torture’s distortion of the law’s temporality. One could read into this a confirmation of Scarry’s

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thesis that torture reverses the legal process of finding evidence and determining punishment in the flogging of the barbarian prisoners, but the design of the flogging scene suggests that Coetzee holds the middle ground between Kafka’s stress on simultaneity in torture and Scarry’s emphasis on reversal. Joll’s writing of the word “enemy” on the prisoners’ backs stresses, like Kafka’s fable, that inhumanity is inscribed on the tortured rather than found in him. This is not achieved by physical punishment producing verbal admissions of guilt, as suggested by Scarry; nor is it practised through the simultaneous finding of evidence, sentencing and punishing in Kafka. When the captive barbarians are labelled “enemy” and then flogged until the word has disappeared from their backs, sentencing precedes punishment, and the production of evidence consists in a subsequent and forced ‘atonement’ of the body by sweating and bleeding the sentence (“enemy”) away. The suggestion is that the sentence must have been just because the convicts atoned for their supposed crimes. Coetzee follows Kafka’s lesson that torture conceals its inscription of guilt by pretending that there is only the physical evidence of the body. While not denying Scarry’s point that torture unmakes the tortured person’s language and replaces it with the vehement presence of his body, Coetzee, following Kafka, shows that this replacement also serves to erase any historical record that could be read by future civilizations. The magistrate accuses Joll in the spirit of drawing a universal and ahistorical distinction between barbarism and civilization (see Valdez Moses, “The Mark of Empire” 119): “You are the enemy, you have made the war, and you have given them all the martyrs they need—starting not now but a year ago when you committed your first filthy barbarities here! History will bear me out!” (WB 135). Joll coolly replies: “Nonsense. There will be no history” (WB 135). Joll is right because his torturing erases its own traces by leaving only bodies that will eventually rot. The aforementioned scene illustrates in perhaps the most powerful way how torture unmakes humanity. Mandel leads the magistrate to a tree, covers his eyes, and forces him to step up the rungs of a ladder leading into a tree’s crown. A rope has been fixed around the magistrate’s neck: I try to call out something, a word of blind fear, a shriek, but the rope is now so tight that I am strangled, speechless. The blood hammers in my ears. I feel my toes lose their hold. I am swinging gently in the air, bumping against the ladder, flailing with my feet. The drumbeat in my ears becomes slower and louder till it is all I can hear. (WB 142)

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Suddenly the magistrate touches the ground and the hood comes off. He has survived, like the insurrectionary soldier of Kafka’s penal colony who is suddenly set free after having been certain of his imminent death (see The Complete Stories 185). In addition to displacing this mock execution from the flogging of the barbarians to the enacted hanging of the magistrate—the flogging scene would have been the corresponding episode to Kafka’s—Coetzee also seems to have modelled the magistrate’s mock execution on one of the crucial events in the life of Fyodor Dostoevsky, who was led before a firing squad for participating in illegal propaganda to oppose serfdom. At the last moment, a messenger rushed in and the guns were lowered; the Tsar had spared their lives. Dostoevsky had passed several minutes believing that his life was about to end, and the mock execution was part of the punishment (see Frank, Dostoevsky 173–85). Going beyond this biographical reference to an influential source, the episode in Coetzee’s novel stresses a final way in which torture attempts to break down the humanity of the tortured subject: by making him or her go through the process of dying. Death, the end of all sentient being, seems immediate in the overwhelming presence of bodily pain: “I have already died one death, on that tree, only you decided to save me” (WB 148), the magistrate will tell Mandel. His suspension from a tree with a rope around his neck is only a more visible version of the truth that every act of torture makes the tortured go through the experience of dying. “Pain”, Scarry writes, is the equivalent in felt-experience of what is unfeelable in death. Each only happens because of the body. In each, the contents of consciousness are destroyed. The two are the most intense forms of negation, the purest expressions of the anti-human, […] one occurring in the cessation of sentience, the other expressing itself in grotesque overload. Regardless, then, of the context in which it occurs, physical pain always mimes death and the infliction of physical pain is always a mock execution. (The Body in Pain 31)

The torturer’s violent driving of a wedge between the body and its voice— making the body painfully present by destroying it and making the voice absent by destroying it—is directly related to death in that the body is present while “that more elusive part represented by the voice is so alarmingly absent that heavens are created to explain its whereabouts” (The Body in Pain 49). This suggests that, to the civilized, living without a language in barbarism is death-in-life. The cries of the tortured are only calling from

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beyond. When the magistrate is suspended from the tree once more, this time with the rope attached to his hands bound behind his back, his bellowing, roaring, and shouting is commented on as follows: “He is calling his barbarian friends […]. That is barbarian language you hear” (WB 144).11 The remark is a cruel joke, but it is also a piece of mythmaking as addressed in Dusklands. The soldier making the comment imposes a secondary meaning—barbarism—on the primary meaning of the magistrate’s cries—pain. He posits the non-language of the cries—a language of madness—as a mark of barbarism. The myth of barbarism exists from the moment when barbarism achieves a natural state (see Barthes, Mythologies 114–30). Carrol Clarkson has asked whether, given that prose is unable to capture the intensity of physical events such as torture, there are ways in which Coetzee hints “that it is possible, for snatches, however brief, to think outside one’s own language” (DP 198), and to convey that in writing. She asks what the ethical implications of linguistic commentary in moments of unthinkable physical suffering might be (see “J.  M. Coetzee and the Limits of Language” 108). The magistrate’s cries are indeed “outside one’s own language” and in this sense are bar-bar-ian. Waiting for the Barbarians suggests that bystanders can only hear a call for an ethical response in these cries if they do not believe the myth of barbarism. In this novel, even something as tangible and universally human as the body and the voice can be transformed into something inhuman through the myths of Empire. For the citizens to hear ethical demands in cries that are outside their own language, they would first have to question the myths that have been ingrained in that very language. This is something that only the magistrate achieves.

Life & Times of Michael K Thou wert better in thy grave than to answer with thy uncovered body this extremity of the skies. Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha, here’s three on’s are sophisticated; thou art the thing itself. Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings! Come. Unbutton here.

These are the words of King Lear caught in a raging storm together with his fool and followers (Shakespeare, King Lear 3.4.91–98). Western

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l­iterature has produced a number of tales featuring protagonists who are reduced to what we may call a minimal life. For whatever reason, these protagonists are severed from the social fabric, and their sole business has become survival. Often they quite literally inhabit the threshold between life and death, sometimes finding their way back into civilization, sometimes crossing this threshold. King Lear, the beginning of Robinson Crusoe, the story of Caspar Hauser, Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist”, Beckett’s novel trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable as well as Waiting for Godot and Endgame, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road are all minimal life tales of this kind. They are set in deserts, prison cells, on empty heaths and desert islands, in apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic landscapes. In these lonely places the human does not stop being a zoon politikon and an animal rationale, but the classical definitions look like extravagant clothes: surely they are not minimal definitions of the human. Minimal life tales often raise metaphysical questions and investigate how much can be stripped away from a human being before it turns into something no longer human. J.M.  Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K, published in 1983, shares this concern with the aforementioned tales but considers it in a decidedly political perspective. While the novel strips its Coloured protagonist of attributes that are commonly understood to be human,12 and while Beckett’s trilogy is arguably its most important influence, Coetzee modifies the model suggested by other minimal life tales by developing its existential concern in a scenario that resembles the political situation of South Africa of the early 1980s. In Life & Times, the question of the essential, or minimal, human takes the following form: what part of humanity can be saved under a totalitarian power? The novel’s Western Cape in the near future is torn by civil war. Curfews and restrictions exist; people are kept in labour or rehabilitation camps and are forced to work. South Africa’s apartheid era is extrapolated into an even more violent future in which totalitarian parallels with Nazism and Stalinism are evident. While considering how Michael K’s reduction to bare life is related to the treatment of the oppressed population under apartheid, the novel also questions how representative its protagonist is of the oppressed in South Africa and, in fact, of human beings in general. Arguably, only Kafka has grappled with this problem as persistently as Coetzee, and both might be the writers most concerned with the question of whether bare life is conceivable in the first place. Both suggest that even if the bare life of humans is the object of sovereign power, humans themselves are unable to encounter each other as bare life. In everyday life—in

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the sense of Heidegger’s ‘being-in-the-world’—there can be no bare life and no minimal human because the reciprocity of the social depends on the implicit understanding that the other is just as human as myself. The search for the minimal human by stripping away is wrong-headed. Bare life is not the minimal version of the human but of life which is no longer anthropomorphic. Ashes and Goats The fate of K’s mother Anna introduces the theme of minimal life. As K carries her ashes with him, they foreshadow his being “as near to a state of life in death or death in life […] as is humanly possible” (MK 159). In what sense are the ashes truly his mother? Do they at all resemble the human being they were? Similar questions will soon apply to K: is he still a human being? Has he become an animal, a vegetable, a stone? If the ashes of K’s mother are on the other side, beyond death, although they are part of K’s immanence, K does not cross that border. He does, however, come close in his ‘stony’ moments in Prince Albert, inhabiting death in life as the ashes inhabited life in death. The fact that, for K, the ashes are his mother is evinced by his care for them. This care is similar to David Lurie’s care for the corpses of dogs in Disgrace insofar as the ashes as well as the dead dogs issue ethical demands: traces of life they retain preclude them from becoming mere dead matter. Instead of letting the nurse at the Stellenbosch hospital “dispose of the ashes fittingly” (MK 32), as she offers to do, K takes them with him, even though cremation has made it impossible to tell whether the ashes are truly his mother’s remains (see MK 32). That K takes this on trust shows that it is not a physical resemblance which emotionally attaches him to the ashes, as may be the case with mourners paying their respects to a showcased corpse, but the very notion that this was—and paradoxically still is—his mother. This is not a symbolic notion because it is important for K that these ashes were his mother; he would not be able to replace them with other ashes. Thus his mother is, as the novel has it, “in some sense in the box and in some sense not” (MK 57). The situation resembles the transubstantiation of the Catholic Eucharist: although the bread and wine consumed by the believer do not resemble Christ’s flesh and blood, they have no separate meaning; they are Christ.13 The ashes foreshadow that K’s future minimal life will sometimes appear like starving and sacrifice for the community in the footsteps of Gandhi and Christ until “detail far in

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excess of any allegorical reading” (Attridge, J. M. Coetzee 49) will thwart the interpretation that religion can enable political action in times of oppression. In the course of K’s journey to Prince Albert, a policeman, a fellow passenger on a train, and a child inquire about the box K carries with him, and each of these scenes is one of disbelief. People are also discomfited because the ashes remind them of their own mortality and because they see to just how little life can be reduced. Yet at the same time the ashes resemble the pumpkin seeds that K will henceforth carry with him, suggesting that the ashes, too, contain life because they fertilize. K first wants to put the packet of ash in a little hole dug in the earth, but an impulse tells him that this would be inappropriate. He then scatters the ashes over a patch of a few metres, turning the earth over spadeful by spadeful, as if planting something. Sowing his mother’s ashes, he rediscovers his impulse to plant and cultivate: “It is because I am a gardener, he thought, because that is my nature. […] The impulse to plant had been reawoken in him; now, in a matter of weeks, he found his waking life bound tightly to the patch of earth he had begun to cultivate and the seeds he had planted there” (MK 59). A decisive step towards the minimal life is taken: not to take what cannot be replenished. When K arrives on the farm, he becomes a killer of other lives one last time. After killing a ewe, K finds it “hard to believe that he had spent a day chasing after them like a madman with a knife. He had a vision of himself riding the ewe to death under the mud by the light of the moon, and shuddered” (MK 55). As is often the case in Coetzee, the grace to be found in the most gruesome failures and nightmarish events lies in their teaching the protagonist a lesson, and the “lesson, if there was a lesson, if there were lessons embedded in events, seemed to be not to kill such large animals” (MK 57). The reader, however, learns a more general lesson: that the least bare life—the most assuming one—is the life that appropriates land and feeds on the meat of others. The Visagie family, white farmers who claim exclusive ownership of land and who feed on the meat of others by exploiting the workforce of camp inmates, exemplify this way of life. When K returns to the farm, he finds a rotten carcass left by the Visagie grandson. As I will show, the eating of meat in the novel prefigures the workings of sovereign power reigning over its subjects not as citizens but as biological bodies, deciding who shall survive and who shall die.

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Agamben’s Bare Life and Kafka’s “The Burrow” In Homo Sacer Giorgio Agamben argues that Aristotle introduced the differentiation between zoē as the name for the undifferentiated fact of a thing being alive and bios for the specific ways of living that exist in addition to zoē. Following Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, Agamben argues that sovereign power’s primary function is to produce and control the biological life of its subjects rather than their way of living (see Homo Sacer 9–14). The mechanism by which sovereign power controls biological life is the state of exception—an idea Agamben derives from Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political—that is, a state in which sovereign power is able at the same time to be and not be part of the legal system: stepping outside the system, sovereign power instals new laws regulating the bare life of its subjects. According to Agamben, this does not manifest an undermining of the law but showcases a breach inherent in law. It demonstrates that the norm and its application are not tied together by an essential bond that would allow for deducing the application. It is important that for Agamben, bare life is the product of biopolitics rather than an entity preceding it. Bare life is the result of biopolitics stripping a life of all qualities that give it a sociopolitical identity until that life is—and here I return to the medical officer’s words from Life & Times— “as near to a state of life in death or death in life […] as is humanly possible” (MK 159). Like other passages, the statement illustrates that bareness, in Agamben as well as in Coetzee’s novel, is at the same time a state of existence in relation to the law and to power—standing outside the law whilst being subject to it—and a state of existence in relation to necessity, of being reduced to basic creaturely needs.14 In the rhetoric of power, the two versions of bareness support each other in circular fashion: power can legitimately consider life outside the law if that life is merely creaturely, and life is merely creaturely if power positions it outside the law. Biopolitics differentiates between anomy and law as well as life and law on the grounds of power alone (Agamben, Homo Sacer 15–46, State of Exception 34–35, 40–41, 86–88). Agamben famously argues that the homo sacer from Roman law is the earliest conceptualization of bare life; a life that, in response to a grave offence, can be killed but must not be sacrificed. The homo sacer no longer has any of the customary forms or qualifications of specific lives in a community; all that remains is a human creature, a bare life (see Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben 200–39). Agamben argues that while today everyone is a homo sacer at the mercy of sovereign

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power, the purest form of this bare life is found not in the clinic or the prison that Foucault had analysed, but in the concentration camp (see Homo Sacer 68–105). Analysing Life & Times along Agamben’s lines— while resisting the temptation to equate Coetzee’s K with Agamben’s homo sacer—promises to both sharpen K’s contours and reveal something of his peculiar way of being. Moreover, is the question of whether it is possible for K to live outside history tantamount to the question of whether there can be bare human life at all? If it is impossible for K to live outside history, this could mean that there cannot be bare human life because history always marks and qualifies his body as a cultural and political body.15 It is important to keep in mind that the literary character K can inhabit ways of being that are not necessarily open to human beings. His example cannot be treated as evidence against theories erected on the basis, for example, of the accounts of Holocaust survivors, but it does demand that we interrogate ideas about the limits of the human. K imagines his transition into a bare life as turning to a different landscape, that is, as an option that is naturally open to him. He imagines that if his former life was like the lush vegetation of the Cape peninsula, his new life is like the semi-­ desert Karoo: I have lost my love for that kind of earth, he thought, I no longer care to feel that kind of earth between my fingers. It is no longer the green and the brown that I want but the yellow and the red; not the wet but the dry; not the dark but the light; not the soft but the hard. I am becoming a different kind of man, he thought, if there are two kinds of man. If I were cut, he thought, holding his wrists out, looking at his wrists, the blood would no longer gush from me but seep, and after a little seeping dry and heal. I am becoming smaller and harder and drier every day. (MK 67)

A climate change from the humid to the arid has taken place in K as he has travelled from Cape Town’s Sea Point to Prince Albert in the Karoo. This geographical interpretation of K’s inner change suggests the immanence of the minimal life he has chosen: it is not to be found beyond this world but merely in another, less peopled region. The passage foreshadows the medical officer’s later comments on K as a rudimentary little man made of earth (see MK 160–61, discussed below) and it refers to the burrow that K has dug in the ground. The nature of that burrow may be the most striking expression of K’s minimal life. The descriptions of K’s paradisal life in Prince Albert, and

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particularly of his life in the burrow, draw on Kafka’s story “The Burrow”. While Coetzee reverses some of the story’s features, both texts enact the breakdown of time, the seeping of timelessness into the narrative. In an interview, Coetzee has said that in terms of technique, he focused on the pace of narration when writing the novel (see DP 142–43), and in his essay “Time, Tense, and Aspect in Kafka’s ‘The Burrow’” he examines Kafka’s attempted cancellation of the distance between the time of the events narrated and the time of narration. If the concern with time is important in Coetzee’s intertextual use of Kafka, its other important purpose is to juxtapose K’s bare life with the life of Kafka’s narrator, who feeds on the meat of other creatures (see Complete Stories 326–27). Michael K gradually distances himself from this practice. Kafka’s burrow is a home fortified against an unknown enemy; it is the narrator’s life task and his work of art (see Complete Stories 339–40). Michael K’s burrow serves only his self-preservation. It is a minimal and transitory intervention in the environment, with hardly anything stored in it, and not to be enlarged: “He did not explore his new world. He did not turn his cave into a home or keep a record of the passage of the days” (MK 93). The building of Kafka’s burrow, by contrast, is an act of exploration and colonization, for the narrator takes possession of the earth by enlarging his labyrinthine burrow (see Alt, Franz Kafka 661–62). He stores ever greater supplies of meat (see Complete Stories 340), but his status is ambivalently lodged between hunter and hunted. It is telling that he fearfully imagines the enemy waiting at the gate of his burrow to be an animal. Michael K does not draw a line between himself and animals or between human and animal burrows. The notions of enclosed and appropriated spaces are foreign to him. He is patient rather than hesitant. Whereas Kafka presents a life premised on exploitation, ownership, permanence, foresight, and fear of death, Michael K’s way of life suggests self-­sufficiency, a sense of being a visitor to the land, provisionality, dispassion, and equanimity. Coetzee arguably rewrites Kafka along the lines of Beckett, especially of Molloy. As Gilbert Yeoh has argued, Beckett’s aesthetics of nothingness becomes an ideology of dispossession and relinquishment in Coetzee’s hands, creating in the character of K a minimal historical self (see “J. M. Coetzee and Samuel Beckett” 127–28). The “Beckettian situation of ‘him who has nothing’ [is transformed] into the ‘person who wants nothing,’ positively revaluing the concept of a self with minimal needs. Such a self is able to deny more effectively the objectifying effects

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of both charities and camps exercised upon it, retaining its agency in historical participation” (Yeoh 131). Sovereign control over K directly targets his body; in this respect, K seems to stand as an example of Agamben’s thoughts on bare life and sovereign power. The novel’s main agent of sovereign power is the medical officer whose charity turns out to be another form of control. To the medical officer, K’s body promises to embody meaning or at least K’s identity. As discussed in the section on Waiting for the Barbarians, the desire to know another human being makes us perceive the other’s body as a script to be deciphered (see Brooks, Body Work 5–8, 21). K’s body, however, differs from the barbarian girl’s because the marks on his body are, quite miraculously, not marks left by history, and it is history that provides the code to read marks. K was born with a harelip, an apparently purely biological and pre-cultural sign of we know not what, and the signs of starvation on his body do not signify that he was starved but result from his will not to eat. K’s body does not, like the barbarian girl’s or Friday’s in Foe, bear the marks of (possible) torture, marks that would testify to an undeniable history of suffering. It is far from certain that the symptoms of starvation on K’s body signify suffering. Like Kafka’s hunger artist, K finds it miraculously easy to starve himself. This raises the question whether K’s body is not a mere subject of sovereign control in Agamben’s sense but also the site of resistance to sovereign power. But is resistance through lacking the need to eat conceivable at all? Would such an individual still be human? Superhuman, Miracle, Eschatological Time Put in historical terms: if K is not readable because human history has left no marks on him, can he perhaps be read as a figure of eschatological history? After all, not only his talent for starving seems superhuman but also his lack of a need for reciprocal acknowledgement. K is quite sufficient unto himself in Prince Albert. Aristotle’s aforementioned judgement that a person who is unable or does not need to live in society must be either a beast or a god (see The Politics 14) might suggest that K’s sphere is indeed the religious. K’s inexplicable vanishing from the Kenilworth camp shows parallels to Christ’s vanishing from the tomb after crucifixion, yet K’s body does not bear the stigmata of bleeding hands and feet or a wound signifying the entry of a lance. The only miracles he performs are those of his own body, and he is not aware of his exceptional nature. Even though

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he increasingly plays the role of a saviour to the medical officer, K has no intention of saving the world. K is not readable as an allegory either of Jesus or of Gandhi because he neither sacrifices himself nor starves to benefit any cause. The spiritual figures closest to K are those located between man and god: the radical Christian and possibly also Buddhist ascetic figures. The Bible’s “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven” (Matthew 5:3) comes to mind, where poverty comprises material as well as spiritual renunciation. Fasting is reported of Buddha and of Christ, who starves for forty days and nights in the desert and then refuses the devil’s bid to transform stones into bread because “Man shall not live by bread alone” (Matthew 4:4). St. Gregorius turns into a stone and finally into a fish in Thomas Mann’s The Holy Sinner. Coetzee’s novel does not suggest the existence of God watching over its deeply unjust world. K does not justify his behaviour by referring to the divine. If he is a saint, he is a saint in godless times: an anti-allegory “of how scandalously”, in the words of the medical officer, “how outrageously a meaning can take up residence in a system without becoming a term in it” (MK 166). A meaning can only be allegorical if it is a term of a semiotic system that we use to make sense of the world. Such a system is always historical and cultural. K’s body, however, is bare of the signs of any but natural history, and his deeds do not seem to spring from sources we know. His bare life may ultimately be the subject of power, as Agamben has shown, but in its very bareness it resists reading and interpretation. The medical officer once believed that the body is devoid of ambivalence but then acknowledges that K’s example proves him wrong: The body, I had been taught, wants only to live. Suicide, I had understood, is an act not of the body against itself but of the will against the body. Yet here I beheld a body that was going to die rather than change its nature. I stood for hours in the doorway of the ward watching you and puzzling over the mystery. It was not a principle, an idea that lay behind your decline. You did not want to die, but you were dying. (MK 164)

K’s is a body without thought, a body neither guided by principles nor by instincts. The time in which K lives—not the “times” of the novel’s title but the very ontology of his being—seems closer to eschatological time than to historical time, even if it is not eschatological time. When K retreats to the remote countryside of Prince Albert, time is loosened from the wheels of history and becomes a sheet that can be stretched. Derek

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Attridge has analysed how K avoids his world’s preoccupation with the measuring and exploitation of time and argues that the strength of K’s stance towards time is his openness to a contingent future (see J. M. Coetzee 49–57). Having arrived in Prince Albert, K imagines that he could live there forever, or till he dies, and that every day would be the same as the day before (see MK 46–47, 99): [He] was learning to love idleness, idleness […] as a yielding up of himself to time, to a time flowing slowly like oil from horizon to horizon over the face of the world, washing over his body, circulating in his armpits and his groin, stirring his eyelids. [… ] [A]ll that was moving was time, bearing him onward in its flow. Once or twice the other time in which the war had its existence reminded itself to him as the jet fighters whistled high overhead. But for the rest he was living beyond the reach of calendar and clock in a blessedly neglected corner, half awake, half asleep. (MK 115–16)

K lives in what can be termed body time: a time not measured by instruments of civilization, coordinating its cogs’ working, but time determined by the rhythms of the body, its phases of exertion, and rest. It might be helpful here to consider a passage from Coetzee’s previous novel, Waiting for the Barbarians. The magistrate describes how Empire, understood as the hegemonic culture of any given period, distorts body time in which humans could live “like fish in water, like birds in air, like children” (WB 133). Empire has created the time of history and “located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe” (WB 133). This means that Empire replaces time by history: “Empire dooms itself to live in history and plot against history. One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era” (WB 133). In Prince Albert, K inhabits a forgotten part of Empire, and his example shows how, rather than struggling with time, the body glides through it, and how its contours can be brought out only by time’s touch (not by violence, not by torture). In a metafictional moment towards the end of the novel, K wonders about what he learned out in the country: “Is that […] the moral of the whole story: that there is time enough for everything?” (MK 183). This remark becomes clearer when seen in the light of Coetzee’s essay on “Time, Tense, and Aspect in Kafka’s ‘The Burrow’”. The essay ends by contrasting “historical” and “eschatological” conceptions of temporality. The historical one relates the present to a past with

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which it is continuous. The eschatological conception of time “recognizes no such continuity: there is only the present, which is always present, […], der entscheidende Augenblick [the decisive moment, KW]” (DP 231). In this second conception, there is no continuity between the successive nows of experience, which is why every moment seems everlasting: time enough for everything.16 Whereas Kafka’s “The Burrow” approaches such an idea of time by its use of tense and aspect, Life & Times approaches time through its protagonist’s minimal being. If for Kafka’s narrator time has broken down because its continuity is lost, K embraces life in the eternal present with his self-sufficient, provisional existence in Prince Albert. It is an existence free from the two emotions directed towards the future: hope and fear. Such an experience of time is surely miraculous and seems indeed to belong to eschatology and more generally to the divine sphere, as does K’s ability to starve. The miraculous aspects of K’s existence link him most closely to the protagonist of Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist”. In an interview, Coetzee has explained that he draws on Kafka because of the earlier writer’s ability to gesture towards the miraculous: “Kafka at least hints that it is possible, for snatches, however brief, to think outside one’s own language, perhaps to report back on what it is like to think outside language itself. […] What is interesting is the liberating possibility Kafka opens up” (DP 198–99). To think outside one’s language is precisely what Magda attempts in In the Heart of the Country. Michael K takes a less self-conscious and less self-­ reflexive form in attempting to live outside history; a form that at least one of his observers, the medical officer, recognizes as potentially superhuman. Like Kafka’s hunger artist, Michael K has a prodigious ability to starve, and only he knows how easy it is to starve (see The Complete Stories 302–03). Yet only Kafka’s hunger artist is depressed by the fact that his warders consider him a deceiver. Kafka’s narrator explicitly states that it is impossible to explain the art of starving to rational people and that these people will invariably describe it as a fraud (see The Complete Stories 302–06). Michael K shows no awareness of his walking like a miracle among the rational animals who cannot comprehend him. The medical officer confirms “there is nothing there, no story of the slightest interest to rational people. […] He is not of our world. He lives in a world all his own” (MK 142). Yet the same medical officer, despite his initial address that “[t]here is nothing special about you” (MK 136), later considers that K might indeed be special, and that the food he lived on in the mountains might have been manna (see MK 150).

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The Muselmann K’s superhuman and miraculous aspects suggest that Agamben’s notion of bare life captures only one side of K. And yet Agamben’s search for historical paradigms of bare life seems to yield models that fit K more than the saint or other religious characters. This becomes apparent in what may be the novel’s most explicit and elaborate comment on the bareness of K’s life: With Michaels it always seemed to me that someone had scuffled together a handful of dust, spat on it, and patted it into the shape of a rudimentary man, making one or two mistakes (the mouth, and without a doubt the contents of the head), omitting one or two details (the sex), but coming up nevertheless in the end with a genuine little man of earth, the kind of little man one sees in peasant art emerging into the world from between the squat thighs of its mother-host with fingers ready hooked and back ready bent for a life of burrowing, a creature that spends its waking life stooped over the soil, that when at last its time comes digs its own grave and slips quietly in and draws the heavy earth over its head like a blanket and cracks a last smile and turns over and descends into sleep, home at last, while unnoticed as ever somewhere far away the grinding of the wheels of history continues. What organ of state would play with the idea of recruiting creatures like that as its agents, and what use would they serve except to carry things and die in large numbers? (MK 160–61)

The passage reads like a Beckettian parody of God’s creation of Adam from earth. The man it describes is smaller than the original and deficient not due to old age but from birth. It is a disposable man who cannot procreate and who self-disposingly buries himself. This man might in outward shape resemble the architect and narrator of Kafka’s “The Burrow” and also lead a “life of burrowing”, but he lacks Kafka’s narrator’s foresight and will to expand and participate in history. But the rudimentary man’s being outside history is dubitable. When the medical officer wonders what state would recruit a creature like K who can only carry things and die, the answer must be: the kind of state the medical officer serves—at least if we follow Agamben’s claim that the production of bare life lies at the heart of sovereign power. The apartheid state of Life & Times seems especially close to such a definition of sovereign power under which bare life is unwillingly part—one might even say the meat—of history. It is important that the creature of the quoted passage is described as a “rudimentary man” and not as an animal or a divine being that would not be a subject of sovereign power.

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The medical officer’s superior, Noël, might thus come closer to the meaning of “rudimentary man” when he remarks that K seems like a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp. This again suggests a proximity to Agamben’s line of thought: “He was living by himself on that farm of his free as a bird, eating the bread of freedom, yet he arrived here looking like a skeleton. He looked like someone out of Dachau.” The medical officer has doubts: “Maybe he is just a very thin man” (MK 146). Is K a Muselmann, a camp inmate who, according to Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man (see 93–106), was given that name because he had become barely recognizable as human? It is worth quoting at length Agamben’s portrait of the Muselmann here. He describes him as a being from whom humiliation, horror, and fear had so taken away all consciousness and all personality as to make him absolutely apathetic (hence the ironical name given to him). He was not only, like his companions, excluded from the political and social context to which he once belonged; he was not only, as Jewish life that does not deserve to live, destined to a future more or less close to death. He no longer belongs to the world of men in any way; he does not even belong to the threatened and precarious world of the camp inhabitants who have forgotten him from the very beginning. Mute and absolutely alone, he has passed into another world without memory and without grief. For him, Hölderlin’s statement that “at the extreme limit of pain, nothing remains but the conditions of time and space” holds to the letter. What is the life of the Muselmann? Can one say that it is pure zoē? Nothing “natural” or “common,” however, is left in him; nothing animal or instinctual remains in his life. All his instincts are cancelled along with his reason. Antelme tells us that the camp inhabitant was no longer capable of distinguishing between pangs of cold and the ferocity of the SS. If we apply this statement to the Muselmann quite literally (“the cold, SS”), then we can say that he moves in an absolute indistinction of fact and law, of life and juridical rule, and of nature and politics. Because of this, the guard suddenly seems powerless before him, as if struck by the thought that the Muselmann’s behaviour—which does not register any difference between an order and the cold—might perhaps be a silent form of resistance. Here a law that seeks to transform itself entirely into life finds itself confronted with a life that is absolutely indistinguishable from law, and it is precisely this indiscernibility that threatens the lex animata of the camp. (Homo Sacer 103–04)

It is not that humiliation, horror, and fear have made K what he finally is. His choice of a minimal life seems like a shell to protect him from these

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experiences: where others might fear being reduced to a state such as his, K has opted out of a regular existence. In this regard, Kay Sulk does not go far enough when claiming that K’s resistance to sovereign power consists in the unreadability of the bare life it has created (see “Not grace” 38–44). Not only does the medical officer fail in his attempt to read the bare life that is K’s body; there are moments when K’s body affords something positively liberating and even gratifying, and this seems to be related to the fact that K has not merely been reduced to bare life but has chosen it. Gratification and extreme starvation do not exclude each other: “After the hardships of the mountains and the camp there was nothing but bone and muscle on his body. […] Yet as he moved about his field he felt a deep joy in his physical being” (MK 101–02). If the unreadability of K’s body might still conform to Agamben’s description of the Muselmann, the joy felt by K clearly does not. His wilful embracing of bare life seems to turn what would otherwise occur as history, fate, or punishment into an act of liberation. Consider the medical officer’s words: When we told you to jump, you jumped. When we told you to jump again, you jumped again. When we told you to jump a third time, however, you did not respond but collapsed in a heap. […] So we picked you up, finding that you weighed no more than a sack of feathers, and set you down before food, and said: Eat, build up your strength so you can exhaust it again obeying us. And you did not refuse. You tried sincerely, I believe, to do as you were told. […] [Y]our will acquiesced but your body baulked. (MK 163)

This is the indiscernibility of life and law, nature and politics which Agamben attributes to the Muselmann. K’s behaviour resembles that of the camp inhabitant whom Agamben describes as unable to distinguish between pangs of cold and the ferocity of his tormentors. This, in turn, is the reason why the medical officer seems powerless before him, struck by the thought that K’s behaviour might be a form of resistance. “Here a law that seeks to transform itself entirely into life finds itself confronted with a life that is absolutely indistinguishable from law”; Agamben could have been writing about K.  Nevertheless, Agamben’s description of the Muselmann does not entirely fit K, who is, if anything, a man who has pre-­ emptively chosen bare life, at times even enjoying it. Again, K resists classification. This is not to deny that K no longer belongs to the threatened and precarious world of the camp inhabitants who have forgotten him, as

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Agamben writes in the passage on the Muselmann. Mute and absolutely alone, K has passed into another world without memory and without grief. Hölderlin’s statement that nothing remains but the conditions of time and space at the extreme limit of pain fits K with his peculiar experience of time and space—except for the fact that it is not pain that drives him to that experience. He has arrived in the same situation as the Muselmann, one might say, but he has come a different way. The Animal The only category into which K might still fit, it seems, is the category of the animal. In The Open, Agamben shows that the differentiation between human and animal has always been a political one, and that it has changed considerably over time. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Linné lists the species Homo next to apes and lemurs under the label Anthropomorpha. Linné does not add an adjective to Homo (as in Homo sapiens) because in his view, the human does not have a specific identity except his ability to know himself. The human is therefore neither a substance nor a clearly defined species (see Agamben, The Open 23–31). The mechanisms producing the human become especially visible when Ernst Haeckel identifies Homo alalus—a precursor of modern man who does not speak—as the missing link between the human and the animal. Haeckel still uses the criterion of language to differentiate between man and animal. Language, however, is an unreliable scientific criterion for this differentiation: there is in fact a continuum, a zone of indiscernibility, between human and animal (Tiermensch, Menschentier). Agamben argues that if the difference between human and animal has been scientifically indiscernible, it must have been produced by what he calls the ‘anthropological machine’.17 This term comprises all symbolic and material mechanisms in scientific and philosophical discourses that classify and distinguish humans and animals through a dual process of inclusion and exclusion.18 Historically, according to Agamben, two forms of anthropological machine can be distinguished. Before Darwin, a humanization of the animal was undertaken from Aristotle to Linné, meaning that extreme or deviant forms of the human—such as the infant savage, the werewolf, the slave, or the barbarian—were considered to belong outside humanity. The modern anthropological machine is post-­ Darwinian and seeks to isolate animal aspects of the human animal and to exclude them from humanity proper. This animalization of certain modes

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of human life begins with searches for a missing link between human and animal and continues with the ‘Jew’ or the ‘Negro’ as non-man found within man. K obviously seems to be the subject of this second mechanism. No matter which form of the anthropological machine is in place, the machine does not work by finding a uniquely human trait, for as Agamben acknowledges, no such trait or group of traits can be found. The anthropological machine is one of decisionism in Carl Schmitt’s sense, that is, the need for differentiation as such overrides the question of what differentiation is being made. Biopolitics creates conditions in which more and more ‘animal’ aspects of human life are brought under control of the modern state or juridical order (see Agamben, The Open 33–38). Again, there seem to be sufficient convergences between K and the animalized life Agamben describes. Throughout the novel, there are literally dozens of comparisons of K to animals, and his silence appears like a renunciation of speech, that most influential criterion of humanity since antiquity. If K is to fit into Agamben’s scenario, however, he does not occupy the position of the animal but is a rare inhabitant of that zone of indiscernibility (Tiermensch, Menschentier) discovered by Steinthal. One can derive this from Part II of the novel. The medical officer assessing K is a representative of the medical and anthropological discourse of his time: a cog in the anthropological machine. He muses that K is like a “mouse” (MK 136) and later, a “stick insect” of a “bizarre shape” (MK 149), but also that he is like a “pebble” (MK 135), and finally, that he is a rudimentary “little man of earth” (MK 161). The medical officer’s definitions oscillate between the animal, the inanimate, the vegetable, and the human, spanning the whole Great Chain of Being from stone to plant to animal to human to a sphere bordering on the divine. Zimbler has demonstrated that almost half of all metaphors follow the form ‘people are animals’ and ‘people are things’, which are based on and redefine the Great Chain of Being. K is pictured as a domestic animal, as a stick insect, a plant and then as a pebble: the order in which these metaphors appear broadly suggests a trajectory of diminution and existential reduction. In each instance, Zimbler argues, K is compared to animals, plants, or things not because he physically or psychologically resembles them, but because his mode of existence appears to resemble theirs. Each metaphor proves insufficient and is discarded (see Zimbler, J.  M. Coetzee 125–31, 148–49). Nor do these metaphors form a coherent whole. Although K hardly speaks, the medical officer acknowledges that he sounds like a human being; but his harmlessness and inertia are like that of

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a stone or plant. K’s indiscernibility, it seems, renders the Great Chain of Being useless and comprises even more spheres than those of the human as differentiated by Agamben’s anthropological machine. What removes K from human and animal alike is his miraculous ability to starve, which might rather be described as a lack of instinct, whether erotic or of self-­ preservation. Like all children in Huis Norenius, K had been hungry, and hunger “had turned them into animals […]. Then he had grown older and stopped wanting. Whatever the nature of the beast that had howled inside him, it was starved into stillness” (MK 68). The very phrasing of these sentences—sounding first like Michael K’s inner voice, then like a narrator talking about K—illustrates the indiscernibility of K’s location between human, animal, and other forms of life the reader could make sense of. Derek Attridge has shown that the narrative of Parts I and III, told in the third person but inviting to be read as told from K’s perspective, features a purposefully unstable voice oscillating between “directly represented thought and something that hovers between free indirect discourse and narratorial reporting” (J. M. Coetzee 53) to draw the reader into K’s consciousness while suggesting the strangeness and possible inhumanity of his thoughts.19 This can be understood as Coetzee’s linguistic solution to a literature of minimal life that attempts to present bare life from a non-­ human perspective but can only do so in human language. Rather than inventing an artificial voice for minimal life, Coetzee casts this voice as a paradoxical one that is at the same time inside and outside K’s consciousness. It draws the reader inside by free indirect discourse only to thwart the impression of unmediated interiority by the insertion of “he thought”. Pursuing this technique, Coetzee introduces a new standard in the ­literature of minimal life by insisting that bare life is just life and not animal life, and that this life, if it must be narrated in human terms, must be narrated in a way that reveals the impossibility of the task through the linguistic texture. Odradek, or the Need to Anthropomorphize Bare Life Where does K’s elusiveness leave us? It is useful here to remember Nadine Gordimer’s questioning, in 1984, of the novel’s political value because K is not representative of living blacks, Coloureds, or any other group of men (see “The Idea of Gardening” 3, 6). The contention is not naive but points towards the novel’s centre ex negativo. The medical officer anticipates both the reader’s will to make sense of K and his inability to do so.

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What frustrates the medical officer is that his patient is not a saint (he is too indifferent about God and seems too human) yet he has a superhuman ability to starve; that K at times seems an animal but betrays no stirring of instinct; that K is like a stone that breathes; that he is stupid but seems to harbour a wisdom his silence will not yield. The medical officer claims that he is the only one who can save K while hoping that K can save him from history: We have all tumbled over the lip into the cauldron of history: only you, following your idiot light, biding your time in an orphanage (who would have thought of that as a hiding-place?), evading the peace and the war, skulking in the open where no one dreamed of looking, have managed to live in the old way, drifting through time, observing the seasons, no more trying to change the course of history than a grain of sand does. (MK 151–52)

Of course, it is not quite true that K lives outside history. Although K escapes the camps, he escapes them only temporarily and in the third part of the book becomes the object of charity as another form of foreign control. The reader makes two seemingly incompatible observations: that K’s appearing somewhat less and somewhat more than human both disquiets the medical officer and fills him with inordinate hopes; and that rather than declaring K inhuman, the medical officer cannot help seeing K as a special human being. The medical officer’s anthropomorphizing view does not prevent him from expecting K to perform miracles that are beyond the human. It is here that Life & Times transcends the special case of its protagonist and tells something more general about the construction of the human. This becomes particularly clear in the novel’s relation to Kafka’s story “The Cares of a Family Man”, a source of K’s resistance to classification that critics have so far ignored. Kafka’s family man prefigures the medical officer in describing an odd tenant of his house named Odradek. Odradek looks like a star-shaped spool of thread, but a small wooden crossbar sticks out in the middle of the star. A small rod is fixed to the bar in a rectangle. Odradek can stand as if on two legs on this rod and on one of the spikes of the star. In other words, Odradek, like K, consists of parts and qualities that seem irreconcilable and form an unclassifiable whole. Although Odradek could have fulfilled some purpose or use in the past, it is more likely that this was never the case, whereas the family man’s function is revealed already by his name. Odradek nonetheless seems not lacking in

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any respect; he is complete. When he talks, his answers are evasive and he laughs, but his laughter sounds like the rustling of fallen leaves. Some say the name Odradek originates from Slavic languages, others from German, implying that both explanations are probably false. The family man has a fixed abode, whereas Odradek continually changes places. The thought that Odradek might outlive him pains the family man, who asks: “Can he die?” (The Complete Stories 429). Everything mortal has some purpose or goal in life, whereas Odradek seems to have none, and the family man muses that it is maybe this lack of purpose that makes Odradek immortal (see 427–29). Similar concerns recur in the thoughts of the medical officer of Life & Times. Odradek is described in etymological, physiognomic, economic, and individual terms as well as through the family man’s relation to him, yet in each perspective Odradek’s form reveals no meaning (see Alt, Franz Kafka 511–12). The medical officer fails to give meaning to K’s form when he consecutively muses that K is like a “pebble” (MK 135), like a mouse, a stick insect, a little man of earth. K’s answers to the medical officer’s questions only increase K’s obscurity. The medical officer finds him without a function and even without instinct—two categories that explain much of the medical officer’s own behaviour. Like Odradek, K lacks a fixed abode and, most importantly, K seems immortal because he hungers but does not die. Kafka’s family man and the medical officer note a number of reasons for Odradek and K not being human. Some of the key attributes of the human are barely existent in them, such as human speech and the need to live in a group and in a specifically human abode. The family man and the medical officer also acknowledge that Odradek and K have abilities human beings lack, particularly eternal life (Odradek) or a capability to starve seemingly indefinitely (K). Nevertheless, both men keep expecting their counterparts to behave like themselves and thus they treat them as special humans rather than as non-humans. Abstractly considered, Odradek and K may represent forms of bare life divested of its sociopolitical aspects. But in dealing with them, the family man and the medical officer cannot help treating them like human beings, or at times as anthropomorphized animals or gods. Agamben may argue that sovereign power rules over the bare life of its subjects, but as Kafka and Coetzee show, the subjects themselves cannot even conceive of bare life: bare life is not bare human life nor bare divine

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life nor bare animal life: it is just bare life. The human mind’s anthropomorphizing view will always ascribe to this bare life human features that allow the mind to see itself in the other creature and thus to understand it. Kafka and Coetzee show that in social terms the difference between bare and supposedly full life is not as relevant as Agamben claims. Bare life will always fall into one of the three semantic sets available to the human mind: human, animal, divine; and even if falling into the category of the animal or the divine, others will anthropomorphize him. Identities are constructed socially and reciprocally and do not follow automatically from the ontologies of species or races. Having an identity is therefore tantamount to living in history. Having an identity makes it impossible to live a bare life because others constantly interpret, qualify, and define the very body of any being and thus return it to the political realm. If all politics is biopolitics and rules over the bare life of its subjects, Coetzee’s novel shows that humans mask bare life with a human or humanoid face to be able to address it in the first place. Agamben subscribes to Foucault’s model of power insofar as power is dispersed in discourse-practices rather than depending on subjectivity or particular subjects such as kings and rulers who display their power in spectacles such as public torture (see Foucault, Discipline & Punish 3–72). However, Life & Times demonstrates that subjects can monopolize power, and that they need their anthropomorphizing view in order to make bare life a ready unit to be processed in the mechanics of power. Foucault is right that power is not exclusively in the hands of certain political bodies but permeates the whole of society in a net of asymmetric relationships. But this means only that power is amorphous and has to crystallize in ­different forms. There are simple and more complex crystals of power with intermediate and overlapping forms, and these crystals have to be differentiated rather than theorized as if they were identical raindrops. Even if an (unwilling) servant of power such as the medical officer is unaware of the ways in which power enacts itself through him, his distinctly human point of view influences how K’s bare life is subjected to power in the first place: as human life, that is, not as bare life. This implies that merely by being classified as human, Coetzee’s K already dips into the cauldron of history. A comparison of K with the magistrate of Waiting for the Barbarians is enlightening in this regard. The magistrate is dehumanized and subjected to bare life by power because torture strips him of everything that defines his identity. K, on the other hand, has to be humanized by sovereign

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power before he can be subjected to it—even if power is ultimately after his bare life. As an animal, K could be killed, but he could not be disciplined and made productive, which in Foucault’s view is the nature of modern power. If the old regime of power was thanatopolitics and its essence the decision to kill, modern power is biopolitics because it instils its commands in living bodies in order to programme their practice of life (see Foucault, Discipline & Punish 104–94). These commands include reproduction, personal health, and insurance—in short, the prolongation of life (see Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 242–44). K is readable in political terms, then, but not along the lines of Gordimer, who complained that while the novel is implicitly and highly political, Coetzee’s heroes are those who ignore history, not make it. […] No one in this novel has any sense of taking part in determining that course; no one is shown to believe he knows what that course should be. The sense is of the ultimate malaise: of destruction. Not even the oppressor really believes in what he is doing, anymore, let alone the revolutionary. (“The Idea of Gardening” 6)

If Gordimer wishes Coetzee had given space in his novel to the agency of the oppressed, Life & Times denies such a space: it does not even consider, as Gordimer correctly attests, the possibility of violent opposition. Coetzee’s novel does not ask how one would have to act in order to resist power, but what one would have to be to slip from its view. The novel shows, in a crab-like movement of self-effacing paradoxes, first that sovereign power is after the bare life of humans, but that one would have to cease being human in order to escape power’s grip; and second, that not even K’s bare life, whose blank surface lacks human attributes that would allow power to address it, is caught in the net of history because the anthropomorphizing gazes of K’s contemporaries return him to humanity. As even bare life is caught in the net of history, humans cannot slip like an eel from the hands of sovereign power to oppose it. This is the political meaning of K. Even if, like Foe, the novel grants that passivity and silence of the subjected will puzzle sovereign power, passivity, and silence will not jam the wheels of history. Gordimer is right that the novel does not give credence to the possibility of acting. If one chooses to look at the novel from a revolutionary perspective, then Gordimer is correct that it fails politically: it does not recognize the revolutionary potential she finds in South Africa’s black population. History proved Gordimer right insofar as revolutionary struggle eventually did liberate the black majority.

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Certainly this was not history’s last word. After Mandela’s release from Robben Island, history’s inner workings—the dynamic of succession and inheritance—came visibly to the fore. When K says that he does not want to begin a rival line to that of the Visagies, the former owners of the farm, his reticence can be read as prescient advice to blacks (of whatever heritage) who have wrested power from the white minority to bring South Africa under their rule. It is in The Master of Petersburg, published in the year of South Africa’s first free elections, where history fully appears as a struggle of generations.

Notes 1. “Small Notebook”, 16 March 1974 to 9 February 1976. Entry 19/2/74/5. The J.  M. Coetzee Papers Manuscript Collection, MS 0842, Subseries A, The Harry Ransom Center at University of Texas at Austin. Cit. aft. Jennifer Rutherford, “Thinking through Shit” 60. 2. David Attwell points out the particular influence of structuralism, transformational grammar, and poststructuralism on Coetzee at the time when he was writing Dusklands. What Coetzee derived from these intellectual movements was especially the idea of humans’ limited power over the cultural and linguistic systems they inhabit. Attwell’s account of Waiting for the Barbarians’ textual genesis shows how much Coetzee’s focus had changed by then (see J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing 9, 81–104). 3. Attwell and Jane Poyner point out that Dawn’s views are informed by Western models of thought, especially Freud’s myth of the primal horde that killed the father. The parodic effect depends on Dawn’s ‘sympathy’ with the Vietnamese really being an actualization of imperialist thought (see Attwell, J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing 44 and Poyner, J. M. Coetzee 19). 4. Dawn argues here along lines that recall Malinowski’s generalizing ethnological methods critiqued by Lévi-Strauss in Structural Anthropology (see 1–25). 5. The irony here consists in the fact that J.M. Coetzee is, after all, the artist, not Eugene Dawn. 6. Jacobus Coetzee is claimed by J.M. Coetzee to be a real ancestor. The other Coetzees of the “Narrative” are fictional. Jane Poyner has called attention to the fact that ‘S.J. Coetzee’ prepares the material for his afterword to Jacobus Coetzee’s narrative immediately preceding the election of the Afrikaner National Party (and thus beginning of apartheid) in 1948 (see J. M. Coetzee 15). 7. Madness is initially declared a problem of the passions (the passions being a meeting ground of body and soul), then as a waking dream in which the

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madman believes in what he sees. It is then found to consist in a distorted vision or bedazzlement, then in strained nerves weakened by an urban lifestyle. All these definitions interpret madness as unreason (see Madness and Civilization 80–83, 97–98, 99–102, 145–50). 8. Foucault argues that for centuries there was a direct relationship between the ‘mad’ and the ‘criminal’. For most of the time, both groups were confined together. Only in the wake of the French Revolution at the beginning of the nineteenth century were madmen and criminals separated. It was found unfair for the criminals to be incarcerated with madmen. Madness threatened the criminals’ sanity, and unreason became the ultimate reason for confinement (see Madness and Civilization 213–17). 9. Rosemary Jolly has read torture in the novel as a probing for guilt in a process of othering as described by Abdul JanMohamed (see Jolly, Colonization 122–37). I draw on Scarry because her conceptualization of inflicted pain as an unmaking of what is human about men and women allows for a more detailed exploration of the novel’s central nexus between torture, barbarism, and inhumanity. 10. To clarify: Scarry’s book appeared in 1985, five years after Waiting for the Barbarians. 11. For Brian May, this suggests that when the body speaks, whatever its language, it bespeaks pain, although pain, May argues, is not the only thing the body expresses in Coetzee: it can also stir ethical curiosity (see “J. M. Coetzee and the Question of the Body” 414–15). However, what would be a better way to stir such curiosity than through the exhibition of pain? 12. Such stripping away had already characterized Coetzee’s writing process. David Attwell shows that for a long time, the protagonist of Heinrich von Kleist’s novella Michael Kohlhaas served as Coetzee’s model for K (see J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing 129–38). In an introduction to Kleist’s novella, Coetzee describes Kohlhaas as an “outlaw […] outside society and free to declare war on it” (LE 86). Turning this outlaw into a quietistic gardener was a first step towards creating the minimal character of the published version of Life & Times of Michael K. 13. To the Catholic, they are Christ because the substance of the consecrated bread and wine are transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ; their substance is converted into the substance of the body and blood, although the outward appearances of the elements, their ‘accidents’, remain (see Cross, Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church 570–71). The implication for the central question of bare life in Coetzee’s novel is that Anna K’s ashes, at least for K, are not just his dead mother but also contain the barest form of her life, as wine and bread are the living and not dead Jesus. 14. For a reading that seeks the meaning of bareness only in K’s vulnerability to being harmed or killed without consequences, see Mills, “Life Beyond Law”.

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15. I use the term ‘history’ here in the sense suggested by the novel and its forerunner Waiting for the Barbarians: history is the time of sovereign power, structured by rise and fall, beginning and end. Power is driven by the one motive of how to prolong its rule, how not to die, how to survive. The manifestation of this desire is the law. Only because history and law are linked in such a way can Agamben, whose focus is law, speak to the issue of history in Life & Times of Michel K. I return to the concept of history later in the section. 16. This concept of time is inversely related to Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” where Benjamin criticizes socialism’s belief in progress. Progress, he argues, relies on the idea of empty time filled with events like pearls on a string. The conception of time adequate to history, Benjamin argues, would be a discontinuous time in which moments that lie in the past can be re-actualized. Rome of the classical age was such a moment in time for Robespierre because it held potential for revolutionary action and could serve as a model for the French Revolution (see Illuminations 254–63). Michael K relinquishes any revolutionary intention. Whereas Benjamin believes in the possibility to re-actualize the past in the present and thus in the everlasting past, Michael K believes in the self-sufficiency of the present moment because there is only the present, which therefore seems everlasting. 17. Agamben clearly uses this term in a fashion analogous to the biopolitical mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion in Homo Sacer while not explaining the relationship between the two. It would make most sense to conceive of the anthropological machine as a subfunction of the biopolitical mechanisms deciding which particular life will reproduce and which life will die. 18. Agamben gives the following definition: insofar as the production of man through the opposition of man/animal, human/inhuman, is at stake here, the machine necessarily functions by means of an exclusion (which is always already a capturing) and an inclusion (which is also always already an exclusion). Indeed, precisely because the human is already presupposed every time, the machine actually produces a kind of state of exception, a zone of indeterminacy in which the outside is nothing but the exclusion of an inside and the inside is in turn only the exclusion of an outside (see The Open 33–38). 19. Attridge refers to the following passage: “K allowed this utterance to sink into his mind. Do I believe in helping people? he wondered. He might help people, he might not help them, he did not know beforehand, anything was possible. He did not seem to have a belief, or did not seem to have a belief regarding help. Perhaps I am the stony ground, he thought” (MK 48).

CHAPTER 4

The Human, the Animal, and the Body

Exploiting the genre of the historical novel, The Master of Petersburg tests how traces are left, followed, and erased between parents and children who bequeath, inherit, and shape one another. In a dialogue with Dostoevsky’s Demons and Turgenev’s Fathers and Children, history is depicted as a struggle of generations that limits individual autonomy. The generation emerges as embodied history, a hybrid between the natural constraints of the body and the cultural imperatives of the historical context. Bodily cultural inheritances infringe on autonomy when they force the children into conflict with the fathers. Instead of being exponents of the animal rationale, denying their descent in defining themselves, fathers and children are forced by history to act out roles inscribed in their bodies. As every generation redefines the human, the definition of the human is at stake in one generation’s leaving a trace and the next one’s rejecting or following it (see Wiegandt, “History as Struggle of Generations”). These are the ways in which The Master of Petersburg touches on the question of the human. However, at its centre are the relation between writing autobiography/confession and writing fiction, the ethical implications that arise from addressing one’s guilt in each genre, and the cultural and biological laws of generation that inform one generation’s narratives about another. The early stages of the novel’s manuscript show that these concerns originated from the violent death of Coetzee’s own son, Nicholas, in obscure circumstances. Coetzee’s vision of history is marked by and focused on this loss even as the novel’s manuscript undergoes a process of © The Author(s) 2019 K. Wiegandt, J.M. Coetzee’s Revisions of the Human, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29306-2_4

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depersonalization and politicization in the course of writing (see Attwell, J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing 191–204; Kannemeyer, J. M. Coetzee 452–70).1 Coetzee’s concern with the human is therefore more indirect and less insistent here than in the subsequent novels that constitute the second phase of Coetzee’s revising of the human. The human/animal divide, central to Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello, is largely absent, although there is an exception that I will discuss in the section on Disgrace. The Master of Petersburg’s most important contribution to Coetzee’s thinking of the human remains its inquiry into the dynamics of generational change, as it offers, for the first time, a unified view of human embodiedness and embeddedness. Early in The Master of Petersburg, the protagonist Dostoevsky comes to realize that he and Anna Sergeyevna, his dead stepson’s former landlady, belong to an older generation than his stepson Pavel, Sergeyevna’s daughter Matryona, and his own young wife in Dresden: [H]e feels what he can only call kinship with her. He and she are of the same kind, the same generation. And all of a sudden the generations fall into place: Pavel and Matryona and his wife Anna ranked on the one side, he and Anna Sergeyevna on the other. The children against those who are not children. (MP 63)

The passage complements the perspective of natural history on heredity, prominently featured in Dostoevsky’s thoughts and Nechaev’s speeches, with that of cultural history, and highlights that both approaches are in fact fused in the concept of the generation. Following Latour, one could say that the generation is a hybrid that unites nature and culture in a particular configuration of nature-culture (see We Have Never Been Modern 103–09), and that history and the body—the two principal loci of Coetzee’s revisions of the human—are inseparable in the generation. The spirit that unites a generation and distinguishes it from another exists only in embodied form, both as propositional as well as implicit knowledge. At the same time, the words “kinship” and “kind” refer to generational kinship that relies not only on blood relations but date of birth, and therefore on hybrid nature-culture: on being born around a certain date and being part of a temporally and locally specific culture. This unified view of embodiedness and embeddedness informs Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello, where the conflicted borders between human generations also play important roles—think of Lurie’s conflicted relationship

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with his daughter Lucy, or Costello’s with her son John. Principally, however, these novels test ideas of the human, again via dialogues with Kafka, by questioning and undermining species boundaries. For example, the interpenetration of body and history, embodiedness and embeddedness is visible when, shortly after the dismantling of apartheid, David Lurie’s sexual desire attaches itself to a Coloured student. While Elizabeth Costello introduces her audiences to the concepts of embodiedness and embeddedness, the narrative of her own life, as seen through her son’s eyes, shows that both terms ultimately entail the same kind of heteronomy that makes every idea that we have ours and not ours, planting in us the seed of scepticism vis-à-vis our own ideas: ideas, for example, about the human, the animal and their respective bodies, as Costello learns.

Disgrace Driven characters populate Samuel Beckett’s dramas and novels. It has been remarked that Beckett’s central concern is the somatic and psychological conditioning of the individual (see Breuer, Samuel Beckett 21). At one point the protagonists of Waiting for Godot want to escape their situation even at the cost of their lives, but the play ends with the suggestion that the protagonists are instead driven by the urge to go on waiting and therefore to live: Vladimir: Well, shall we go? Estragon: Yes, let’s go. [They do not move.] (Beckett, Dramatic Works 87)

The characters of Beckett’s novels are unable to overcome what urges them to continue living. The Unnamable ends with the words: “[Y]ou must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on” (Beckett, Novels II 407). In their lack of autonomy, Beckett’s characters resemble animals that behave but cannot act. It is primarily the instinctive drive that establishes the kinship of man and animal in Beckett (see Smith, “Beckett and the Animal” 217). Alain Badiou has argued that especially in his early phase, Beckett is principally concerned with reducing human subjectivity, with “subtracting the figure of humanity from everything that distracts it, so as to examine the intimate articulation of its functions” (Badiou, On Beckett 4). This attempt to write the generic human involves an approximation of the human to

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animality: speech and reason characterize the human only insofar as humans can reflect on themselves while remaining caught in solipsism. They cannot break the determination by instincts (see Badiou, On Beckett 1–15). The power of instinct makes the individual blind to everything that does not serve or hinder the satisfaction of need. Molloy describes intercourse with a woman who could be his mother, his grandmother or in fact a man, stating: “And all I could see was her taut yellow nape which every now and then I set my teeth in, forgetting I had none, such is the power of instinct” (Beckett, Novels II 52). In other cases the drivenness of the characters appears in the form of conditioning, as for example when Malone, telling a story while waiting for death, describes weeding a garden: But when given the job of weeding a plot of young carrots for example, at the rate of threepence or even sixpence an hour, it often happened that he tore them all up, through absent-mindedness, or carried away by I know not what irresistible urge that came over him at the sight of vegetables, and even of flowers, and literally blinded him to his true interests, the urge to make a clean sweep and have nothing before his eyes but a patch of brown earth rid of its parasites, it was often more than he could resist. (Novels II 237)

While it is clear that conditioning by urges minimizes the difference between Beckett’s characters and animals, it is less clear how Beckett motivates and justifies his characters’ drivenness and animality. In the following I would like to suggest that Beckett’s novels and plays resort to different and even contradictory explanations of motivation. In the early works, this strategy serves to parody the jargon and preposterousness of the human sciences, and even in Beckett’s later works there are swipes at anthropology. In Molloy the protagonist comments on his studies of different scientific fields: The next pain in the balls was anthropology and the other disciplines, such as psychiatry, that are connected with it, disconnected, then connected again, according to the latest discoveries. What I liked in anthropology was its inexhaustible faculty of negation, its relentless definition of man, as though he were no better than God, in terms of what he is not. (Novels II 35)

The mention of anthropology and psychiatry is later followed by magic. Beckett suggests that none of these disciplines is able to give an appropri-

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ate account of the human because they either silently presuppose a ­fundamental difference between the human and the animal or because they are at pains to prove differences. A sentence from Molloy paraphrases Beckett’s opposite strategy: “The fact is, it seems, that the most you can hope is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were in the beginning, and the middle” (Novels II 28). The sentence proposes becoming an animal instead of a Christian striving towards God. This transformation is achieved in The Unnamable: I’m something quite different, a quite different thing, a wordless thing in an empty place, a hard shut dry cold black place, where nothing stirs, nothing speaks, and that I listen, and that I seek, like a caged beast born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born in a cage and dead in a cage, born and then dead, born in a cage and then dead in a cage, in a word like a beast, in one of their words, like such a beast, and that I seek, like such a beast, with my little strength, such a beast, with nothing of its species left but fear and fury, no, the fury is past, nothing but fear … (Novels II 380)

This is not a parody of scientific discourse but a description of the human condition reminiscent of Heidegger’s claims that the world of the animal is limited (“worldless thing”) and that its subjection to instinct is absolute (“born of caged beasts born of caged beasts”), claims which I will discuss below. Parodic citation is replaced by a more serious treatment of science in the trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, which Coetzee describes as belonging to “Beckett’s mature, post-humanist phase” (LE 183). What remains constant is Beckett’s strategy of playing different scientific explanations off against each other, and of conflating human and animal. Both continuities will serve as models for Coetzee—and not only for him. In Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, for example, behaviourism and psychoanalysis are similarly pitted against each other; like the later Coetzee, Pynchon does not grant interpretive authority over the human exclusively to Freudian and Jungian depth psychology. After a brief reconstruction of Beckett’s poetic of drive, I will show how Coetzee adopts and modifies this poetic in Disgrace. The novel focuses on the sexual drive and plays off early concepts of Eros (the cynic Diogenes, Plato, Aristotle) against ideas of the Romantics (Blake, Byron), of psychoanalysis and of scientific materialism.

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Beckett’s Poetic of Drive Beckett was intimately familiar with Freud’s thought, not least by way of his own psychoanalytic treatment during a period of two years. His early works are rich in psychoanalytic vocabulary, and the invocation of psychoanalytical concepts continues in the novel trilogy. Molloy in particular has been read as a creative adaptation of Freudian thought. Even the linguistic texture of the novel suggests this. Molloy sleeps with the aforementioned woman, considers the possibility that she is in fact a man and asks himself whether those involved in the intercourse may have “repressed and forgotten” (Novels II 53) the encounter. There is also mention of “the fatal pleasure principle” (Novels II 94). The novel’s symmetries seem psychoanalytically inspired. Both halves of the novel depict Oedipal scenarios— one with the mother, one with the father—and Molloy can be read as the repressed self of Moran, the novel’s second protagonist. Beckett uses the Oedipus complex and the concept of repression as mythological ready-­ mades, that is, in the manner he uses classic philosophical cruxes (e.g., in Descartes or Schopenhauer) and religious motifs. After Molloy, he abstained from transparent allusions to psychoanalysis, possibly because he aimed at stylistically reducing his prose to essentials, but psychoanalysis still plays a discreet role. Ideas such as the mother’s womb as paradise, the law of the father, regression, narcissism, and the narratives of mourning and of melancholia pervade Beckett’s prose (see Baker, Beckett xi–xv). Beckett’s most radical engagement with Freud’s theory of drives occurs in The Unnamable, a novel in which the narrator is most brutally reduced to the psychological and somatic conditions of his existence. Drive, or instinct, here appears anthropomorphized as Worm who is one of the main characters next to Mahood and the narrator, and who could be an invention of the latter. Worm has lost most qualities characterizing a human being but is not an animal either. Worm’s position is one below creatureliness and appears to be an anthropomorphized function of an organism when the narrator says: “Yes, let us call that thing Worm, so as to exclaim, the sleight of hand accomplished, Oh look, life again, life everywhere and always, the life that’s on every tongue, the only possible!” (Novels II 342). It is said that Worm is “less than a beast” (Novels II 351) and that he is unable to move. He neither possesses will, nor does he have desires, but it is impossible to talk about him as something other than a creature:

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But what is the good of talking about what they will do as soon as Worm sets himself in motion, so as to gather him without fail into their midst, since he cannot set himself in motion, though he often desires to, if when speaking of him one may speak of desire, and one may not, one should not, but there it is, that is the way to speak of him, that is the way to speak to him, as if he were alive, as if he could understand, as if he could desire, even if it serves no purpose, and it serves none. (Novels II 351)

Worm is the parodic, microscopically detectable equivalent of a Prime Mover and at the same time an embodiment of Freud’s drives which are themselves not driven by any other force. Since drive resists explanation and can only be presumed, Freud notes that they have a mythical quality: “The theory of the instincts is so to speak our mythology. Instincts are mythical entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness” (“New Introductory Lectures” 95). In Beckett’s Worm, this myth has become a substance. Worm may be insufficiently defined, but as an organic entity he belongs to nature. He is a myth for the post-metaphysical age: psychoanalysis as well as science can believe in him. Beckett had made himself familiar with contemporary anthropological and psychological research and was particularly interested in behaviourism, as Horst Breuer shows in his analyses of that theory’s influence on the dramas and novels. Behaviourism is incompatible with psychoanalytical explanations of drive because it wants to do without a mythology of last causes and admits only the observable as scientific object. For behaviourists, human behaviour is learned by conditioning, that is, by reward and punishment of actions; it is not determined by drives. The very scenarios of Beckett’s plays remind the audience of experimental psychology, in which labyrinths and cages containing problems to be solved play important roles and which insists that results from experiments with rats can shed light on human behaviour. Beckett’s stage can be described as a test cage, most obviously in Acts Without Words I, where a character learns to pile crates upon each other in order to reach a water bottle dangling from the ceiling. Wolfgang Köhler’s experiments with chimpanzees who had to reach a banana—the tests are mentioned in Elizabeth Costello’s lectures on the lives of animals—serve as the model for Beckett’s play. In “Eight Ways of Looking at Samuel Beckett” Coetzee suggests that such testing of problem-solving capabilities characterizes much of Beckett’s work. The tests reveal the limits of reason and the persistence of instinct as much as

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the absurdity of the test situation itself, regardless of whether we ­recognize ourselves in these tests, caught in a universe overseen by a cruel God, or whether we see in them human animals testing other human and non-­ human animals in games of master/slave (see LE 208–14). Lucky and Pozzo of Waiting for Godot illustrate that play’s experimental set-up. The experimenter, Pozzo, conditions responses such as ‘thinking aloud’, ‘dancing’, or ‘fetching basket’ in the test subject Lucky; commands, lashes of the whip, or pulling of a leash serves as stimuli. Failure to respond in the desired way is punished by whiplashes. The play demonstrates the somatic determination of the individual: the internalization of behaviour in the flesh. The degree to which this explanation of drive differs from the psychoanalytic approach becomes apparent in the different answers to the question of why Vladimir and Estragon are waiting for someone named Godot. For a Freudian, the protagonists’ inability to stop waiting can be explained as a symptom of an insurmountable drive of self-preservation, a drive that also prevents the men from committing suicide. In contrast, Breuer notes that Vladimir and Estragon behave like rats in so-called frustration experiments: they no longer wait in the hope of a reward but simply because they are conditioned to wait (see Samuel Beckett 15–27, 69; “Die höchste Nerventätigkeit des Menschen” 166–70). Freudian and behaviouristic explanations of drivenness share an insistence on a limitation of human autonomy that renders them more animal-­ like than humanism would like to believe. György Lukács grumbled that Beckett reduces human beings to animals and was in turn criticized by Adorno: Lukács’ objection, that in Beckett humans are reduced to animality, resists with official optimism the fact that residual philosophies, which would like to bank the true and immutable after removing temporal contingency, have become the residue of life, the end product of injury. (“Trying to Understand Endgame” 125)

Adorno defends Beckett’s animalization of the characters of Endgame by interpreting this ‘reduction’ as damage done by a society obsessed with goal-oriented rationality and reification. However, such a social interpretation of conditioning reads contexts into the play which it hardly invokes. A reading which foregrounds the receptivity of humans to conditioning instead of the reasons for conditioning itself therefore seems more plausible. At any rate, this is the focus Coetzee adopts from Beckett.

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Beckett’s representation of the sexual drive illustrates that he conceives of drive as pure irresistibility—no matter how it is explained—and that he elides all differences between human and animal in its portrayal. Instinct and pleasure are severed from one another, and the protagonists perform the necessary acts with detached doggedness. They often prefer masturbation to intercourse because all that counts is getting rid of the itching urge. The characteristics by which people have distinguished human sexuality from that of animals—complex wooing, love, shame, taboos—disappear in Beckett, and the characters are disgusted by intercourse. This disgust is due to the idea in Beckett that intercourse is the source of all unhappiness: the original sin of Beckett’s characters is having been born, and their ultimate fantasy is to return to the mother’s womb (see Breuer, Samuel Beckett 124–29). Nevertheless, they feel the urge to preserve themselves and to procreate and grudgingly gratify this urge. Giorgio Agamben’s paraphrase of Heidegger in The Open hits the nail on the head: “Dasein is simply an animal that has learned to become bored; it has awakened from its own captivation to its own captivation” (70). Human beings are able to recognize their animality but cannot divorce themselves from it, a situation that is highlighted by the protagonists of Coetzee’s Disgrace and The Master of Petersburg. Eros as God and Instinct David Lurie’s seduction of Melanie Isaacs, the rape of Lucy Lurie, and the killing of dogs that breed uncontrollably are central events in J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, and they are in some—but obviously different—ways related to the concept of Eros. The multifaceted concept of Eros competes with other terms from a variety of registers in the novel, showing the full spectrum of emotions: from “affection” to “love”, “desire”, “impulse”, “temptation”, “caritas”, “instinct”, “passion”, and “drive”. All these terms are played off against each other in the novel. There is, for example, David Lurie’s painstaking separation of his sexual desire, acted out with the prostitute Soraya, from his “affection” (D 2) for her and his unalterable amorous “temperament” (D 2). When Bill Shaw helps him after the assault and calls himself Lurie’s friend, Lurie traces the etymology of the English word ‘friend’ back to its origins—the Old English freond, derived from the verb freon, meaning ‘to love’. The term had nothing to do with either erotic love or charity and today fails to accurately characterize the relationship between Lurie and a helper he barely knows (see D 102).

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When Lurie, shaken by the rape of his daughter, follows an “impulse” (D 148) and reaches for Bev Shaw, it is once again unclear whether this impulse is erotic, whether it stems from pity or whether it could be explained in terms of caritas or love. The question arises whether the “lyric impulse” (D 214) Lurie is waiting for while working on his opera about Byron shares only its name or also its essence with the impulse that makes him approach Bev Shaw. Only moments after having determined that Bev Shaw does not arouse his desire (she is “out of the way of temptation”, 148) Lurie has sex with her, concluding afterwards that contrary to what just happened “they have not made love” (D 162). For her part, Lucy says that more than mere sexual drive was involved in her rape. It was also about “hatred” (D 156), with hatred perhaps being part of male sexuality (see D 158). The end of the novel sees Lurie bidding farewell to “passion” (D 218). Of all things, he calls the act of putting down a dog “love” (“giving it what he no longer has difficulty in calling by its proper name: love” [D 219]). Love in Disgrace thus takes the different and even contradictory meanings of sexual drive, caritas, and euthanasia, the latter of which is used to combat the consequences of the sexual drive, that is, the sheer number of stray dogs: “The dogs are brought to the clinic because they are unwanted: because we are too menny” (D 146). The ambivalence of Eros shows in the fact that the terms given above can be divided into two groups. On the one side (“instinct”, “drive”, “impulse”, and others), Eros signifies libido in Freudian terms, an instinctive energy originating from a physical source which calls for constant discharge and which is directed towards a relatively variable object. Mankind has this instinctive energy in common with animals. On the other side (“love”, caritas, and other terms), Eros traditionally signifies a higher power which enables humans to approach the divine sphere. The novel’s beginning and middle are characterized by a double standard concerning Eros on Lurie’s behalf, and they modify Beckett’s pitting psychoanalysis against behaviourism: psychoanalytical Eros and ideas on Eros from Romanticism are played off against one another. In contrast to Beckett’s novels, the protagonist’s mental state determines which explanation gains the upper hand. Lurie denigrates libido as animalistic but appeals to the concept when it helps him justify his behaviour. When Lurie has sex with Melanie (“Not rape, not quite that, but undesired, undesired to the core” [D 25]), he imagines the event to be motivated purely by instinct and thus to be removed from the responsibility of the involved parties, just as animals are not responsible for their behaviour. Melanie’s body becomes

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limp “like a rabbit in fox fangs” (D 25). The same equation of instinctive behaviour with animalistic behaviour is evident when Lucy tells her father after the rape that the men “spur[red] each other on. […] Like dogs in a pack”, with Lurie imagining them “purring” (D 159) contentedly like cats after the deed. The animality of instinct is rendered unacceptable by Lucy’s rape, as it forces Lurie to identify with the rapists. Lurie’s reaction to this animality is disgust reminiscent of Beckett’s illustrations of sexuality, a disgust which also becomes obvious when he catches the young rapist Pollux spying on the naked Lucy and calls him a “swine” (D 206). Like Beckett’s characters, Lurie is disgusted by instinct as the animalistic component of human existence, threatening the human as such. This feeling is already palpable in the novel’s first sentence: Lurie has solved the “problem of sex” (1). The discomfort expressed here is reminiscent of the reaction of the young protagonist of The Master of Petersburg when his childhood friend shows him two copulating flies and tears off one of the wings of the male while it is perched on top of the female: The fly paid no attention. He tore off the second wing. The fly, with its strange, bald back, went on with its business. With an expression of distaste, Albert flung the couple to the ground and crushed it. He could imagine staring into the fly’s eyes while its wings were being torn off: he was sure it would not blink; perhaps it would not even see him. It was as though, for the duration of the act, its soul went into the female. The thought had made him shudder; it had made him want to annihilate every fly on earth. (MP 149)

This image recalls and may even be modelled on Heidegger’s example from his lectures on The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, where a bee continues to suck honey even after its abdomen has been severed and the honey leaks from its body. The bee is unable to behave differently. It is not aware that the honey is honey, yet it is completely taken by it. In this way, the world is neither open nor closed to the bee that inhabits it. Rather, it is a restricted world in that the bee is receptive only to a small number of stimuli that its instincts respond to.2 In Coetzee’s example, the existence of the fly merges with the satisfaction of its sexual drive to a degree that leaves the insect unresponsive even to the instinct of self-preservation as its wings are torn off. The sight of the bee, however, can only be unbearable for a human observer if the bee’s behaviour is imaginatively transposed to human

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behaviour. Measured by human standards, the bee’s behaviour is disgusting because it suspends free will, one of the traditional hallmarks of humanity. Heidegger himself implicitly suggests how this example can be transposed to the human realm. What he calls the They (das Man) (see Being and Time 107–22) appears as conventional and expected behaviour that has become second nature, a conditioning of human reactions to a limited circle of stimuli or situations triggering types of behaviour that have thereby become quasi-instinctive. In Heidegger’s terms, the They causes humans to submerge themselves in a self-inflicted state of being taken by an encountered stimulus. The world shrinks to the dimensions experienced by animals. It is worth looking closer at Heidegger’s dividing line between animals and humans in order to understand Disgrace’s ‘distant proximity’ to it. According to Heidegger’s Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, the They allows a measure of distraction, but not the deep boredom that would permit humans to see things as such as opposed to merely using them in their particular context of usefulness and thus being taken by them like the bee is taken by the honey. Only deep boredom enables humans to perceive how many possibilities are open to them—an option inaccessible to animals. Boredom is nevertheless only capable of interrupting the human state of being taken by the material dimension of the daily Being-in-the-­ world, and not of permanently neutralizing it. For Heidegger, the human is thus the animal that can interrupt and reflect on his or her animality (see also Agamben, The Open 57–70). Lurie’s initial resistance to such a post-humanistic conception of Eros and in fact of mankind (see Heidegger’s “Letter on ‘Humanism’”) shows in his disgust but also in his ‘romantic’ attempts to wrest Eros from the grasp of the animalistic in which it can only exist as compulsion. He seeks to transfer Eros from an allegedly subhuman level to the superhuman, divine sphere. Lurie, the expert on Romanticism, looks for this meaning of Eros in Romantic poetry. At the outset, two aspects of Romanticism determine his notion of Eros: the opposition to instrumental reason and the closely connected idea of embracing and accepting one’s own ‘nature’, which, as it were, causes him to anthropomorphize the sexual drive by referring to the “rights of desire” (D 89). He invokes this right before the committee which questions him on allegations of sexual harassment, and he insinuates that the spectacle of public contrition that he is expected to perform ultimately amounts to a ritual castration (see D 66). Defending himself against the proposal of “[s]ensitivity training. Community service.

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Counselling” (D 43) for improving his management of the sexual drive, Lurie appeals to the idea of organic growth reminiscent of Coleridge. What has grown organically has a right to exist because it is part of nature: “I am a grown man. I am not receptive to being counselled. I am beyond the reach of counselling” (D 49). Religious overtones of nature as expression of God’s will are strong, and the concept of Eros which Lurie chooses for his defence is directly borrowed from the religious register: “Suffice it that Eros entered. After that I was not the same. […] I was no longer a fifty-year-old divorcé at a loose end. I became a servant of Eros” (D 52). Lurie’s female colleague from the Department of Economics inquires whether he wants to defend himself by claiming that he was compelled to follow an “ungovernable impulse”. Lurie responds: “As for the impulse, it was far from ungovernable. I have denied similar impulses many times in the past, I am ashamed to say” (D 52). The discourse that Lurie employs for his defence is deliberately anachronistic in an age that he calls “post-­ religious” (D 4) and “post-Christian” (D 32). For example, Eros is visualized as a flame when Lurie thinks back to the affair with Melanie as “a last leap of the flame of sense before it goes out” (D 27), or when he explains to Melanie’s father that a flame that used to be worshipped in earlier times as the fiery god Eros had enkindled him (see D 166). For Lurie, a distinction between religious concepts from pagan antiquity and Christian ideas is no longer required in a present that is altogether beyond religion. Consequently, in his speech the god Eros becomes the divine spark that animates human beings and turns them into the image of God according to Christian doctrine. Particularly Lurie’s notion of Eros as a divine force comes under attack after Lucy’s rape. Is it possible that the same god that made him seduce Melanie acts through the rapists, the same god that dignifies even dogs by his presence, as he explained to Lucy only minutes before? After all, he almost justified his affair with Melanie to Lucy in the following terms: “I was a servant of Eros […] It was a god who acted through me” (D 89). It could be argued that the desire of the rapists has to be considered as distinct from the desire that caused Lurie to have sex with Melanie, as the underlying motivation of the rapist is the humiliation of the victim (see van Heerden, “Disgrace, Desire” 51–52). Lucy, however, questions the validity of this distinction (see D 158). Lurie gradually abandons his Romantic view of Eros after the rape. Eros now becomes a form of animality that has to be accepted rather than  denigrated and that can and must be controlled. By increasingly

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­ edicating himself to the welfare of dogs, Lurie discovers this kind of Eros d in animals.3 “A woman in love,” he muses, “wallowing in love; a cat on a roof, howling; complex proteins swirling in the blood, distending the sexual organs, making the palms sweat and voice thicken as the soul hurls its longings to the skies” (D 185). It is significant that shortly before the rape, Lurie tells his daughter the story of a dog from his old neighbourhood that was beaten by its owner whenever it started barking and going wild at the smell of a female. After a while, the dog reacted to the smell of a female by trying to hide in the garden with its tail tucked between its legs. Lurie argues that a dog can be punished for chewing a slipper, but not for following its instinct. This does not imply that all male beings should follow their urges as a matter of principle. It would have been better, however, to castrate or shoot the dog rather than conditioning it to hate its own nature (see D 89–90). Following this anecdote, the rape of Lucy drastically shows that Eros as instinct is a much more ambivalent force than its divine cousin. Anticipating Lurie’s switch of preoccupation from the god Eros to dogs and their uncontrolled instincts, the idealistic Romanticism of Wordsworth and Coleridge gives way to the more ambivalent Romanticism of Blake and Byron. It is no coincidence that Byron is about to follow Wordsworth in the syllabus of Lurie’s class exactly at the point when the affair takes a dangerous turn. Byron prefers bathos to the pathos of his predecessor Wordsworth: a trimming back of overly idealistic notions to a more human scale, which frequently sheds light on issues eschewed by others due to their dangerous nature. Lurie quotes the following lines from Byron’s poem “Lara” which refer to Lucifer:             He could At times resign his own for others’ good, But not in pity, not because he ought, But in some strange perversity of thought, That swayed him onward with a secret pride To do what few or none would do beside; And this same impulse would in tempting time Mislead his spirit equally to crime. (D 33)

Lurie explains what seems important to him in these lines: “He doesn’t act on principle but on impulse, and the source of his impulses is dark to him. […] He is exactly what he calls himself: a thing, that is, a monster. Finally,

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Byron suggests, it will not be possible to love him” (D 33–34). A “thing” is incapable of acting of its own volition and condemned to be moved by forces beyond its control. These powerful urges remain opaque to Byron’s protagonist: they are “dark imaginings” and “impulses” that drive him randomly to ethically commendable behaviour or to criminal transgressions (see Wright, “David Lurie’s Learning” 153–54). For William Blake, too, desire is ambivalent. Always following desire is not advisable, nor is desire’s constant suppression. Lurie recalls a proverb from Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires” (D 69). Lurie as Cynic A glance at the novel’s ending reveals that the transvaluation of Eros and thereby of the relationship between man and beast has caused Lurie to refrain from either worshipping or denigrating desire. Though not conceding primacy to instinct, he clearly strengthens its position in relation to the human spirit. Most importantly, he denies the existence of a sphere transcending animality, which means that men and women are to be counted amongst the animals; all human achievements, including art, must be seen in this light. This attitude is modern, “post-Christian”, and “post-religious” in that it rejects the notions of Humanism and religion as illusions; and it is classical, as I will argue below, in that it is reminiscent of the Cynicism of Diogenes of Sinope, the contemporary of Plato. In retrospect, the Beckettian playing off of concepts of drive has accompanied Lurie’s transformation into a modern-day Diogenes. Let me first turn to the modern rejections of religion and Humanism. The novel criticizes these notions through the behaviour of Melanie Isaacs’ Christian father during Lurie’s visit to his house (see D 164–74). Isaacs’ subtle and hypocritical bullying of Lurie in a religious vocabulary suggests that religion is used as a tool serving interests of power. Instead of accepting Lurie’s confession at face value, Isaacs suspects ulterior motives. Chiming with Coetzee’s critique of the self’s transparency to itself (see “Confession and Double Thoughts” 275–91), apparently free-­ willed gestures like Lurie’s apology could always be motivated by unconscious egotistical motives. And when the committee investigating Lurie’s harassment case suggests that he should apologize and confess in public, the male committee members expect only that he go through the motions and acknowledge that unvoiced selfish motives will be in play. This means

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that what seems like an assumption of religious authority is in fact the appropriation of the religious practice of confession for the purpose of a role play following a set of rules that is economic in nature. The accused is expected to pay the price of humiliation by publicly admitting his guilt; whether he accepts this guilt out of an inner conviction or not is irrelevant. In turn, he benefits from the amnesty that he is granted (see D 47–58). One of the cornerstones of Humanism is the subject’s autonomy and transparency to itself. Lurie cannot be sure of the truthfulness of what he says and thus of his status as an autonomous agent. His identity feels equally contingent and subject to processes beyond his influence. Before the committee, he still defends himself by saying that this is who he is, whereas later Lurie focuses on how he became who he is, on the vicissitudes of his instincts when thinking about the unattractive Bev Shaw, or about the mortification of his sexual drive (see D 120, 148–50, 217–18). In hindsight, the plot has been all about becoming (Lurie’s learning) rather than being (Lurie’s nature). Disgrace contains a sexual history of its protagonist, from Soraya to the secretary Dawn, from Melanie Isaacs to Bev Shaw, from a streetwalker in Green Point to the drying up of instinct in a backyard in Grahamstown, illustrating what Freud describes in his essay “Instincts and their Vicissitudes”. According to Freud, the sexual instinct is always rooted in the same somatic source, but its object is highly variable. Only in the course of the personal history does it attach itself to a particular object to achieve a particular kind of satisfaction. The initially purely biological instinct is therefore informed by the subject’s life story (see 117–40).4 This is also a significant difference from Beckett. Whereas Beckett, invoking both psychoanalysis and behaviourism, characterizes the human condition as being suspended between instinctive and learned conditioning, Coetzee makes this model more dynamic: on the one hand, by making the choice of explanation dependent on Lurie’s mental state, thus letting romantic and psychoanalytical concepts of the drive gain influence in the course of the narrative; on the other hand, by showing how history codetermines the objects to which instincts will apply themselves, and thus how history informs what is thought to be biological, not vice versa. It is South Africa’s history, after all, that makes Lurie’s seduction of the Coloured Melanie especially precarious. The development of the opera about Byron and Teresa Guiccioli both mimics Lurie’s changing relation to instinct and comments on it. The opera is originally conceived as a “meditation on love between the sexes” (D 4), narrated from the perspective of the seducer who experiences his

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last erotic summer. After the affair with Melanie, Lurie’s own summer seems over, and images of weariness and frustration find their way into his vision of the relationship between Byron and the young, married Teresa (see D 87, 180). The decisive change occurs after Lucy’s rape, when Lurie abandons the male perspective. Byron is now dead; Teresa is a matron advanced in years, who appears more pathetic than tragic as she pines after her dead lover and guards his letters like a treasure. Instead of Byron, it is Teresa and her erotic nostalgia with which Lurie now identifies (see D 181–86). Lurie, who already felt ‘castrated’ by the committee’s decision, metaphorically castrates himself by identifying with Teresa and does to himself what is usually only done to animals. Ultimately, the orchestration of the opera is reduced to a single banjo, and Lurie considers giving a little role to a lame dog he has befriended: it is supposed to howl between the stanzas. Man and beast are now on the same level, and art is on the level of instinctive howling, while the dog raises himself as if to jump upwards to become a two-legged human being: “The dog is fascinated by the banjo. When he strums the strings, the dog sits up, cocks its head, listens. When he hums Teresa’s line, and the humming begins to swell with feeling […], the dog smacks its lips and seems on the point of singing too, or howling” (D 215). The metamorphoses of the opera retrace the vicissitudes of Lurie’s instinct in such a way that they suggest the spiritual superstructure of culture to be merely a depiction of the substructure of physicality and urge. Significantly, however, Lurie’s transformation into an animal-like creature is chiastic in nature: some aspects of his animality increase whereas others decrease as in “the crablike [musical] motif, one line going up, one line down, that is Byron’s” (D 186). Byron’s line is the line of a man governed by instinct, whose sexual drive is waning. Similarly, Lurie’s animality decreases as he is less and less taken by instinct. However, he becomes more animal-like insofar as he accepts animality as a basic human trait, lowering himself to the standard of living and expectations of a dog. Lurie’s acknowledgement of instincts does not entail an insistence on the priority of bodily self-experience over morality. Rather, he accepts his instincts while refusing to participate in the social life of the They, which is characterized by the internal division of its protagonists into an ‘I’ ­governed by instincts and an ‘I’ governed by morality. This means that he sides with the animal and abandons society and the range of stimuli provided by it. The cynic Diogenes is someone who, according to Aristotle, lives outside of state and society as a beast because he is sufficient to

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­ imself (see The Politics 14).5 Lurie’s animal-like dwelling makes his simih larity to Diogenes obvious: The clinic, more than the boarding-house, becomes his home. In the bare compound behind the building he makes a nest of sorts, with a table and an old armchair from the Shaws and a beach umbrella to keep off the worst of the sun. He brings out the gas stove to make tea or warm up canned food: spaghetti and meatballs, snoek and onions. Twice a day he feeds the animals; he cleans out their pens and occasionally talks to them; otherwise he reads or dozes or, when he has the premises to himself, picks out on Lucy’s banjo the music he will give to Teresa Guiccioli. (D 211)

As a “nest of sorts”, the concrete backyard with its concrete walls (see D 212) is an animal’s burrow rather than a human dwelling, recalling the containers for water or grain that Diogenes chose as his living quarters (another legend has him living in a barrel). Soon, Lurie will be calling this dwelling “the dog-yard” (D 213). His nourishment comes, like dog food, from cans. Dozing is his favourite pastime—according to the legend, this is how Alexander the Great encounters Diogenes. Diogenes of Sinope, founder of the philosophical school of Cynicism, presents himself as a ‘dog-man’ when he says: “I wag my tail at those who give, bark at those who don’t, and bite scoundrels” (Bracht Branham and Goulet-Cazé, The Cynics 96, n. 49). The complete lack of possessions that has belonged to the traditional image of the cynic since antiquity also characterizes Lurie’s final state. For the cynic, possessions rob humans of their freedom. In an attempt to show his magnanimity, young Alexander the Great invites Diogenes to make a wish, and Diogenes requests Alexander to move out of the sun. By doing so, Diogenes not only negates the wish for power but also the power of wishes. Diogenes’ statement summarizes his philosophy of necessities. The pleasure principle has its effects on Diogenes and Alexander alike. However, happiness is attained neither through the pursuit of possessions nor through great deeds but through the realization of the dispensability of these possessions or achievements. Lurie’s giving up on the idea of a great opera mimics this stance. As a consequence of Diogenes’ deliberately lowered standard of living, the Athenians give him the epithet “dog”, and Diogenes, now a dog-man like Lurie, turns the spite of the Athenians against themselves by naming his philosophical school after the Greek word for dog, kyon.6 It can be

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argued that Disgrace realizes the hope formulated by Beckett’s Molloy, who says that the most you can hope is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were at the beginning and the middle (see Novels II 28). To be sure, Lurie does not turn into a philosopher like Diogenes, but he is seen by the children who laugh at him and is therefore an example. Like Diogenes, Lurie gives an example through action rather than by speaking. In the stories about Diogenes, Plato is unable to meet the challenge of Diogenes because the latter avoids conversation and tries to bodily expose Plato’s idealism as a phoney illusion. In response to Plato’s definition of man as a featherless two-legged animal, so the story goes, Diogenes plucks the feathers of a rooster and brings the animal to the schola, exclaiming: “This is Plato’s man!” (see Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason 103). The proximity of cynical philosophy to literature’s capability of transferring thoughts into action is illustrated by the fact that no philosophical works of Diogenes exist, while anecdotes that portray him gesticulating in pantomimic fashion abound. One day, Diogenes wanders the streets with a lantern in broad daylight. On being questioned on the purpose of this activity, he replies: “I am looking for a human being.” It is said of Diogenes that he answers questions about his native city by exclaiming: “I am a cosmopolitan!” Severing the ties between the idea of a good life and the community of mankind, the status of an outsider is unavoidable for both Diogenes and Lurie. As Peter Sloterdijk suggests, the cynic sacrifices his social identity and renounces the psychological comfort of unquestioned allegiance to a political entity in order to rescue his existential identity. When asked what benefit his philosophy yields for him, tradition has it that Diogenes answers by saying he is at least prepared for every turn of fate. This means that he can live wherever he chooses, as he will always attune himself to the laws of nature. The same can be said about Lurie, who takes the last blow in his and Lucy’s story—Lucy is pregnant with the rapist’s child and decides to give birth to it—with a bearing that simultaneously displays a belief in cosmopolitanism and a state of preparedness: “It will be, after all, a child of this earth” (D 216). This belief in a cosmopolitan identity can be considered the last remnant of the idealistic superstructure that Diogenes usually rejects and that Lucy Lurie has abandoned even before her father’s transformation into a dog: “[T]here is no higher life. This is the only life there is. That’s the example that people like Bev try to set. That’s the example I try to follow. To share some of our human privilege with the beasts” (D 74). Diogenes—and in his wake Lurie—thus negates ideals, duties, hopes, and promises of

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s­ alvation and power. He is a zoon politikon in a sense that is much narrower than the Greek word zoon permits: a shameless political animal claiming a natural, but not exaggerated, place for the animalistic in the image of humanity (concerning Diogenes, see Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason 103, 156–69). Lurie’s reminiscence of Diogenes distinguishes his position from the anti-humanist stance Heidegger takes in “Letter on ‘Humanism’”. Heidegger explicitly states that even those parts of humanity belonging to animalitas “ek-sist”, that is, they protrude into existence and their attention is not completely absorbed by the environment. This constitutes a fundamental difference between the human body and that of animals (see 239–76).7 Coetzee’s novel denies this fundamental distinction by insisting that the instincts of humans and animals are identical. Heidegger claims that the divine is closer to human nature than the animal is, more familiar than “our scarcely conceivable, abysmal bodily kinship with the beast” (248). In the character of David Lurie, Coetzee’s cynical novel juxtaposes a ‘dog-man’ with Heidegger’s ‘god-man’. Identification, Luck, and Learning In Disgrace, the proximity of man and beast is staged as a kind of sympathy between man and dog which arguably is only possible because they both share the same instincts.8 Since the novel is about Lurie becoming a kind of cynic rather than about cynicism, I will now focus on the human-animal encounters that are crucial for Lurie’s transformation, and on the important roles which identification, luck, and learning play in these. At the beginning of the novel Lurie displays no particular sympathy for animals. He first shows compassion for them when he tries to move two sheep that will be slaughtered for Petrus’ party from the scorching sun into the shade. “The bond is not one of affection. It is not even a bond with these two in particular” (D 126). What brings about Lurie’s involvement is the sacrificial status of the sheep. The animals remind him of how he himself felt like a scapegoat in a ritual sacrifice before the committee, punished for natural instincts for which he does not feel responsible. There is no indication that he is consciously aware of this. Later on, when he assists Bev Shaw with putting down the dogs, he tries to exclude unacceptable motives for his sympathy with the animals: “He does not understand what is happening to him. Until now he has been more or less indifferent to animals. […] He is not, he hopes, a sentimentalist. He tries not to sentimentalize the ani-

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mals he kills” (D 143). Finally, Lurie makes sure that the carcasses of the dogs are cremated without having their bones smashed with shovels to make them fit into the incinerator. He still does not understand why he takes on this responsibility: To lighten the burden on Bev Shaw? For that it would be enough to drop off the bags at the dump and drive away. For the sake of the dogs? But the dogs are dead; and what do dogs know of honour and dishonour anyway? For himself, then. For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing. (D 145–46)

Prior to this, Lurie has observed the dogs’ fear of death during the minutes before they are euthanized (see D 143). What makes the dogs fear their own death is the urge to survive (or, as Freud calls it in his early dualistic concept of instincts, the instinct of self-preservation as opposed to the reproductive instinct). It is the same instinct that made Lurie fear for his life when the three assailants set him on fire on Lucy’s farm (see D 96). Again, it is the experience of human disregard for the instincts of animals which causes Lurie to sympathize with the dogs. Lurie senses that their instincts of reproduction and self-preservation are also his. Given that Lurie was introduced as an essentially selfish character, it is possible to argue that he cares about the dead dogs so that the instinct for which he sees himself punished receives the respect it deserves. Lurie’s respect for the animals due to identification with their instincts would thus be a ‘fringe benefit’ of his egotism. However, while Lurie does not care for the dogs for the sake of ethics, which would require conscious deliberation, it is at least not impossible that Lurie transcends this egotistical motive and is simply motivated by a feeling of kinship without ulterior motives. His self-­ imposed epithet “dog-man” (D 146), inherited after Petrus’ rise to the status of landowner, can be read as a hint in that direction. In order to understand how Lurie becomes what he is at the end, it is helpful to consider the obsessive use of the words ‘lucky’ and ‘luck’ in the novel. Lurie and Soraya “have been lucky, the two of them: he to have found her, she to have found him” (D 2). After the assault and the rape of his daughter, Lurie thinks: “Count yourself lucky to have escaped with your life. Count yourself lucky not to be a prisoner in that car […] Count Lucy lucky too. Above all Lucy” (D 98). The doctor who examines Lurie’s burned eyelid attests: “[Y]ou are lucky” (D 101). Petrus is a “lucky man”

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(D 114) because he has an attractive wife, whereas Lurie’s relationships with women have not brought him much “luck” (D 147). A policeman assures Lurie: “[Y]ou were lucky with your car” (D 152)—the thieves have not disassembled the allegedly recovered car. Close to the end of the novel, Lurie himself thinks that with a certain degree of “luck” (D 217), Lucy will be able to live a tolerable life (he repeats the word three times in his head). The meaning that all these instances of luck have in common is an undeserved and sudden arrival of the good in a surprising form, frequently turning out to be a blessing in disguise. There is a striking parallel between luck and grace, the term that the novel’s title puts on the thematic map. Theologically, grace is in the broadest terms defined as the spontaneous, unmerited gift of God in the salvation of sinners for their regeneration and sanctification (see Cross, Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church 700–02). This explains the prominence of the term ‘luck’ as the secular equivalent of ‘grace’: luck is the grace of the post-religious age with which Disgrace is concerned. Whereas in the past a stroke of luck could be regarded as an act of divine grace, in the post-religious age luck has become the luck of the gambler. This ‘bare luck’ is much more reluctant to transform itself into the subjective perception of blessedness: no interaction between subjects is involved; there is no generosity of the powerful towards the powerless, only a random coincidence devoid of higher meaning. The word ‘luck’, and even more so the word ‘lucky’, also allude to the character Lucky in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. There has been a great deal of speculation on why this character, frequently whipped and forced to crawl on all fours by his master Pozzo, carries the name Lucky. If we superimpose Disgrace as a kind of filter over Godot, the following answer can be given: Lucky’s luck consists of having resigned himself to his animality. In a marked contrast to Vladimir, Estragon, and even Pozzo, he expects nothing, waits for nothing, and cannot be disappointed. The predicament in Beckett’s play is not the meaninglessness of existence, as has frequently been claimed; rather, it is the inability of humans to break free from their hopes and to accept meaninglessness. Disgrace turns Godot’s metaphysical situation into an anthropological one. Here, man’s ­predicament, embodied in Lurie, consists in his inability to accept the animalitas that is part of his humanitas, which makes him a ‘dog-man’. In other words, Lucky is in the same situation as Diogenes, who emphasizes that his preparedness for every turn of fate is a beneficial effect of his philo-

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sophical approach that affirms human animalitas. When Bev Shaw asks Lurie whether he is prepared to give up the dog that he has grown fond of, his reply (“Yes, I am giving him up” [D 220]) can be taken as the kind of cynical relinquishing of hope that, according to the cynic, is a prerequisite of happiness. At peace with his instincts and only his instincts, the cynic can be considered lucky like Beckett’s Lucky, who can neither hope for grace nor fear disgrace but can take good and bad events as mere good or bad luck. Luck cannot be taught. It can only be learned from what comes to pass, which explains the nature of learning in the novel. Learning is never a result of purposeful teaching but a consequence of experiences made by trial and error. Every time Lurie tries to teach others a lesson, he fails; this holds true for his attempt to give his students an understanding of Wordsworth and Byron, and for his attempt to make an example of Pollux after catching him spying on his naked daughter. “Teaching was never a vocation for me” (D 162), he has to admit to himself, “[h]e has taught no one a lesson” (D 208). By contrast, David and Lucy Lurie learn from coincidental and unforeseeable experiences. This is the sense of Lurie’s statement that he has been enriched by each of the women he has slept with—including Melanie and other less than satisfactory encounters (see D 56, 192). In Disgrace, learning is achieved via luck as a process of conditioning through catastrophes that always have the sexual drive at their centre. When Melanie’s goatee-wearing boyfriend asks Lurie: “Didn’t you learn your lesson?”, summing up the lesson with the words “[s]tay with your own kind”, Lurie’s thoughts confirm his successful conditioning: “The seed of generation, driven to perfect itself, driving deep into the woman’s body, driving to bring the future into being. Drive, driven” (D 194). ‘Driven’, the participle of ‘to drive’, is a drive that has come to an end. Grammar anticipates Lurie’s retreat among his own kind, namely, the elderly who are beyond desire. He has learned a lesson, though: understanding animals and other humans better, especially Lucy. To be sure, the novel does not end on a positive note, and cynicism is not simply the lesson it teaches. A positive endorsement of cynicism would be untypical after novels such as Waiting for the Barbarians, Foe, or In the Heart of the Country, where the possibility of confession, the subaltern’s capability to speak, or the ability to find a language for madness are suspended in the rhythm of doubt. Likewise, Disgrace suspends the value of cynicism and Lurie’s happiness. If Lurie experiences momentary happiness in his dog-yard, it cannot last, and even if we grant Lurie happiness, his

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example has no political value. A society based on cynicism is inconceivable as long as absolute independence is part of its programme. The cynic has always been an ambivalent figure. He can have a moderating and humanizing effect by unmasking excessive hopes and illusions and by teaching that happiness lies in frugality. But he can also appear as a misanthropist whose words contain more aggression than moral value. Instead of teaching society a lesson, Lurie turns his back on it, and his behaviour retains traces of selfishness to the end. When Lurie euthanizes the dog that has come to trust him and that he in turn feels affection for, this act can hardly be interpreted as being motivated by feelings of kinship. The dog is not condemned to death because of terminal illness or its missing leg. Lurie has also refuted the claim that the dog was “too menny” in the sense that there was no one who would or could care for it. Lurie kills the dog for his selfish reasons, to rid himself of all needs and to render himself immune to disappointment. Just as Lurie’s example cannot be explained by an animal ethics because his behaviour follows pre-rational motives, it cannot be called upon to teach cynicism as a way of life. In the words of Elizabeth Costello, Lurie’s cynicism is “embodied” (D 77), that is, it is shaped and reshaped by his personal history.9 On the other hand, a cynicism that is not embodied would be an empty concept for Coetzee, who thoroughly explores a possible conclusion to be drawn from this problem in his next novel, Elizabeth Costello: that fiction, in contrast to philosophy, is the realm in which ideas like cynicism can truly be tested. Disgrace transfers Beckett’s ahistorical and static poetic of drive into a dynamic historical situation; it can be understood as such a test.

Elizabeth Costello The publication history of Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons is a history of embedding. Two of its lessons, entitled “The Lives of Animals”, were earlier given by Coetzee as the Tanner Lectures at Princeton and published with an introduction and comments. Already in the Tanner Lectures, the lessons on “The Lives of Animals” do not follow the usual form of a lecture but embed lectures given by the protagonist Elizabeth Costello in stories about herself. She is an elderly and highly regarded Australian ­novelist best known for her novel The House on Eccles Street, in which she fleshes out the untold story of Marion Bloom, the central female character of Ulysses. In “The Lives of Animals” Costello is welcomed by her son John, who is the focalizer of the narrative and who happens to teach at the

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US college that will honour Costello at an award ceremony. Costello has a meal with John, his wife Norma, and their children, during which Costello’s ostentatious vegetarianism is a thorn in Norma’s side. John notices how much his mother has aged during the last two years; he escorts her from one event to the next, including the lecture, a dinner with members of the faculty and administration, and a workshop the next day. John and Norma are surprised by Costello’s choice to speak about “The Philosophers and the Animals” and even more by her lecture’s content. The reader thus reads a lecture embedded in a story that was, at an earlier stage, embedded in the context of the Tanner Lectures, as if Coetzee’s point was that facts are embedded in stories as well as stories in real lives, just as arguments are embodied in people and the stories they live. In this section I will argue that this is, in fact, one of the novel’s central claims about human being-in-the-world. Whereas The Master of Petersburg addresses human embeddedness implicitly in its representation of the inevitable yet futile attempts of the young to break free from their fathers and of fathers to impose themselves on the young, Elizabeth Costello addresses embeddedness explicitly. The novel invites us to see that The Master of Petersburg’s concern with family kinship and the struggle of generations is a concern with specific forms of human embeddedness in biological and social structures of inheritance, as well as their natural and cultural histories. Elizabeth Costello highlights how culture and nature influence, inform, limit, and determine human actions and utterances in ways that are too complex to be fully grasped, and that this complexity renders each action or utterance singular. Coetzee’s novel suggests that such singularity cannot be conceptualized in the generalizing discourses of philosophy or the social sciences; but that narrative, which does not abstract from individuals, can approximate it. In “The Philosophers and the Animals” Costello argues that embodiedness is key to a necessary revision of humanity, and the interplay of form and content in that text calls for such a revision of humanity. Costello’s lecture is embedded in the narrative of Costello’s arrival, her lecture-­ performance, the audience’s reactions to her lecture, and its impact on her relationship with John and Norma. This frame narrative inflects the reader’s interpretation of Costello’s lecture. In this way, the text implicitly shows what philosophers miss if they discuss Costello’s arguments in the abstract, that is, as if these arguments had nothing to do with her. In other words, “The Philosophers and the Animals” performs embeddedness through its form, or in the terms of the novel’s lesson “On Realism”, it

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addresses embeddedness realistically, as I will explain in what follows. It is only seemingly paradoxical—rather intentionally ironic—that such realistic embedding will inflect the meaning of what Costello herself, in her lecture, says about embeddedness. After reading “The Lives of Animals” as lessons in anthropology, I will turn to the interplay of form and content by addressing Cora Diamond’s discussion of embodiedness and embeddedness in the novel. I will then show how the lessons on humans and animals are themselves embedded in the broader narrative of Elizabeth Costello, and how this narrative yet again inflects the sense of “The Lives of Animals”. Finally, I will relate the lessons on “The Lives of Animals” to Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am in order to show how philosophy concerned with the human-animal relationship has recently turned to literary strategies in order to become capable of re-envisioning the human in terms that do not unduly privilege rationality (vs. the body) and abstraction (vs. singularity). I hope that my comparison of Costello’s and Derrida’s ethical claims will shed light on Elizabeth Costello’s suggestion that literature is able to define the human in ways that are barred to philosophy and the social and natural sciences. The Anthropological Relevance of Costello’s Lectures on “The Lives of Animals” At the most fundamental level, Costello’s lecture on “The Philosophers and the Animals” aims to dethrone reason as a criterion of comparison between humans and animals. It instead aims to draw attention to the shared embodiedness of animals and humans. Both exist not only in a body but as that body. If humans did not shy away from what they share with animals, Costello suggests, this would elicit an attitude towards animals that would not allow for meat factories. She argues that philosophers have not wanted to acknowledge what humans and animals have in common. St Thomas, for example, defines God as reason, and since humans are created in the image of God, they too are endowed with reason, whereas animals are not. Although Costello is generally not averse to admitting the existence of the divine (see “On Eros”, which atypically features a stream of consciousness like Molly Bloom’s instead of an ­embedded lecture), she rejects the centrality of reason advanced by St Thomas’ argument and cites the example of the Indian intuitive mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, a self-taught man who presented groundbreaking mathematical results with no notion of mathematical proof or

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demonstration. It took professional mathematicians years of intellectual labour to prove the validity of his results. The lesson of Costello’s anecdote is this: although Ramanujan’s mind seems to be more closely affiliated with reason than the minds of most humans, we do not think of Ramanujan as closer to God and certainly not as more human than others—even though we tend to fetishize reason as human essence. If reason and humanity should not be seen in too close conjunction, the reader is prompted to ask, then why should the gulf between humans and animals be insurmountable? The question echoes the problem formulated at the beginning of Elizabeth Costello: “There is first of all the problem of the opening, namely, how to get us from where we are, which is, as yet, nowhere, to the far bank. It is a simple bridging problem, a problem of knocking together a bridge” (EC 1). Reason cannot be that bridge for Costello, for there is no hint that reason is more than one amongst many types of thinking. It merely seems to be a certain spectrum of human thinking. Kant gives us cause to doubt the value of human reason by demonstrating that reason projects the categories of time and space onto a reality of which time and space are not inherent parts. According to Elizabeth Costello, Kant fails to draw the conclusion that reason might not be the defining measure for other living beings (see EC 67, 69). For Costello, the example of the psychologist Wolfgang Köhler illuminates with particular clarity how an experimental focus on reason misjudges creatures under observation even before experimentation begins. Between 1908 and 1920, Köhler conducted experiments on the mental capabilities of primates for the Prussian Academy of Sciences, testing chimpanzees’ ability to pile crates on top of one another. The primates had to reach bananas dangling from the cage ceiling or use a stick in order to fetch bananas lying outside the cage. With each of these experiments Köhler’s primates were forced to think of themselves exclusively as organisms in need of feeding themselves. First they were trained to sacrifice all forms of thought for instrumental reason—the form of thought that Köhler essentialized as ‘thought’—then the primates’ reasoning was compared with that of humans and found lacking (see EC 71–74). As Costello wants to make this point without relying on reason, she attempts to perform it. In fact she resembles the cynics Diogenes and David Lurie who perform the animality of the human. Costello sets herself up as the embodiment of Kafka’s ape, Red Peter, from the story “Report to an Academy”. In Costello’s view, Kafka modelled Red Peter on Köhler’s most capable pupil, a chimpanzee called Sultan.10 Red Peter is captured in

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his native environment in order to stock the German Hagenbeck company’s zoo and finds that he can escape confinement only by becoming human. Step by step, he learns the civil gestures and habits humans take as signs of humanity—shaking hands, drinking schnapps from a bottle, and so on—until he is able to address the learned society of the academy, making use of logos, the fetishized quintessence of humanity. Like Costello, Red Peter does not deliver a lecture the academy expects, as he does not give account of his previous life as an ape (see Alt, Franz Kafka 522). Red Peter explains eloquently how he became human, and at the same time, his tale demonstrates how little he benefits from rationality. Making use of reason allows Red Peter only to perform on variety stages (see Kafka, The Complete Stories 281–91). Kafka’s story leaves no doubt that giving a report to an academy is performing on just such a stage, and Elizabeth Costello underlines the point when, from behind the lectern, she compares herself to Red Peter: The comparison I have just drawn between myself and Kafka’s ape might be taken as […] a light-hearted remark, meant to set you at ease, meant to say I am just an ordinary person, neither a god nor a beast. Even those among you who read Kafka’s story of the ape who performs before human beings as an allegory of Kafka the Jew performing for Gentiles may nevertheless— in view of the fact that I am not a Jew—have done me the kindness of taking the comparison at face value, that is to say, ironically. I want to say at the outset that that was not how my remark—the remark that I feel like Red Peter—was intended. I did not intend it ironically. 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)

The link between Costello’s being both “an old woman” and Red Peter is addressed when she calls Red Peter’s wound her own: Red Peter was not an investigator of primate behaviour but a branded, marked, wounded animal presenting himself as speaking testimony to a gathering of scholars. I am not a philosopher of mind but an animal exhibiting, yet not exhibiting, to a gathering of scholars, a wound, which I cover up under my clothes but touch on in every word I speak. (EC 70–71)

Costello’s implication that her advanced age links her to Red Peter, as well as her comment that she covers up a wound under her clothes, suggests that she shares with the animal a body that is vulnerable to wounding and death.

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The association of animality and death is also part of Kafka’s story. Kafka likely gleaned the motif of the wounded ape from Oskar Weber’s 1914 memoir The Sugar Baron: The Adventures of a Former German Officer in South America,11 in which Weber describes shooting an ape on a hunt. In Kafka and Weber, the ape shows strikingly human behaviour after losing the freedom of animal movement through its wound; in Weber, he sits like a man with his back against a trunk, looks reproachful, presses a palm against the wound, and whimpers like a child (see Zilcosky, Kafka’s Travels 108). Kafka radicalizes this anthropomorphosis through wounding as his story suggests that any becoming-human is a (self-)sacrificial immobilization of the animal body. The vitality of animal life gives way to a metaphorically caged existence that, in Chris Danta’s reading, is essentially human: Red Peter—qua scapegoat—reveals the human longing for a free natural (or animal) life to be pure fantasy: a veritable disavowal of the human. As he comes to understand the hard way, being human means having to accept one’s solitary confinement. It involves interiorizing the bars of the cage and performing the movement-in-a-place that is a report to an academy. (“Like a Dog” 730)

The ultimate immobilization is becoming a dead body, which sheds light on Costello’s remark that she knows what it is like to be a corpse. This seems a reference to the argument of Ecclesiastes 3:19: “Man’s fate is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; man has no advantage over the animal.” In Costello’s as in Kafka’s world, “[t]o the extent that the animal traces a line of escape or a way out for the human, each becoming-animal of the human is also a becoming-corpse” (Danta, “Like a Dog” 731). This confirms that what Costello consistently covers up but touches on in every word she speaks is the wound of mortality. The members of the academy she addresses, like those addressed by Red Peter, have bodies, and even are such bodies, but the civil manners of humanity call for clothes deflecting from the condition of mortality not only to hide this condition but also to hide the animality of the human body. In return for his “prodigious overdevelopment of the intellect” (EC 75) and for his command “of lecture-hall etiquette and academic rhetoric”, Red Peter had to give up more than exhibiting his animal body. He had to realize that he could not with a clear conscience make use of one of

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the vital functions of the body, the function of reproduction, for his hybrid nature would only father monsters. The point of Kafka’s story is that Red Peter stands for human nature. He is literally an animal that has evolved into a human animal, and Kafka draws attention to a rift within human nature as defined by philosophy rendering humans, in the words of Costello, “monstrous thinking devices mounted inexplicably on suffering animal bodies” (EC 75; see Blank, “Ein Landarzt: Kleine Erzählungen” 235). To be sure, the hybridity of the human is not a new idea. As I pointed out in my discussion of Life & Times of Michael K, Agamben shows that the human has been defined as a hybrid of animal and human components from the beginning of Western thought. When Aristotle faces the problem that he cannot define life, he chooses, in De Anima, to divide and categorize it by analysing how and in which contexts the term is used. He concludes that the ability of nutrition is most common and fundamental to life, but that nutrition is not its only form. There is also perception, movement, thinking, and all of these forms of life depend on each other. Animal or nutritive life and higher forms of life (which are supposed to make us human) conjoin in the human, but in practical terms they are always separated from each other, which is a political act rather than a medical observation (see Agamben, The Open 13–16). The human has since been the site and the result of continuous separations and divisions. Hiding the animality of the human under clothes is one of the more subtle instances. Kafka, Costello says, questions these historically arbitrary separations and divisions because he is insecure about his own humanity: “This, he seems to say: this is the image of God?” (EC 75). Costello’s performing Red Peter demonstrates not only the hybridity of the human, but also that the animal part of the human has not been given its due weight. Costello contrasts Descartes’ influential emphasis on reason in his view of the human with “embodiedness, the sensation of being—not a consciousness of yourself as a kind of ghostly reasoning machine thinking thoughts, but on the contrary the sensation—the heavily affective sensation—of being a body with limbs that have extension in space, of being alive to the world” (EC 78). For Costello, the issue is not that we must rationally understand that we inhabit a mortal body like other animals. Red Peter is not making the point of animal rights activists who argue that some animals should get rights similar to human rights because these animals share certain properties with humans, such as rationality, self-consciousness, or language. Red Peter does not want to be regarded as a mentally defective simpleton.

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In Costello’s reading of Kafka—that is, in my reading of Costello’s reading—we should sense (not think abstractly) our shared embodiedness with animals. To illustrate what she means, Costello gives the counterexample of the lack of such a sensation in Germans under Hitler who refused to put themselves sympathetically in the place of the Jews whose bodies were torn apart, burned, or gassed (see EC 64–65, 70, 79). Costello makes a claim for the possibility of putting oneself in the place of a victim and even in the place of an animal. Embodiedness is the commonality between animals and humans allowing for such sympathetic imagination. In his famous essay “What is it like to be a Bat?”, philosopher Thomas Nagel proposed a continuum of creatures like and unlike us and argued that the less similar a creature is to us, the less we can sympathize with it. Costello claims that our embodiedness even allows us to feel our way into a corpse: “For a moment we are that knowledge. We live the impossible: we live beyond our death, look back on it, yet look back as only a dead self can” (EC 77). We can feel like a bat because a bat is “full of being” (EC 77), a sense of being-a-body humans have even before they feel themselves to be human. Contrary to Descartes, she argues that to be alive is to be an “embodied soul” (EC 78). Embodiedness, Embeddedness, and How (Not) to Acknowledge Them It is tempting to read these claims as a call for a changed attitude towards animals, and to see in Costello a mouthpiece for Coetzee’s vegan convictions. “The Lives of Animals” has been read along those lines more often than not.12 As my focus on Costello’s performance of Red Peter showed, and as my introductory remark about the centrality of embedding suggested, I think that a critical focus on the mere propositional content of the lessons misses the point. I agree with Cora Diamond that the ethical virtue of Elizabeth Costello’s lessons does not lie in the propositional content but in performing Costello’s own embodiedness. Robert McKay has shown that the social contexts in which Costello addresses the treatment of animals—from the lecture-performance, the classroom seminar, the public debate and the prestigious dinner to the family visit, the conjugal argument, and the intimate confession—are just as central to Costello’s performance of animal ethics. Each context comes with particular ideological, aesthetic, and familial obligations and investments that inflect Costello’s arguments. This enables the reader to experience Costello’s

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morality as an effect of the different discourse-practices it contains rather than as a set of beliefs or principles (see McKay, “Metafiction” 70–80).13 However, the virtue of performance is not only of a moral nature. Only the lessons’ performative quality puts the propositional content in a perspective that allows the reader to see that a redefinition of the human is at stake. As Elizabeth Costello does not “ironically” but literally stand in for Red Peter, Red Peter literally stands in for the human as a hybrid creature. Most critics reading the lessons as comments on animal ethics ignore that this ethics can work only if common conceptions of the human are redefined, if its commonality with the animal is established, and if the bridge of which Elizabeth Costello’s beginning speaks is effectively built. If a reader of “The Lives of Animals” focuses only on the moral problems inherent in the way we treat animals, he or she sees his or her own body merely as a fact that may or may not play a role in a moral argument (see Diamond, “Difficulty” 59), whereas the difficulty of reality due to our being embodied creatures, if striking us directly, “shoulders us from a familiar sense of moral life, from a sense of being able to take in and think a moral world” (“Difficulty” 64). According to Diamond, this difficulty is exhibited by Costello when she is faced with animal corpses in abattoirs, an experience that prompts her to say she knows what it feels like to be a corpse (see “Difficulty” 74). In other words, awareness that we share vulnerability to death with animals is wounding. It is a difficulty of reality from which humans escape into moral discussion, that is, a mere difficulty of philosophy obscuring the fact that our very ideas are embodied and dependent on power relations in which humans are embedded. The story in which Costello’s lecture is embedded shows that her moral views cannot be completely separated from her family relations, the competition between philosophy and literature in the university context, and other factors (see “Difficulty” 55–56). Coetzee’s descriptions of Costello’s physical frailty stress the fact that our arguments, views, and beliefs are influenced by the desires, instincts, rhythms, and ageing of our bodies. Costello is aware of this. She is a sceptic because she is open to the difficulty of reality and to being confounded by accepting the impossible disentanglement of thought and physicality. The coming apart of thought and reality in scepticism belongs to our daily bodily ­experience (see “Difficulty” 78). Costello’s sceptical stance concerning her ideas and beliefs leads her to take only the fact of being a body for certain. Belief in the body is the rock upon which she builds her anthropology and her ethics: a habeo corpus, ergo sum, to use a phrase by Jean

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Améry (see Unmeisterliche Wanderjahre 146), whose conviction also flows from a keen awareness of mortality, an alertness that arrests the ritualized motions of everyday life. Blinding ourselves to mortality might make life bearable; yet for Costello belief in the perishable body rests more securely in reality than does Descartes’ belief in reason, and this is enough for her to cling to what she calls realism. Costello sees metaphysical bias, fear, and pride at the root of humans’ unwillingness to acknowledge their embodied nature, as that nature makes them vulnerable to suffering and mortality and links them to animals. She seeks to debunk the metaphysical bias when she provocatively compares the industrialized killing of animals with the Holocaust. Such analogies are usually dismissed because they are felt to denigrate human suffering. In his letter of protest, Abraham Stern, a supposedly Jewish poet who, after Costello’s lecture, boycotts the university dinner held in her honour, argues that “[i]f Jews were treated like cattle, it does not follow that cattle are treated like Jews. The inversion insults the memory of the dead” (EC 94). The reader is invited to ask why it does. If we are kin to the animal, is the animal not kin to us? In order to make his point, Stern adds a third form of being, the divine, to animals (cattle) and humans (Jews): The Jews died like cattle, therefore cattle die like Jews, you say. That is a trick with words I will not accept. You misunderstand the nature of likenesses; I would even say you misunderstand wilfully, to the point of blasphemy. Man is made in the likeness of God but God does not have the likeness of man. If Jews were treated like cattle, it does not follow that cattle are treated like Jews. (EC 94)

Abraham Stern’s analogy of non-reciprocal likenesses is structured according to a “three-part Aristotelian division of gods, beasts and men” (EC 102), mentioned by Costello in a reading of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels during her workshop of the second lesson on “The Poets and the Animals”: if man can be compared to God but not God to man, animals can be compared to humans but not humans to animals. Stern interprets the Aristotelian division as a hierarchical triad of family resemblances in which lower members can be likened to the next higher member (the animal to human, the human to god) but not the other way around as this “insults” and constitutes “blasphemy”, that is, it violates religiously prescribed respect for a higher form of being. As dubious as Costello’s comparison with the Holocaust may be, Stern’s objection shows how religious deference before a God who made man in his likeness is taken to legitimate

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man’s domination of animals. By way of analogical reasoning, the animal is supposed to occupy the position in relation to man that man occupies under God. In short, the animal’s god is man.14 Costello rejects hierarchical readings of the three-part Aristotelian division and can therefore argue that bilateral comparisons of the treatment of Jews and of animals are legitimate. Like Derrida, whose ideas I will discuss in more detail after the anthropological part of this section, Costello claims that if her comparison of industrial animal killing and the Holocaust generalizes illegitimately, it does so at the cost of animals: in contrast to the Jews under the Nazis, animals are not only killed on an industrial scale but also created on such a scale in order to be killed (see Derrida, The Animal 24–26, EC 65–66). Derrida’s own discussion of the Aristotelian division of beasts and men likewise elucidates rather than contradicts Costello’s anthropological claims. Derrida highlights that there are differences between humans and animals, but that the common practice of drawing one divide between human and animal blurs the many distinctions amongst animals. There is no ‘animal’; there are only animals, from protozoon to starfish to lizard, dog, and chimpanzee. The traditional drawing of a single divide between animal and human conceals that humans have more in common with chimpanzees, for example, than chimpanzees with protozoa (see The Animal 30–34, 39–40, 47–48). If “The Lives of Animals” stresses the perspective that individuals who embody ideas are in turn rooted in the body with its needs and instincts (see Mulhall, The Wounded Animal 182), and that these individuals always already find themselves in manifold discourse-practices that potentially conflict with the (moral) ideas in question (see McKay, “Metafiction” 80), then Elizabeth Costello’s other six lessons broaden that perspective. They show the complexity of the relations in which the ideas expressed in Costello’s lectures are embedded, and the complexity of overlapping cultural expectations, social pressures, and personal interests that all have a bearing on these ideas. Embeddedness comprises all social and historical ways in which human thought is conditioned. For example, when David Lurie in Disgrace defends himself against accusations of raping Melanie Isaacs, the accusations are embedded in South Africa’s apartheid past, and this embedding codetermines the rape’s meaning. The beliefs Costello holds and the ideas she entertains are embedded in particular situations in the sense that she would possibly not hold or entertain them in other situations. There are hints that she would not entertain her ideas about the body if her own body did not show signs of decay and mortality. As she

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herself depends on her body, so do her beliefs and ideas because they do not exist as disembodied currency of reason. Elizabeth Costello’s principal concern is showing all these forms of embeddedness realistically. The novel’s first lesson, “Realism”, accordingly defines realism as being true to the embodiedness of ideas and to their embeddedness in social contexts: [R]ealism is premised on the idea that ideas have no autonomous existence, can exist only in things. So when it needs to debate ideas, as here, realism is driven to invent situations—walks in the countryside, conversations—in which characters give voice to contending ideas and thereby in a certain sense embody them. The notion of embodying turns out to be pivotal. In such debates ideas do not and indeed cannot float free: they are tied to the speakers by whom they are enounced, and generated from the matrix of individual interests out of which their speakers act in the world—for instance, the son’s concern that his mother not be treated as a Mickey Mouse post-­ colonial writer […]. (EC 9)

To fully understand this programmatic statement, one must consider that the lesson “On Realism”, in which it is embedded, undermines literary realism, that is, a particular mode of writing, by showing up the arbitrary conventions on which it rests. For example, Elizabeth Costello makes explicit the tacit convention of suspending disbelief when the reader is asked to “assume that, however it may have been done, it is done. Let us take it that the bridge is built and crossed, that we can put it out of our mind” (EC 1). The lesson also emphasizes that literary realism (as well as other modes of writing) offers a selective view of the reality it purports to present because realist texts are full of gaps in which time passes: between paragraphs, even phrases. Here the gaps are made explicit: “There is a scene in the restaurant, mainly dialogue, which we will skip” (EC 7). The realism proposed in the long quote is of a different kind. Instead of a literary convention, realism here is an epistemological virtue if we acknowledge the embodiedness and embeddedness of ideas in “the matrix of individual interests out of which their speakers act in the world”. The salient point, however, is that while literary realism is a period in literary history or a literary programme, narrative turns out to be a privileged epistemological mode because it accommodates—within the bounds of its historically contingent conventions—embodiedness and embeddedness that are the roots of what Diamond calls the difficulty of reality. Philosophy,

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as it has been practised, does not; and the sciences, including the social sciences and psychology, are themselves only partial, as they focus on the psychological, the social, or the body in isolation and cannot offer integrated representations, and even less the experiential dimension of reality. The magnitude of these claims is considerable. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason attempts to provide a solid foundation for epistemology by limiting its claims: our perception of the world is inflected by time and space, both of which are categories of our minds rather than of reality; we therefore do not see the world as it is, but within the aforementioned limitations see it realistically, that is, reliably as the same. While Kant argues that time and space condition the possibility of thought, Elizabeth Costello suggests that it is conditioned by the body and social factors. We must take these factors into account if we want to approximate—even if we cannot reach—a realistic image of reality, and we can only do so through narrative. One can conceive of this redefinition as a narrative turn in which narrative—in all its generic forms15—inherits the epistemological position claimed by Kantian philosophy, and in which the embodied mind inherits the position held by reason. Narratives are more convincing than philosophical arguments because they let the reader experience the difficulty of reality rather than attempting to solve it, as Mulhall has argued. The generalizations of reason do not hold according to the novel because embeddedness and embodiedness mean that no particular instance of reality is experienced like another (see The Wounded Animal 183).16 The idea of literature as a mode of thinking realistically is not as new as it may seem. Coetzee draws heavily on Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas from Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. “In Dostoevsky”, Bakhtin writes, “two thoughts are already two people, for there are no thoughts belonging to no one and every thought represents an entire person” (93). Elizabeth Costello turns this poetological characterization of Dostoevsky into an ontological claim about ideas: there cannot be any thought at all if not an embodied and socially embedded thought. There are no thoughts, there is only thinking. Bakhtin only makes claims about Dostoevsky’s creative method when he claims that the author “thought not in thoughts but in points of view, consciousnesses, voices” (93); that he “tried to perceive and formulate each thought in such a way that a whole person was expressed and began to sound in it” (93); and that “this, in condensed form, is his entire worldview, from alpha to omega” (93).17 Coetzee radicalizes these thoughts by negating the existence of disembodied ideas and

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consequently embodying them in speakers. This radicalization suggests that Dostoevsky invented the realism discussed in Elizabeth Costello and thus refined the novel into a privileged means of addressing, playing with and testing ideas. Earlier literary-philosophical genres attempted what, in this view, only Dostoevsky fully achieved. As mentioned above, the Socratic/Platonic dialogue influenced Dostoevsky’s poetic and is premised on a belief in “the dialogic nature of truth” (110) and its embodying of ideas in “ideologists” (111). The same can be claimed of Coetzee’s novels, especially Elizabeth Costello and the Jesus novels.18 If realistic narrative (in Coetzee’s sense) lets the reader experience the difficulty of reality, then the reader experiences the human neither as an abstract idea, nor only as an idea inflected and ‘made difficult’ by reality, but also as the bedrock of reality. The specific forms of embeddedness and embodiedness which are the sources of reality’s difficulty are properties of the human itself. They determine human experientiality; hence, to show what it is like to be human, narrative must realistically convey this experientiality if it wants to go beyond philosophy’s and science’s abstract ideas of the human. Narratologists such as David Herman have ventured as far as arguing that “we cannot even have a notion of the felt quality of experience without narrative” (“Cognition” 257). This claim echoes Elizabeth Costello’s suggestion that the experientiality of embedded and embodied consciousness is not only the sine qua non of any narrative that can claim to give a truthful account of what it is like to be human, but that narrative is the form of language that can give such an account. Coetzee’s novel also anticipates Marco Caracciolo’s claim that a narrator’s and characters’ historically situated bodies are not principally cognitive representations in the reader’s mind but are pre-rationally inhabited by the reader. This pre-­ rational element of enactment is key to the relation between Costello’s arguments and Elizabeth Costello’s literary performances (and performative contradictions) of these arguments. After all, it is the very point of Coetzee’s book that the embedded and embodied nature of ideas is an experiential quality that cannot fully be grasped by Costello’s or the reader’s reasoning. This is the reason why one must speak of ‘performances’ enacted by narratives. Allowing readers to inhabit and enact historically embedded fictional bodies, narrative performs what cannot be told in propositional terms because ideas gain their content only against the background of embodiedness and embeddedness.

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Elizabeth Costello’s Performance of Embedding Lest this section itself remain at the level of abstraction, it is necessary to take a closer look at how Coetzee’s novel brings the embeddedness and embodiedness of the human to life. Introducing the concept of realism, Elizabeth Costello’s first lesson also demonstrates realism in practice and principally does so by showing how the members of Costello’s family are embedded and embodied in each other’s lives. In this novel, as in The Master of Petersburg, being-father and being-child are prominent forms of embodiedness. This is drastically suggested when Costello snores on an airplane and John, the narrative’s focalizer embedding his mother in his point of view, sees her open mouth and imagines “the gullet, pink and ugly, contracting as it swallows, like a python, drawing things down to the pear-shaped belly-sac. […] No, he tells himself, that is not where I come from, that is not it” (EC 34). The blending of mouth and vagina signifies the son’s revulsion at the idea that his mother is this organic matter, and that he came from it. His reaction is an example of what Diamond calls the coming apart of thought and reality in scepticism. John is repelled by the fact that he feels obliged to help this devouring yet wounded body through the ordeal of performing for the academy, and the fact that he does so even though he does not like his mother only adds to his revulsion. Facing his mother’s body proves to him the inescapability of family ties and his helplessness before them. “On Realism” also shows that embeddedness includes being embedded in the stories that connect us with others. The relations between Costello and her son John are less than warm, and it becomes clear that she has not been an ideal mother because she has not applied her sympathetic imagination to her children or else has done so only with a view to her own benefit. John knows that “[h]e is in her books” (EC 5), that she embedded him to feed on him, as the image of the python gullet suggests. Hints like these raise questions about Costello’s theses on animals. There is the question of how she, who apparently sympathizes little with her own children, can stand by her claims about sympathetic imagination; and there is the question of whether her call for sympathetic imagination originates from her realization that she failed as a mother. These questions cannot be definitively answered, yet they point towards the possibility that Costello’s arguments are embedded in her own desires and anxieties, and that the way the arguments are embedded in them will change our reading of her ideas when we are sure enough of her motivations. John, on the

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other hand, learns how deeply he is embedded in his mother’s life when Susan Moebius, a scholar who has written a book on his mother, sleeps with him, most likely because she wants to reach Costello through him. The story Moebius tells herself is that through touching Costello she will touch a higher sphere. Moebius does not contradict John when he associates his mother with the divine: “I think you are baffled, even if you won’t admit it, by the mystery of the divine in the human”, he tells Moebius. “You know there is something special about my mother” (EC 28). “You really are her son”, Moebius replies, correctly implying that there is a family resemblance between mother and son that goes beyond the biological. “You mean, am I touched by the god?” John asks and goes on: “No. But yes, I am her son. Not a foundling, not an adoptee. Out of her very body I came, caterwauling” (EC 28). It is an answer Costello herself could have given, ironically confirming Moebius’ suspicion of a family resemblance. Costello mentions Kafka’s Red Peter from “Report to an Academy” for the first time in “On Realism” and makes a remark there that should warn readers of “The Lives of Animals” against taking these lessons merely as lectures on animal ethics. “Kafka’s ape is embedded in life”, she says. “It is the embeddedness that is important, not the life itself. His ape is embedded as we are embedded, you in me, I in you” (EC 32). Like John, who is thought to embody Costello because he is her child and who is in turn embedded in the story of her fame, Red Peter is an example of the human animal’s embeddedness. The same is true of Elizabeth Costello, who finds herself not only in a wounded, ageing body like the ape’s but also in his situation of reporting to an academy. To John, it seems she is at moments inspired by the divine. When she has to perform her lecture, however, she is “an old, tired circus seal” (EC 3). She has become “a little frail” (EC 2) and her hair has “a greasy, lifeless look” (EC 3). Her brazen ideas are insecurely lodged in a dying body that once gave birth to John, while Costello is in turn embedded in the history of her difficult relationship to John and his family, and vice versa (see EC 3–5). She may have embodied a man when she wrote a novel (Fire and Ice) from a man’s perspective (see EC 12), but she cannot avoid being embedded in other lives and being a body. Despite the fact that embodying can be an ability, Costello here cannot help embodying all kinds of animals to John: a seal, a cat, a whale, Daisy Duck, a python, an ape (see EC 6–34). “What sort of creature is she really?” (EC 5), John asks himself. As if answering him, Costello lectures (in a particularly Christ-like scene): “I am one of you, I am not of a different species” (EC 18).

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The riddle of her being is the riddle of hybrid humanity, and John’s likening her to different animals suggests more than a clumsy attempt to make sense of her. Imaginative sympathy with animals furnishes his mind with ideas of who he and Costello are in the first place. To be embedded in life is to be embedded in other lives, to see parts of one’s self reflected in other human and non-human animals, and even in a fictional animal like Red Peter which is embedded in our lives. Conversely, life is embedded in discourse. Costello’s lectures are embedded in the novel about her, Kafka’s story in Costello’s lectures, and Sultan’s story in Köhler’s report to the Prussian Academy of Sciences. The lives of animals are embedded in Disgrace, in the Byron opera of that novel, and also in The Lives of Animals (see Geiger, “Writing the Lives” 158). The second lesson, “The Novel in Africa”, takes the embodiedness of ideas seriously by addressing voice and writing as means of expressing thoughts. The literary genre of the novel and oral literature serve as examples, one championed by Elizabeth Costello, the other by the Nigerian writer and fellow cruise ship speaker Emmanuel Egudu. Since Plato, the voice has been seen as the more bodily, less abstract means of expressing thought, and Derrida’s critique of logocentrism and defence of writing in Of Grammatology has arguably been the most recent important contribution to this debate. “The Novel in Africa” rubs these positions against each other and assesses how Costello and Egudu embody them. Their arguments, as well as the degrees of conviction they carry, turn out to be highly dependent on personal relations, interests of power, erotic interests, and the vocal performances of Costello and Egudu. Costello leaves little doubt that she has always found Egudu to be someone who cannot back up with deeds what he loudly proclaims (see EC 36). However, as she listens to her own voice delivering the lecture she has given a hundred times before, she is not sure whether she still believes what she says about the novel as a means of giving coherence to the past and exploring the power of the present to produce the future. She cannot prevent this lack of conviction from showing in her voice and notices that “the applause at the end lacks enthusiasm” (EC 39). Egudu, by contrast, delivers his talk with an “effortlessly booming voice” (EC 40). He claims that being in contact with one’s body is an essentially African quality, and that it is the backbone of the African oral novel in which oral speech is alive. To be African is to belong to an oral tradition, whereas Western culture is premised on the abstraction of writing:

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[W]e African novelists can embody these qualities as no one else can because we have not lost touch with the body. The African novel, the true African novel, is an oral novel. On the page it is inert, only half alive; it wakes up when the voice, from deep in the body, breathes life into the words, speaks them aloud. (EC 45)

Egudu receives much applause for his critique of Western disembodiment, and this seems due to the fact that he “ends his talk loud and spirited. He has spoken with force, perhaps even with passion; he has stood up for himself” (EC 45–46). Egudu can count on the popularity of his theses. Even Western theorists such as Zumthor declared that literature brought about the death of the voice and expressed hope that Africa might be able to revive it (see EC 45). Nevertheless, the content of Egudu’s arguments seems weak to Costello, who dislikes his mystique of the body and the voice, to say nothing of the concept of négritude. She also suspects that despite Egudu’s booming voice, he does not believe his own words either, that he tacitly agrees to perform the exotic and makes a living by it. The benefits of performing the exotic seem to be pecuniary as well as erotic: Costello sees a Russian singer emerge from Egudu’s cabin in the morning (see EC 46–54). The lesson ends with a surprising twist. Only now do we learn that Costello, when still young, spent three nights with Egudu, the “oral poet”, as she teased him: “‘Show me what an oral poet can do.’ And he laid her out, lay upon her, put his lips to her ears, opened them, breathed his breath into her, showed her” (EC 58). The revelation opens another perspective on Costello’s opinions on Egudu. She might be uncharitable because she is jealous of the younger Russian. Maybe her affair with Egudu ended on bitter terms. Costello’s judgements on Egudu appeared convincing to the reader before. Now they are reasonably suspected to be personally motivated, whereas Egudu’s theses on oral poetry carried conviction precisely because he seemed personally invested in them. The lesson’s last sentence about his breathing into her rhetorically marries sense to sound (see Mulhall, The Wounded Animal 192–93), performs what it says, and means what it performs, as if to prove that Egudu does have a point: apparently, he can back up what he says with deeds. This is an example of a concept that surfaced earlier in the lesson: inspiration as “[r]eceiving the spirit into oneself” (EC 52), as Costello thinks of it. It is also, more literally, the physical act of breathing into someone. Poseurs, the reader learns in this lesson, are not and maybe should not

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easily be discredited, for every successful verbal performance backs up its ideas by acts, that is, by the verbal performance itself. In this sense logos, the term denoting language and/as reason, is not as detached from the body as Plato and the Western tradition have made Costello think. Nor is the lesson detached from “The Lives of Animals”, where Costello engages in a physical performance of Red Peter in which she is invested with full conviction. “The Novel in Africa” precedes this performance and prepares the reader to ask whether her theses on humans and animals are discredited by circumstantial evidence of personal motivations, or whether on the contrary such motivations give her theses their particular force. Both lessons framing “The Lives of Animals” notably refer to Africa. In “The Novel in Africa”, the continent is hailed as the stronghold of an allegedly natural relationship between body and mind. In the fifth lesson, “The Humanities in Africa”, Africa is a place where the study of letters, as practised in the humanities, seems to Costello’s sister Blanche particularly misplaced when compared with her humanitarian efforts. Blanche battles the AIDS epidemic in rural Zululand, South Africa, and studied Classics before she trained as a medical missionary. She gives an address to graduates of the humanities at a university in Johannesburg; Costello listens in a reversal of the previous lessons’ communicative situations. Blanche argues that while the humanities have always pretended to study and serve humanity, they have, after the short and ultimately unsuccessful initial phase of the Humanist movement, become barren due to their overly narrow conception as textual criticism. This conception made them unfit to nurture human needs, as these are not only and not even predominantly needs of reason. The study of the great Greek texts, Blanche argues, can never be enough to deliver humans to a redeemed world because these texts, however interpreted, contain no True Word of redemption. Nor could the study of any modern classic such as Dostoevsky unearth such a Word. Apart from that, the Greeks were important for the humanities merely because their cultural remains offered the only glimpse of a life before the Christian fall. Theology would evidently cater more competently to the human need for redemption (see EC 122–23). Echoing the debate between Costello and Egudu, Blanche tells her audience that the “living breath” (EC 120) has left the humanities and that they have been killed off by the “monster” of “mechanical reason” (EC 123) which humanism conjured in the first place when it focused upon logos. Blanche’s talk uncovers family resemblances between the sisters. Blanche can obviously be as brusque before a good-willed audience as

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Costello, and she seems to share her sister’s critique of reason and particularly of instrumental reason. In a sense, the sisters exhibit a “family resemblance” (EC 118) that mirrors the one between apes and humans in “The Lives of Animals”. Costello addressed her audience as Red Peter, that is, as a human who is at the same time an animal—a human animal like the ones in her audience—and distrusts reason while making use of it. Blanche speaks as someone trained in the reason-based humanities like her audience and evidently makes use of reason in her talk; at the same time, she speaks as a missionary who distrusts reason. Blanche’s “red robes” (EC 123) and the fact that she calls graduates of the humanities “the sad tail” (EC 122) of the Humanist movement reinforce the suggestion that Red Peter is a tertium comparationis, or missing link, supporting Blanche’s and Costello’s family resemblance. This lends additional weight and irony to Costello’s remark that “Sister Bridget [Blanche’s trade name] is my sister. My sister in blood, I mean” (EC 124). She later remarks that “[t]he others are truer sisters, sisters in spirit” (EC 126), contradicting her own critique of prioritizing reason over the body. Costello wishes to distance herself from her sister’s views, but embodiedness is the shared foundation of their different rejections of reason. For Blanche, the flesh cannot be redeemed by logos. It cannot mediate between the human and the divine. Costello, on the other hand, criticizes logos because it cannot mediate between human and animal. What is to be achieved is in each case putting oneself in the place of the other: for Costello, in the place of the animal through an act of sympathetic imagination; for her sister, in the place of the divine by partaking of its non-rational truth. One of the complicating ironies of Elizabeth Costello is that Costello herself is not only likened to animals but also to the divine, a comparison that rather seems to befit Blanche. John may not like his mother but thinks her a “mouthpiece for the divine” (EC 31); not in the sense of a sibyl or an oracle, which seems too Greco-Roman to him, but like a god incarnated in a venerated child, as they exist in Tibet or India (see EC 31). When John or others associate Costello with animals or the divine, the very fact of her being, not only her argument, is apt to unsettle notions of the human that otherwise go without saying. Again, the same is true of Blanche. The academics hosting Blanche and Costello “must by now have realized that in Sister Bridget […] they have someone out of the ordinary” (EC 128). Her selfless humanitarian effort and unquestioning trust in God baffles others, as does Costello’s literary gift. Both sisters seem ­superhuman and are venerated, but for different abilities; both criticize

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rationality, but for different reasons; both question the human as a category of its own, but one does so by relating it to the animal, the other to God. They contest each other’s association with the divine. Blanche lets the audience and her sister know that all she finds in novels are depictions of what baseness and cruelty humans are capable of: We are fallen creatures. If the study of mankind amounts to no more than picturing to us our darker potential, I have better things to spend my time on. If on the other hand the study of mankind is to be a study in what reborn man can be, that is a different story. (EC 128)

If we remember that Adam and Eve’s fall from grace involves their discovery of nakedness and that the body will henceforth be the vehicle of their mortality, it is clear that Blanche’s reference to fallenness recalls Costello’s notion of embodiedness. The darker potential Blanche alludes to is pictured as beastliness, as a “baseness” that forces humans into the company of the animal instead of elevating them to God. For Blanche, a writer like her sister is a sort of “anthropologist” (EC 130) like Lorenzo Valla, able only to describe humanity’s animal side and to make the case that “mankind had lost its way and should go back to its primitive roots and make a fresh start” (EC 130). But going back to the Greeks will not redeem humans from the misery of earthly life, she argues, and the fact that her body has “lasted well” (EC 117), unlike Costello’s, is taken as a reward of her faith. She considers her embodiedness not as the last word in the lives of humans but as an evil to be overcome in the afterlife. For Costello, the human is always in the situation of the human animal Red Peter; for Blanche, the human is something more transitory in the hands of God: thrown into mortality by being tied to a perishable body, possibly elect to be redeemed. The novel ironically makes the divine shine through Costello’s character even more strongly than through her sister. As in other instances of irony in Elizabeth Costello, the effect is created by embedding claims in contexts that undermine them. Blanche may have little respect for literature, but Costello’s works prompt veneration that seems no less religious in nature than the veneration enjoyed by Blanche. In her willing suffering of the world’s evil Costello resembles Christ, the epitome of embodied spirit, more than Blanche does. A second irony, complicating the first, resides in John’s finding that his “mother is not in the Greco-Roman mould” (EC 31). Costello criticizes Blanche’s Christian view that humans

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should take Jesus as their model by arguing that the most common image of Christ—on the cross—is gothic and masochistic, full of loathing of the human body. The Greeks, Costello argues, knew how to praise the beauty of the body. She is dismayed by the craftsman Joseph carving one emaciated Jesus on the cross after another, for she feels that Blanche dragooned Joseph into an impoverished view of the human that results not in artworks but expressions of misguided belief. The Greeks would have offered the beautiful body as something to believe in—as an example of what our species is capable of—but Blanche is quick to respond that it is not the human that Joseph depicts because Jesus is a demigod or a god (see EC 134–39). When John says that his mother is not in the Greek mould, he thus claims that her own bodily and spiritual nature undermines the claim she makes about the Greek vision of the human. This adds to the first irony, her proximity to Jesus-as-embodied-spirit whose presentation she detests. To be sure, John does not say that she is in the Christian mould but rather in the Indian or Tibetan; but the child incarnating the divine is closer to Jesus than to the Greek imagination of the gods who act much like humans in their dramas of envy, lust, and domestic quarrel.19 In fact, the lecturing Costello resembles the infant Jesus preaching in the temple; when she tells the academy that she is an ape, she attracts ridicule, like Jesus riding into Jerusalem on an ass; when she asks herself why only she suffers from the goings-on in the abattoirs while everyone else seems unperturbed, she is Jesus bearing his cross alone, atoning for others’ sins, at last exhibiting a mortal wound. When Costello attends a religious service and faints in the heat, she doubts that the reasons were only bodily. Although she does not allow herself to consider that God may have touched and overwhelmed her, this reading is invited by “The Humanities in Africa” and would confirm Costello’s embeddedness in a religious world (see EC 143–44). Blanche has her own explanation: Costello embraced the wrong Greeks, Apollo instead of Dionysus or Orpheus. Reason brought Costello down although—or because!—she had her own causes for criticizing reason (see EC 145 and “The Lives of Animals”). Despite the fact that the Greeks and Christianity can only offer partial accounts of the body, Elizabeth Costello shows that Costello, as well as her sister, can in fact embody ideas, regardless of whether these ideas are right or wrong, morally good or bad. If Costello can at times be taken to embody Christ, then the lesson on “The Problem of Evil” presents the complementary case of a body embodying evil. Costello blames writer

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Paul West for embodying evil when he describes the last hours of Count von Stauffenberg: “Through Hitler’s hangman a devil entered Paul West, and in his book West in turn has given the devil his freedom, turned him loose upon the world. She felt the brush of his leathery wing, as sure as soap, when she read those dark pages” (EC 167–68). “To save our humanity,” she goes on, “certain things that we may want to see (may want to see because we are human!) must remain off-stage” (EC 169–70). From “The Humanities in Africa” on, the reader experiences an interesting qualification of Costello’s own call for sympathetic imagination through the body. In “The Lives of Animals”, she claimed there are no limits to our sympathetic imagination, that we can feel ourselves into bats, into people being tortured to death, into corpses. She now pleads for limits to such sympathetic acts in order “to save our humanity”. An overriding ethical demand appears that is not identical with the demand for sympathetic embodiment. This ethical demand, the reader understands, is bound up with the meaning of “our humanity”, a term Costello is now inclined to use in the ethical sense. It is one of Elizabeth Costello’s characteristic contradictions that the protagonist once defines the idea of humanity as being a body (a descriptive definition), once as being governed by moral goodness (a normative definition), and also that it transcends this contradiction in the overarching claim that the embodied- and embeddedness of ideas makes ideas dependent on factors beyond their control. This in turn raises the problem of how to be good when being good partly depends on factors that are beyond our control. The seventh lesson “On Eros” responds to “The Humanities in Africa” by presenting Costello’s own non-Christian notion of the divine and its relation to humanity. In this way the lesson also complements the lessons where the relationship between humans and animals is at stake. Structurally, what humans are to animals in “The Lives of Animals” the gods are to humans in “On Eros”: [A]re [the gods] curious about us, their anthropological specimens, to the degree that we in turn are curious about chimps, or about birds, or about flies? Despite some evidence to the contrary, she would like to think, chimps. She would like to think the gods admire, however grudgingly, our energy, the endless ingenuity with which we try to elude our fate. Fascinating creatures, she would like to think they remark to each other over their ambrosia; so like us in many respects; their eyes in particular so expressive; what a pity they lack that je ne sais quoi without which they can never ascend to sit beside us! (EC 190–91)

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If humans can feel their way into animals, can they feel themselves into  gods? According to Costello’s stream of consciousness—its only instance in the novel—the gods specialize in anthropology not only because humans are similar to them: “They specialize in humankind because of what we have and they lack; they study us because they are envious” (EC 189). The answer to what precisely makes them envious contains another irony and reveals that Costello thinks of even the gods in terms of the body and embodiment: the gods envy humans their mortality because it makes sex more exciting. The gods do not know that humans try through sex to get a glimpse of another world, the divine (see EC 190), that is, that the desires of gods and humans are at crosspurposes and mutually blind.20 In other words, the desire of each is embodied in the other. (This is precisely the subject of Heinrich von Kleist’s tragi-comedy Amphitryon whose traces can also be found in the Jesus novels: the mortal wife Alkmene enjoys intercourse with the god Jupiter who has taken the shape of her husband, the Theban general Amphitryon, in order to taste human joys.)21 What Costello finds certain is that desire glues the universe together: it is a force that transcends the order of being according to Aristotle’s tripartite model. The tragic irony is that one must apparently be torn by old age—that is, feel the body through pain and be past desire—to recognize this universal force of desire: “Must one be too creaky to join the dance before one can see the pattern?” (EC 192). Costello’s thoughts on the gods might seem idiosyncratic, anachronistic, even mad, but they make sense if we see the divine as a category that is necessary for locating the human. Costello asks the reader not to think of the gods as miraculous. Whereas a miracle is conceptually impossible but empirically true, Costello’s gods are conceptually necessary even if we find their existence to be empirically false. Costello admits that “[w]e do not call on the gods because we no longer believe in them” (EC 191). The point is that it is quite possible, even empirically possible, that humans could be to another being what animals are to them: a supposedly inferior form of life, equipped with a form of thought that appears second rate. There is more to support Costello’s musings if we ask what modern ­people, including Costello in her other lessons, actually do believe in: certainly in their own bodies, Costello thinks. Throughout the novel, she has built her claims on a revision of Descartes: habeo corpus, ergo sum. This still seems to hold in the last lesson, “At the Gate”:

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That at least she does not have to invent: this dumb, faithful body that has accompanied her every step of the way, this gentle, lumbering monster that has been given to her to look after, this shadow turned to flesh that stands on two feet like a bear and laves itself continually from the inside with blood. Not only is she in this body, this thing which not in a thousand years could she have dreamed up, so far beyond her powers would it be; she somehow is this body; and all around her on the square, on this beautiful morning, these people, somehow, are their bodies, too. (EC 210)

Here, however, Costello questions the body’s self-evidence for the very first time: “Somehow; but how? […] Does it count as a belief, whatever property she has that allows her to continue to be this body when she has not the faintest idea how the trick is done?” (EC 210). Costello’s doubt threatens to undermine the core of her anthropology. Since this question arises in a lesson about the gods, a highly provocative thought is implied. If humans cannot believe in their bodies because they do not understand them, then they certainly cannot believe in gods; but if they believe in their incommensurable bodies—and their actions every day prove that they do—why should they then not believe in gods? Believing in gods is no less plausible than believing in what seems most obvious to us: that we have a body, are a body. In that sense, the gods are real to the extent that Costello believes in them, and they inform humanity in the way the body does. This point is missing in Mulhall’s explanation of Costello’s musings on the gods. Mulhall considers her musing as replicating Kafka’s realism in his thought experiment of embedding Red Peter in a twentieth-century academic context, a context made real to the second degree by Costello when she embodies Red Peter in front of her audience. It is true that Costello is just as realistic in imagining the congress of the human and the divine, that is, in embedding the human in the divine sphere (see Mulhall, The Wounded Animal 216). She does not shy away from practical, ‘realistic’ details when she imagines how it must feel to be inhabited by or to embody a god (see EC 187–88): “It must have been like being fucked by a whale. It must have been like being fucked by the Leviathan” (EC 187). She imagines this experience to be comparable to sexual congress with an ­animal—a whale/Leviathan—and demonstrates that not only our thinking of the human but also of the divine is modelled on our imagination of animals. Considering her thoughts only as an exercise in realistically describing something empirically impossible is too narrow, however. As Costello herself hints, we cannot even be realistic about our bodies, as they remain a mystery to us. Belief in the gods is therefore no less realistic than

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belief in the body. It is realistic to the extent that it is part of imagining the human as embodied and embedded in a universe that is governed by forces transcending human reason, regardless of whether these forces are gods or a single, overarching force of desire. Humans, Animals, and the Ethical Potential of Literature The lessons discussed here as complements to “The Lives of Animals” demonstrate ways in which Costello’s personal history and bodily experience potentially give shape to her views on humans and animals, and how experiences such as being exposed to her Christian sister’s views, fainting in church, reading a fellow writer as embodying evil, or losing faith in her own body continuously transform Costello’s views on humans and animals and reveal their contingency. Her embodiedness and embeddedness in a unique matrix of influences mean that her situation is unique, as is any other human being’s. When it comes to ethical demands towards human or non-human animals, principles will only incompletely account for any particular being because they generalize and rely on anthropocentric rationality. I want to close this section with Elizabeth Costello’s answer to this dilemma by returning once more to literature’s relation to other discourses, and by discussing the potential privilege of literary form in the approximation of human existence and its accompanying ethics. Coetzee’s personal statements on his ethical views should not be taken as authoritative guides to his novels, including the lectures given by Elizabeth Costello. However, these statements and Costello’s proposal of a non-rational foundation for our attitude towards animals can illuminate one another and shed more light on Costello’s claim that poetic language allows us to sympatheticaly imagine the animal. In his critique of Paola Cavalieri’s philosophical dialogue “The Death of the Animal”, Coetzee claims that any argument ignoring the fact that all thinking is embodied cannot assess reality (see “Comments on Paola Cavalieri, ‘A Dialogue on Perfectionism’” 85–88). He goes on to argue against a foundation of ethics in reason: [T]here are people (among whom I number myself) who believe that our ethical impulses are prerational (I would be tempted to go along with Wordsworth and say that our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting, that what Wordsworth calls our moral being is more deeply founded within us than rationality itself), and that all that a rational ethics can achieve is to articulate

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and give form to ethical impulses. (“On Appetite, the Right to Life, and Rational Ethics” 121)

Elizabeth Costello suggests that the pre-rational basis of ethics is the body, and Coetzee’s mentioning of Wordsworth in turn suggests that literature, and especially poetry, has a special propensity to convey bodily sensation, even if the Wordsworth of “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” did not have the body in mind when he celebrated the pre-­ rational as      a sense sublime       Of something far more deeply interfused,       Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,       And the round ocean and the living air,       And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;       A motion and a spirit, that impels       All thinking things, all objects of all thought,      And rolls through all things.      (The Major Works 134, ll. 96–103)

Wordsworth invokes a pantheistic unity of nature; Costello focuses on the body as specifically human and animal nature. Finding epistemological certainty only in the body, and finding the body to be our animality that enables us to sympathize with animals, Costello answers a listener who asks for moral principles to take away from her lecture that the only principle is to “open your heart and listen to what your heart says” (EC 82). This is neither a resort to banal commonplace, nor is it an elevation to a religious register. It is much closer to Wordsworth’s poetic invocation of ‘family resemblances’ between living beings, yet additionally answering to an ethical dilemma. Costello is grappling with a challenge that Coetzee first posed for a protagonist in In the Heart of the Country: to find a language that does not rely on reason because reason and its value are defined by the oppressor.22 Costello discards reason because it is anthropocentric, whereas Magda does so because it is a means of domination in Afrikaans, her mother tongue tainted by a history of colonial violence. We can only guess how Costello would answer the objection that her own arguments rest on reason: possibly by remarking that she can only avail herself of the language of reason because she is not a poet, or not anymore23; that she has to avail herself of a language of reason in the way that Wittgenstein, in Tractatus logico-philosophicus, has to use, like a ladder, a senseless language

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in order to show the senselessness of that language: “My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it)” (6.54). Raimond Gaita fleshes out such a reading of Coetzee’s treatment of animals: Like Wittgenstein, [Coetzee] seems to believe that we misunderstand the importance of the infinitely subtle inflexions and demeanours of the body, the many forms of its expressiveness, if we take them only as the basis for hypothetical attributions of states of consciousness to animals. Rather (I take him to suggest), they partly determine the meaning that words like ‘knowledge’ and ‘belief’, ‘hope’ and ‘fear’ and so on, have in our life with language […]. (The Philosopher’s Dog 71–72)

If Costello were able to write the kind of poetry she introduces in her lesson on “The Poets and the Animals”—poetry like Ted Hughes’, which invites us to inhabit the movements of a jaguar’s body instead of its mind (see EC 96)—she would have had to deliver a poetry reading instead of a lecture, for she is convinced that such poems enable us to embody animals (see EC 97–98). In contrast, arguments only let us gaze through the lens of rationality, separating us from the animal and blinding us to the fact that it offers an anthropocentric view. Hughes’ poem “The Jaguar” suggests to Costello that the rhythm and music of poetry can convey a bodily sensation that is lacking in philosophical discourse. A person who walks past the cages of animals in a zoo, Hughes writes, arrives       At a cage where the crowd stands, stares, mesmerized,       As a child at a dream, at a jaguar hurrying enraged       Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes       On a short fierce fuse. Not in boredom—       The eye satisfied to be blind in fire,       By the bang of blood in the brain deaf the ear—       He spins from the bars, but there’s no cage to him       More than to the visionary his cell      (The Hawk and the Rain 12, ll. 10–17)

The syntactical strategy of cramming images between subject and verb can create an effect of breathlessness and awe that can be associated with the human spectators, but even more it conveys an experience of an animal

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that is all sensation (as a visionary is all vision) because sensation is uninterrupted by reason, let alone grammatical rules. A line like “By the bang of blood in the brain deaf the ear—” with its triple alliteration of “b” and its triple assonance of “bang”, “brain” and “deaf” drums in the reader’s as in the jaguar’s head because no verb transposes the sensation into a form amenable to reasoning. However, the reader of “The Poets and the Animals” knows Costello’s critique of oral literature from the previous lesson on “The Novel in Africa” and is forced to ask whether this critique is compatible with her view that poetry entertains a special relation to the body. Egudu had claimed that the African ‘oral novel’ has a special propensity to capture the sensations of the body as it gives expression to the human voice as embodied thought. Costello had called Egudu’s thoughts “mystique” and “pseudo-philosophy” (EC 46). Part of Costello’s critique in “The Novel in Africa” concerns Egudu’s linking of literary genre with ethnicity (the ‘oral novel’ as specifically African), but the main thrust of her critique is directed against the claim that any literary form, no matter whether an ethnic specialty or not—should have privileged access to the body. She suggests that all of literature, and particularly every novel, now exists in written form and is thereby separated from the voice and the body (see EC 53). This general critique gives the reader of “The Poets and the Animals” reason to ask whether Costello’s claims about poetry as via regia to the body and to animality are not themselves a case of mystification and fetishization, especially because narrative exploits the effects of rhythm and musicality no less than poetry does. The ingenious point is that the reader can draw two alternative conclusions from the impression that Costello’s claims about poetry are no more convincing than Egudu’s about the oral novel. A reader focusing on Costello’s arguments will have to conclude that literature can give no better expression to the embodiedness and embeddedness of human and non-human animals than other forms of discourse such as philosophy or the natural sciences. On the other hand, a reader who considers that Costello’s arguments themselves are embedded in narrative will contrast their experience of Elizabeth Costello’s performance of embodiedness and embeddedness to Costello’s contradictory arguments about poetry; depending on whether this performance offers a convincing representation of embodiedness and embeddedness, one could turn the weakness of Costello’s arguments into the strength of literature in general. While Costello’s arguments would fail to convince

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one of the singularity of poetry, the novel Elizabeth Costello that is her performance would suggest that novels, and potentially all other literary genres, can indeed offer privileged access to embodiedness and embeddedness. Elizabeth Costello invites its readers to base their judgement on the book in their hands. I take Diamond to be a reader who is convinced by Costello’s performance while not necessarily by her arguments because the performance does justice to the difficulty of reality resulting from the embodiedness and embeddedness of the human. Diamond is convinced precisely because she does not consider Elizabeth Costello a unique accomplishment. Diamond illustrates literature’s ability to expose the reader to the difficulty of reality by referring to Ted Hughes’ poem “Six Young Men”, but exposure is not only achieved by the poem and not even by poetry in general. Diamond also names short stories by Mary Mann and Leonard Woolf and refers to Shakespeare’s dramas as read by Stanley Cavell (see “Difficulty” 43–46, 60–69). She suggests that Elizabeth Costello, too, exposes the reader to reality. She remarks that not every reader of any of these works feels exposed to any difficulty of reality; some will remain as unperturbed as Costello’s audience in “The Philosophers and the Animals”. But what this implies is that the question of whether the sceptical or the affirmative reading of Elizabeth Costello is appropriate can only be answered by the individual reader. Regardless of how the reader decides, he or she will realize that the answer is based on the experience of the novel’s performance of embeddedness and embodiedness through Costello rather than on Costello’s arguments considered in the abstract. Diamond answers her own discomfort at philosophy’s deflecting from the difficulty of reality by gesturing towards literature as a discourse outside of philosophy. Jacques Derrida is a philosopher whose writings can be taken to express the same unease. In The Animal That Therefore I Am he grapples with similar difficulties as he sets out to formulate an animal ethics and, like Diamond, he is convinced of the virtues of literary approaches to the animal (see, e.g., 6). Unlike Diamond, however, Derrida incorporates literary strategies into his writing to compensate for philosophy’s shortcomings. He follows, in other words, an approach similar to Coetzee’s in Elizabeth Costello. In both writers’ works, this formal decision of hybridity is inseparable from the propositional content, and in fact, Derrida’s thoughts on the relationship of humans and animals in The Animal That Therefore I Am are strikingly similar to Coetzee’s/Costello’s. To avoid misunderstandings: Coetzee and Derrida do not refer to one another.

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Coetzee’s “The Lives of Animals” and Derrida’s article “L’animal que donc je suis (à suivre)” (which was to become a part of the eponymous book) were both first published in 1999.24 What is most interesting in the parallels between Costello/Coetzee and Derrida is not a putative influence of Coetzee on Derrida or vice versa but that Derrida chooses a hybrid of narrative and argument to address the ethical responsibility of humans towards animals. The origin of his reflections is a primal scene: his cat gazing at him as he stands naked. A scene (could it have been another scene?) is a necessary rather than an arbitrary beginning because for Derrida, as for Coetzee, arguments alone cannot serve as a foundation of an animal ethics. For Derrida the origin of an ethical stance towards the animal is the encounter with the animal, recalling Lévinas’ justification of ethics. Derrida’s medium for conveying this encounter is a narrative scene preceding the arguments, framing them, embedding them in itself. Derrida maintains that philosophers like Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, or Lacan deflect from the unsettling experience of being addressed by a particular animal, and that they do so by advancing abstract reasons that hide the animal’s singularity. They impose anthropocentric standards upon them and have done so systematically out of fear of jeopardizing humanity’s uniqueness (see The Animal 13–14, 54–160). When Derrida tries to convey to the reader that it is not the particular animal’s ability to speak, to feel shame, and so on that moves us but its inability to avoid pain or to evade death—its exposure to wounding and mortality (see 26–29)—he embeds his arguments in the narrative episode about his cat looking at him when he is naked. After the encounter, he tells us, he wonders why he feels shame when he is looked at by his cat. Reason tells him that it is a cat looking at him, not a human, and this in turn makes him ashamed of feeling shame in the first place. On the other hand, he thinks that not feeling shame, he would have behaved like an animal, as animals know no nakedness and therefore no shame, and maybe—he grows uncertain—he was looked at as an animal. For that moment, the question of who or what he is becomes dizzying. What Derrida describes in his autobiographical narrative is a coming apart of thought and reality in scepticism about his own humanity. In the moment of the encounter, his cat refuses to be conceptualized in terms of principles (see The Animal 6–10). Before he can categorize his cat as cat, he is struck by possessing an animal body as the cat does, and this is the origin of his shame. He is “[a]shamed of being naked as a beast” (4). His nudity reveals the vulnerability and mortality of his animal body, com-

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monly hidden under clothes and veiled by human/animal distinctions. His shame does not set him apart from the animal staring at him; it is a symptom of his uncertainty as to whether he is regarded as human or animal by the cat, and whether he is human or animal. One could say that the animal and the human encounter each other on equal terms. The ethics governing human-human relations should also be rooted in the pre-­ rational encounter with the other (see 5–6). Costello’s exhibition of her woundedness, that is, her admission that her thoughts are embodied in and therefore partly conditioned by dying animal flesh, can be read in terms of Derrida’s thoughts on the body’s vulnerability as vehicle for ethical sentiment, and vice versa. In both cases, only a narrative framing allows the reader to grasp the embodiedness of human and non-human animals. It remains to be said that despite certain affinities, Coetzee/Costello’s ideas and performances are not reducible to The Animal That Therefore I Am, nor does Elizabeth Costello absorb Derrida. Such limitations are glaringly obvious if one considers that Derrida proves far less helpful for a reading of Disgrace. This is arguably due to the fact that Disgrace fleshes out not only the existential but also the quotidian face of mortality. Mortality is a negative potential: the incapacity of living beings to evade death. Death, on the other hand, is an actuality, and one that paradoxically cannot be experienced like the process of dying. Feeling like a corpse is feeling dead, not feeling death. Death itself can only be touched through what human beings experience in life, and that is what Disgrace does in far greater detail and with greater emotional force than Elizabeth Costello. Both novels remind readers that death makes itself felt through the symptoms of ageing, accidents, and wounds, but only Disgrace demonstrates that there are less dramatic, yet more common and surprising experiences in our lives that anticipate our future deaths. Disgrace shows with a view to dogs and humans that the everyday experience of embodiment manifests itself first and foremost in the incapacity to escape one’s instincts, that is, in hunger, thirst, the sexual drive and even the drive of self-preservation that prompts living beings to avoid death. Humans and animals are at the mercy of instincts that ultimately respond to the existential condition of mortality. If instincts are symptoms of mortality, observing them in a dog or a cat can also be a basis for sympathizing with these animals. Disgrace reminds readers of Elizabeth Costello that our sympathetic imagination is not only called upon by the potential suffering of animals, but also by animals being at the mercy of instincts we share with them.

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Notes 1. Attwell argues that the novel’s autobiographical strategy is to suggest that at the heart of Dostoevsky’s creativity in Demons was an episode of disorienting grief, and that Coetzee imagined his own grief as Dostoevsky’s (see J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing 194). 2. Heidegger calls the animal’s state of Hingenommenheit (being taken) by the stimulus that satisfies its need “an instinctual ‘toward’…” (The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics 242). 3. A proximity to Nietzsche’s reversal of Christian values is evident when Lurie performs a transvaluation of divine Eros into something organic and animalistic. Nietzsche perceives Christian values to be arbitrary and repressive of the primitive forces of life, which prompts him to correct the philosophical tradition by increasing the value of the body to the detriment of the spirit (see On the Genealogy of Morals, chapters 1 and 2). 4. Lurie’s thoughts after learning of Lucy’s pregnancy show that he is familiar with Freud’s theory of drive: “It was not the pleasure principle that ran the show but testicles” (D 199). 5. Aristotle’s Politics seems an important influence also insofar as it proclaims a natural division of men into masters and servants. Rather than drawing on Hegel’s thesis of the master’s dependence on the servant, Coetzee enters the debate between Hegel and Aristotle on the relation of master and slave. 6. “The Cynics took their name from the Greek for ‘dog’, referring to the animal-like life indifferent to social conventions which they pursued, carrying out all their bodily functions in full public view” (Lane, “Ancient Political Philosophy”). 7. To Heidegger, man is more than an animal rationale precisely because he is less: it is not technology and purposeful rationality that make him master of that which is. He is guardian of the Being because it is up to him, and him alone, to reflect the Dasein without being able to determine how nature, history, and even the gods make their appearance. According to Heidegger, this reflection makes it necessary to approach humanity via its humanitas rather than via its animalitas. 8. Without referring to Heidegger and his notion of animality and instinct, critics have noted that ‘dog-man’ can be read as an inversion of ‘god-man’, a cypher, as it were, for the saviour who has been put from his head back onto his feet. ‘Dog-man’ has also been interpreted as putting man and beast on the same level, hinting at the promise of salvation through reconciliation of the animal parts of the human with the ‘exclusively human’ parts (see van Heerden, “Disgrace, Desire” 56). This interpretation is sup-

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ported by Elizabeth Costello’s remarks in Coetzee’s eponymous novel (see EC 106, 111). 9. Despite these reservations, Lurie’s change of mind as far as animals are concerned shows what animal ethics could be founded on. Research focusing on the ethical aspects of Disgrace has scrutinized these possibilities without taking the identical nature of human and animal instincts asserted by cynicism into account. Deirdre Coleman’s “The ‘Dog-Man’: Race, Sex, Species, and Lineage in Coetzee’s Disgrace”, Adrian van Heerden’s “Disgrace, Desire, and the Dark Side of the New South Africa”, and Carrie Rohman’s “No Higher Life: Bio-Aesthetics in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace” perhaps come closest to a ‘cynical’ interpretation of the novel. 10. Köhler published the results of his experiments in 1917; Kafka’s story was published in November of that year. 11. The original title is Der Zuckerbaron: Schicksale eines ehemaligen deutschen Offiziers in Südamerika. 12. In “The Humanity of Animals and the Animality of Humans”, Agustin Fuentes addresses the novel’s anthropological concerns before relating them to the novel’s ethics, but he, too, takes Costello’s arguments at face value and does not consider their embeddedness as one of the novel’s main points about being human. 13. McKay refers to The Lives of Animals; the cited arguments also apply to “The Lives of Animals”. I agree with McKay that The Lives of Animals should not be regarded a mere part of Elizabeth Costello, partly because the character Elizabeth Costello is slightly different in Lives and Elizabeth Costello (see “Metafiction” 78–79). 14. Critics of Christianity are invited to ask whether humans can endure their submission to God only because God invites them to dominate animals. As I discuss in Chap. 2, Derrida deconstructs Genesis as myth by reading it as an autobiography of the human that legitimates violation of animals. 15. See footnote 3 in Chap. 1. 16. This is why the arguments in Elizabeth Costello must be taken as ‘arguings’, as Derek Attridge puts it: they are voiced in concrete situations that cannot be generalized (see J. M. Coetzee 197–99). 17. The passage preceding this poignant pronouncement is also illuminating because it identifies the person, not the idea, as the atoms of Dostoevsky’s universe: “Dostoevsky’s ideology knows neither the separate thought nor systemic unity in any sense. For him the ultimate indivisible unit is not the separate bounded thought, not the proposition, not the assertion, but rather the integral point of view, the integral position of a personality. In every thought the personality is given, as it were, in its totality. And thus the linking-up of integral positions, the linking-up of personalities” (Bakhtin, Problems 93).

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18. Daniel Medin instead gives an account that highlights, in the more traditional vein of Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel, Defoe’s and Kafka’s (rather than Dostoevsky’s and Kafka’s) influence on Elizabeth Costello’s concept of realism (see Three Sons 161–77). 19. C.M. Bowra and Jean-Pierre Vernant define the Greek gods as powerful rather than perfect beings. In contrast to the Christian God, they embody one particular power (of love, of the sea, of prowess in war, etc.) but are otherwise prone to human behaviour and weaknesses (see Bowra, The Greek Experience 55–60, Vernant, Mortals and Immortals 269–89). 20. Mulhall invokes Jean-Paul Sartre who said that nothing is more human than the desire to not be human. The last lesson, “At the Gate”, Mulhall argues, shows that being conscious of our body, we have hands, and are not our hands, “we relate to our bodies as what we are not” (The Wounded Animal 228). We play roles to which our bodies, our animality, must be fitted and experience our body as something outside us. “Little wonder, then, that the most fundamental desire of such finite beings is the desire to be God—an impossible desire […] for an impossible object” (229). 21. Kleist’s play is itself adapted from Molière’s play of the same name. 22. At the end of “The Lives of Animals”, Costello pays a price that is similar to the one Magda pays for seeking a discourse outside reason. How can it be that only she is horrified by animal slaughter and the rest of humanity seems sane and healthy? Is she mad? (see EC 114–15). Coetzee thus returns to the problem of madness from his earliest books. 23. Costello has written two volumes of poetry (see EC 1), but poetry now seems to be something she devotedly reads rather than writes. (This resembles the case of Coetzee who started with poetry [unsuccessfully trying to publish it until roughly 1972] and then turned to prose.) Maybe we can take her statement “I do not have the time any longer to say things I do not mean” as a hint that she has abandoned poetry because she has grown impatient with forms of figurative language such as metaphor, irony, and allegory that are typical of (yet not essential to) the language of poetry. 24. Derrida’s text appeared in L’animal autobiographique, edited by Marie-­ Louise Mallet (Paris: Galilée).

CHAPTER 5

Humanity and Collectivity: Nation, State, and Community

Since his move to Australia in 2002, Coetzee’s fiction has been increasingly concerned with issues of emigration, nationality, and belonging. These issues are already pertinent in Youth, in which South African protagonist John emigrates to London. Elizabeth Costello deals with an Australian writer who travels around the world giving lectures. Slow Man addresses emigration and national identity explicitly through its protagonist Paul Rayment, who is born in France, emigrates to Australia at the age of six, and returns to his country of birth as an adolescent before re-­ emigrating to Australia. The protagonist of Diary of a Bad Year, JC, has emigrated to Australia, and questions of nationhood often crop up in the essays and conversations of the novel. Summertime (2009), the third instalment of autrebiography after Youth, reconstructs the life of its protagonist John after his return to South Africa in 1971, and The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus tell the tale of a man and a child arriving in an unnamed Spanish-speaking land where they begin a new life. It is tempting to understand Coetzee’s concern with emigration, nationality, and belonging chiefly as a response to his own emigration to Australia. On the other hand, Coetzee’s life at that point had already been marked by several emigrations. Like the John of Youth, he emigrated to Britain in 1962 and stayed there for three and a half years before moving on to Austin, Texas, to pursue a PhD. He stayed in the USA until 1971, when he returned to South Africa because his visa was not renewed due to his participation in a demonstration against the way in which his © The Author(s) 2019 K. Wiegandt, J.M. Coetzee’s Revisions of the Human, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29306-2_5

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­ niversity—SUNY-Buffalo—had handled earlier demonstrations against u the war in Vietnam (see Kannemeyer, J. M. Coetzee 111–204). However, after his move to Australia, emigration and nationality become themes that are developed in a richer way in his texts, in particular by becoming an arena for Coetzee’s persistent questioning and testing of the human. As I will show in the following, nationality and belonging define the human particularly in Slow Man, Diary of a Bad Year, The Childhood of Jesus, and The Schooldays of Jesus, in a manner that Étienne Balibar’s concept of the homo nationalis can help explain. I will therefore dwell on Balibar’s ideas for a moment before discussing the novels. In We, People of Europe? Balibar gives examples of processes experienced by most Western nations since the 1990s by analysing Europe and its borders. Balibar reminds us that the nation’s original function has been the distribution of economic and political power in a hierarchical, monopolistic manner, and that a key factor in this distribution has been the control of anthropological differences. These differences fulfil two conditions: that humanity cannot be conceived without them (or their negation represents a denial of humanity), and that the dividing line between these differences can never be drawn in an objective fashion (so that individuals could be split up without intersections or remainders). Typical examples are the differences of gender, intelligence, and health. Balibar argues that the nation fulfils the function of a Supreme Court of Appeal, or final arbitrator, in the definition of these differences: the nation has the last word on whether someone is healthy or ill, male or female, ‘Caucasian’ or ‘Asian’ (see We, People of Europe? 19–22, 240 n. 21). National institutions such as the hospital, the school, or the authorities granting passports provide the categories into which each and every individual fits, and they authoritatively determine the status of the citizen in each of these regards, thereby enforcing a ‘normalization’ of citizens. The measure of this normalization is an idea of the properly human. Balibar speaks of a homo nationalis in the sense that each nation produces a particular humanity that excludes that of other nations: If we say that the hierarchy and the pluralism of identities […] depend on the possibility of controlling the play of identities and of conflict-fraught differences between human beings in order to use them within the borders and for the benefit of people, then we point to a possibility of classifying human beings and of attributing a specific conception of humanity to them according to ‘type’, ‘behaviour’ or ‘tradition’. This implies that in any ­configuration of borders, each difference—even each différance, to borrow

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Derrida’s active re-formulation of the term—can be understood as a local variant of the idea of the human, or as an aberration from it. In this way, each nation […] can for itself and for all other nations mean a specific ‘sensual’, ‘aesthetic’ view of the idea of the human. (Nous, Citoyens d’Europe? no page)1

Any given society of a certain size is bound to be heterogeneous, but a widely communicated and believed myth of homogeneity must be created in order to ensure coherence within a nation. It thus becomes necessary to define normality and to proclaim a set of attributes that are applicable to any citizen—the homo nationalis—as well as the historically contingent but nationally specific practices that define nationality itself. Since it is not possible to find a set of attributes and practices that simultaneously lets a huge group of heterogeneous subjects appear homogeneous without including other subjects (belonging to another nation), the definition of normality must be exclusive and therefore paradoxically proclaim some nationals to be more valid than others. In other words, the creation of a homo nationalis supposedly ensuring coherence among citizens positions some at the centre of society and pushes others to its periphery. This leads, for example, to the simultaneous inclusion of minorities in legal terms and their exclusion in social terms. Balibar can thus insist that the nation “is not at all an abstract superstructure but the essence of the historical construction of human nature—of what Rousseau called ‘the human of the human’ and of what Freud tried to explain as identification. I, for my part, would use the term homo nationalis” (Balibar, Nous, Citoyens d’Europe? no page). Elsewhere Balibar argues more cautiously that a human being is a homo nationalis amongst other personae—animal sociale, homo oeconomicus—“but we cannot of our own accord escape this determination, which penetrates our categories of thought and action, in order to adopt an opposite point of view, an ‘internationalist’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ worldview for example (these very terms show just how inescapable the national reference is)” (We, People of Europe? 12). Coetzee’s JC of Diary of a Bad Year acknowledges this inescapability when he criticizes Hobbes’ myth of the voluntariness of citizens’ surrendering power to the state (and by extension to the nation-state). Once one is part of the state, one is always part of it; and the moment one becomes part of it is the moment of one’s birth (see DBY 4). Balibar’s ‘nation’ is as “inescapable” as Foucault’s discourses of race, class, or gender, and where there is a nation, there is nationalism involving an ideology of the homo nationalis. There is no point in attacking nationalism without attacking

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the idea of the nation whose essence, for Balibar, is to exclude those that do not match its definition of the properly human. This exclusion is realized not only through border patrols and limits to immigration but increasingly by a policing of the nation’s immigrant population that Balibar reads as a migration of borders from the periphery of states to their centres. Borders no longer separate one supposedly homogeneous population from another; they attempt to divide along the lines of other forms of belonging: the family, the hereditary line, the primary and more or less hereditary communities as well as the secondary communities which require learning or training, and the political community (see We, People of Europe? 1–10, 101–14, 120–32). Profiling of anthropological differences ensures that minorities are excluded within the borders. Being immigrant nations, most Western nations—including Australia that is the subject of Slow Man and Diary of a Bad Year—face a dilemma. On the one hand, they have attempted to naturalize minorities such as women, homosexuals, and foreigners so as to integrate them into the national identity, which by definition is homogeneous. On the other hand, there has been an ever stricter patrolling of the nation’s borders so as to fend off newly arriving foreigners, as well as the aforementioned policing of racially segregated areas. Balibar speaks of a ‘European apartheid’ (see We, People of Europe? 22–25, 28–30, 119–24). Coetzee’s JC also addresses the interior violence against underprivileged minorities and considers the value of a nation whose citizens do not share a sense of belonging together that transcends the family and nationality. Coetzee’s JC and Balibar share the view that for democracy to succeed, the interests of different communities need to be represented—particularly if these communities are underprivileged. This sense of community is not identical to a sense of nationality (see DBY 115–17, and Balibar, We, People of Europe? 64–65). These dynamics of exclusion could be described with a Foucauldian vocabulary. Balibar goes beyond Foucault, however, by granting the national a privileged place amongst discourses because it acts as a magnetic field organizing discourses of race or class (see We, People of Europe? 16–19). He also departs from Foucault by considering how the nation-­ form interacts with the individual personality and psychology of the subject, a feature that makes Balibar’s account particularly useful for a reading of Coetzee’s Australian novels, in which characters are offended by their nation’s border controls while yearning for a sense of home in a particular

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nationality. For example, JC’s attack on the Australian government for its treatment of refugees goes along with a wish to share Anya’s national identity, and Paul Rayment attempts to share Australia as home with the Jokić family despite his feeble connection with the adopted nationality. Balibar remarks that on the one hand any collective identity, or so-called national character, is the effect of an infinite number of diverging projections by individual group members on other members, and that on the other hand no single individual is autonomous enough to construct his or her identity without recourse to a collective imaginary. This means that nobody can have a single, unchanging identity or a choice of an infinite number of identities. Under these circumstances, the nation’s appeal to the individual is that it gives the individual both a general, social identity and a particular, personal identity. Balibar stresses that national identity is a secondary identity, whereas gender, race, or class are primary identities and refer to anthropological differences. However, certain primary identities are ‘national’ traits that make their carriers eligible for positions within the nation, while other primary identities fall outside the definition of the national. National institutions such as the national kinship system, the national churches or confessions, or the subdivisions of the national labour market provide secondary, particular identities that guarantee recognition (see We, People of Europe? 25–30). The immigrants Paul Rayment, Marijana Jokić, and Drago Jokić of Slow Man test such a definition of the human through nationality by assessing the limits the national poses to personal identity but also by testing the nation’s ability to furnish an individual with a reliable identity. They pose the question of what happens to personal, national, and human identity when nations become hybrid through the influx of immigrants, and whether there are not in fact cosmopolitan, transnational alternatives to a homo nationalis of which Balibar speaks. Katherine Hallemeier has stressed that theories of cosmopolitanism, Balibar’s included, are united in their attempt to envision a common humanity without eliding its constitutive multiplicity, and to imagine diversity without producing a hierarchy of difference in which some individuals are more or less human than others (see J. M. Coetzee 1–4, 18). While nationality can only deal with diversity by constructing hierarchies, this construction can be resisted. Balibar names conflicts between national and primary identities such as the debate over whether crucifixes should hang in German classrooms. Citizens who resist the removal of crucifixes prove that primary identities like class, language, gender, or religion can

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resist being transformed into secondary identities in the sense that before a child can consider identifying as Christian, they must first consider their German identity. Even if individuals intellectually recognize the primacy of nationality, they can unconsciously resist integration. Interestingly for any reading of Coetzee, Balibar locates the core of this resistance in the individual’s body as the last stronghold that cannot be alienated from itself: a non-discursive form of the human asserts itself against the hegemonic national discourse. In postcolonial and immigrant societies, where primary identities of immigrants or formerly colonized individuals do not match the primary identities defined as national identities, the education of the individual subject is therefore a more or less violent deconstruction of primary identities provoking resistance, a breaking down of minority forms of humanity as they become thematic in The Childhood of Jesus. David is subjected to a curriculum that does not agree with his ‘nature’. Generally, however, in The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus Coetzee takes a step back to consider nationality as only one level of collectivity at which humanity is shaped. The novels explore the minimal conditions that make human communities possible, as well as alternatives to the nation, the state, and their inflection of the citizens’ humanity. Childhood demonstrates that in any community the needs of the body, which seem inalienable to the individual, are subjected to and produced by a collectively constructed social reality. The novel challenges the collective fictions to be taken for facts by communities. The character Simón insists on the authority of the body, while the antinomian David rejects any human-made rule and insists on metaphysical truths that, as the last pages of the novel suggest, are about to be revealed (including the true identity of David). However, rather than envisioning a religious community with David as Jesus, Schooldays develops an alternative to it and to the nation. Combining Simón’s insistence on the authority of the body and David’s insistence on metaphysical truths, the novel presents a community of dancers embodying, in the form of knowing-how, immutable metaphysical truths: a utopian and prelapsarian vision in which modernity’s conception of the human as epistemic creature is undone.

Slow Man Slow Man’s sustained references to photography and the role of Paul Rayment’s collection of Fauchery photographs offer a good starting point for analysing the relationship in the novel between nationality and the

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human. The photographs of Rayment’s collection depict life in early Melbourne and on the goldfields and were taken by Antoine Fauchery (1827–1861), a French writer and photographer who sailed to Australia in 1852 and 1857 and worked in and near Melbourne for several years as a gold-prospector and photographer (see “Fauchery, Antoine”). Rayment’s insistence on ownership of the ‘true’ Fauchery constitutes one of several interrelated realms in which Rayment’s yearning to find a home is invested and negotiated. Donald Powers traces the function of the photographs to staging a conflict between Rayment seeking identity in clinging to an ‘authentic’ origin and past and the Jokić family’s cosmopolitan view of identity. Rather than representing an authentic origin, the Fauchery photographs demonstrate how the past, in the form of a static image, is open to different interpretations. This constructed nature of photographic ‘authenticity’ is already hinted at by the name Fauchery which resembles the French word faux and the English ‘forgery’. Since the historical Fauchery must be seen as a model for Rayment—both were photographers, both emigrated to Australia twice—the reader is also invited to note that the name Rayment is not only close to the French vraiment but also to the English ‘raiment’, which conceals rather than bares. It is not altogether surprising, then, that Rayment’s desire for an ‘authentic’ photograph soon runs into contradictions. While Rayment insists that Drago has stolen his Fauchery photographs and wants them back, he pretends to be only the temporary custodian of the Fauchery collection and contradicts his claim to ownership. Elizabeth Costello, who appears in Slow Man to interfere with Rayment’s life, debunks Rayment’s pretension that he just guards photos for the sake of national history: he also does it to establish a relationship with Drago and his family (see Powers, “Emigration and Photography” 466–67), and that is something entirely different from his desired affiliation with the Australian nation by donating the “Rayment Bequest” (SM 49) to the State Library of Adelaide. The photographs are thus Rayment’s attempt at creating a mutual past of immigration for the Jokićs and himself, an unacknowledged nesting on Rayment’s part in a family held together by primary identities: the community of the family itself, heredity, ethnicity, and so on. It is a strategic attempt to affiliate himself with the nation that proves too weak to Australianize him—to break down primary identities in order to define a particular and homogeneous humanity and to offer him a home. The history of that nation seems to be captured in the Faucherys, and Marijana approves of Rayment’s collection because it demonstrates that Australia is

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not a place “without history, just bush and then mob of immigrants. Like me. Like us” (SM 48). However, Rayment does not know whether Marijana’s “us” includes him and soon doubts that the Fauchery collection will accommodate him in the tradition the photographs depict: “Look, that is where we come from: […] Our story, our past. But is that the truth? Would the woman in the picture accept him as one of her tribe? […] Is the history he wants to claim as his not finally just an affair for the English and the Irish, foreigners keep out?” (SM 52). The photographs of Australian history—and, by metonymic extension, of the nation—seem too tenuous and open to interpretation to secure him membership in the Jokić clan. Nationality is at all stages only a means for Rayment of finding a home in the Jokić family. The promise of a primary identification with a family supersedes the secondary identity offered by the nation. If Rayment shares a particular identity with the Jokićs, he eventually has to look for it in their common non-Anglo-Irish European past and their migratory experience rather than in their being Australian. The novel’s longest and most explicit passage on emigration and home demonstrates what is at stake in the debate over the Fauchery photographs, and how Costello forces Rayment to acknowledge his search for a home. When Rayment tells Costello that Drago has become interested in his collection, Rayment speculates that the adolescent Drago must be feeling his way into what it is like to have an Australian past. Rayment insists that he can sympathize with Drago because he is not unfamiliar with the immigrant experience (see SM 192). When Costello asks Rayment whether Australia is his home, he argues that the concept of home is a very English concept […] Hearth and home, say the English. To them, home is the place where the fire burns in the hearth, where you come to warm yourself. The one place where you will not be left out in the cold. No, I am not warm here. […] Among the French, as you know, there is no home. Among the French to be at home is to be among ourselves, among our kind. I am not at home in France. Transparently not. I am not the we of anyone. (SM 192–93)

When Rayment later says that he is not home but only has a residence, he tries to explain why, for a migrant like him, Australia cannot serve as a home: “I can pass among Australians. I cannot pass among the French. That, as far as I am concerned, is all there is to it, to the national-identity business: where one passes and where one does not, where on the contrary

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one stands out” (SM 197). The remark is one of the instances where the novel ironizes Rayment, and where the reader detects Rayment’s self-­ deception. As Rayment’s choice of the disparaging phrase “the national-­ identity business” suggests, he is trying to distance himself from such an idea because as a multiple émigré he is unusually lacking in national identity and a sense of home connected with it. Rayment affirms how little he is representative of more recent immigrants like the Jokićs, who have come to their country of destination in the age of accelerated globalization. Rayment has come earlier and, as Powers observes, “hardly recommends himself as an emblematic migrant figure, for compared to the adaptable Marijana he is someone who resists change (hence the title ‘Slow Man’) and longs for the stability and security of affiliation” (Powers, “Emigration and Photography” 468). These longings, I would add, are present in Marijana and her family too, but the Jokićs seem able to satisfy them more flexibly than Rayment who can find a home only in an ‘authentic’, primary identity such as the one offered by the family when he wants to become Drago’s godfather (see SM 223–24). Rayment’s fixation on authenticity has biographical roots. He was born in France and, as his birthplace Lourdes suggests, was raised a Catholic. Brought to Australia when he was six years old, he later dropped out of university and returned to France. There he tried to establish a rapport with his mother’s French family but failed because he “had missed too much of what should have been my formation: not just a proper French schooling but a French youth, including youthful friendships”. People called him “l’Anglais”, and so he was the odd one out on both continents. After an affair with a Moroccan girl he returned to Australia (see SM 43, 155–56, 195–97, quotes from 196). It is ironic—and understandable— that Rayment is the novel’s staunchest defender of authenticity and origins, given that a history of indecisive shuttling between worlds prevented him from developing stable primary identities. He who has never enjoyed the comfort of feeling at home has the hardest time letting go of the desire for it. When Rayment returned to France, he invested his identity in an authenticity and origins that were to cement the factors guaranteeing his primary identity, and the novel leaves little doubt that he was never quite able to undo this investment upon returning to Australia. His obsessive insistence on the values that supposedly led him to go to his native country seems to prevent him from building emotional ties with Australia. If there are failed nations—like Yugoslavia—Rayment is a failed homo nationalis, and for Rayment the missing leg emblematizes this incompleteness.

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Mother Tongue Versus Primary Language Besides Rayment’s body, his speech—an identity marker equally essential to most definitions of the human—illustrates this dilemma most impressively. Before Costello and Rayment address the topic, the reader observes that “le jambon” (SM 29, literally ‘the ham’) as a label for his stump is the first French term to appear in the novel. Rayment, who focalizes the narrative (even though Costello later reveals herself to be his ‘author’), explains that this term keeps the stump “at a nice, contemptuous distance” (SM 29). It appears Rayment uses French to alienate the objects and events described by it in order to cope, suggesting that that English, not French, constitutes Rayment’s primary identity. The suggestion is deceptive, however, because the use of “le jambon” is one of the very few instances where Rayment’s conscious intention to belittle and to distance is plain. Another instance is his use of the phrase “the national-identity business” mentioned above. The subsequent uses of French are more spontaneous and revealing of his “in-between” identity. Rayment muses that Marijana complains about Drago’s “joie de vivre” (SM 41), and here Rayment’s term for Marijana’s complaints does not have a distancing effect. On the contrary, Rayment seems to use it because it is closer to the phenomenon it describes than any English term of similar length; it is arguably an untranslatable term that the English ‘joy of living’ could only clumsily approximate. Drawing on Barbara Cassin’s Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles, Emily Apter has made the case that each language comprises specific terms—for example, “cyclopaedia”, “peace”, “fado”, “saudade”, “sex”, “gender”, “monde”—that do not translate into other languages without an essential loss of meaning, and that other cultures appropriate these terms by mistranslation (see Against World Literature 31–44, 117–90). Whereas David Damrosch, in What is World Literature?, sees translatability and transnational circulation as the metric for texts that qualify as world literature, Apter’s insistence on untranslatability involves a thrust against the hegemony of English because no language can absorb another through translation. Rayment’s case illustrates the idea that linguistic identities cannot be translated either. When Rayment next ponders the phrase “Who is going to take care of you” (SM 43), this leads him to the observation that occupe in the French “je m’en occupe” (SM 44) could have quite a different meaning from the English “care”, namely, that his father used the same term when he shot a whimpering dog. Invoking the French translation, and recognizing that the

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meaning of the French word is quite different, undermines both the general sense that there is an essential identity of word and meaning, and Rayment’s personal sense of language as a primary identity. Australian nationality demands a loosening of Rayment’s tie with French qua primary identity, but this tie has already become tenuous. At the same time, to Rayment, English is just a language like French—and next to French— and never acquires the status of a primary identity offering a home in Australia. Coetzee’s use of French terms is quite unusual compared to other writers, who commonly employ terms from a speaker’s native language when the speaker is emotionally excited, demonstrating a return to the ‘real’ language that serves as their primary identity. In Rayment’s case, the French terms reveal that he is between languages, not in a hybrid or cosmopolitan way but in the manner of someone lost. Rayment explains to Costello: As for language, English has never been mine in the way it is yours. Nothing to do with fluency. […] But English came to me too late. It did not come with my mother’s milk. In fact it did not come at all. Privately I have always felt myself to be a kind of ventriloquist’s dummy. It is not I who speak the language, it is the language that is spoken through me. It does not come from my core, mon coeur. (SM 197–98)

Costello confirms this when she observes that although he speaks English faultlessly, he speaks it like a foreigner who picks words from a word box. Rayment could not agree more and claims that he speaks like a foreigner because he is one (see SM 230–31). His remarks closely resemble JC’s comment in Diary of a Bad Year that “as I listen to the words of English that emerge from my mouth, I have a disquieting sense that the one I hear is not the one I call myself. Rather, it is as though some other person (but who?) were being imitated, followed, even mimicked” (DBY 195). Like Rayment, JC relates this to the feeling that he has “no mother tongue” (DBY 195), but unlike Rayment, he does not dwell on his own being lost between languages and cultures but formulates a hypothesis about human nature when he ruminates that perhaps “all languages are, finally, foreign languages, alien to our animal being. But in a way that is, precisely, inarticulate, inarticulable, English does not feel to me like a resting place, a home” (DBY 197). Why “but”? Because the hope that language could provide a home does not leave JC, and it certainly does not leave Rayment.

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The question raised by JC is about the role of language in constituting the human, whether we are to conceive of it as something added to our animal body or whether the mother tongue—in contrast to our primary, let alone secondary language—is not part of our physical being in the way our actual tongue is part of our body. These thoughts suggest that only in the second case does language offer a home. The question of the relation between language and identity is addressed at greater length in Here and Now (2013), Coetzee’s exchange of letters with Paul Auster, where Coetzee describes Australia as a monolingual, English-speaking nation despite massive immigration from Southern Europe and Asia. He writes that this monolingualism leads to an unquestioned way of thinking, feeling, and relating to others and prompts his own distancing from and scepticism towards English (see HN 73). In particular, it strikes him that although a person can be more or less monolingual, it is possible that the language that person speaks—even perfectly—is not his or her mother tongue. In Coetzee’s childhood, English was just one of many school subjects. John Kannemeyer explains that Afrikaans was Coetzee’s mother tongue, and that there was, in fact, a time when Coetzee could have become an Afrikaans writer (see J. M. Coetzee 40–76). When Coetzee emigrated to England in his early twenties, he did not get rid of the feeling that although he mastered the rules of English more perfectly than most natives, he gave himself away as a non-native as soon as he opened his mouth: I told myself that I knew English in the same way that Erasmus knew Latin, out of books; whereas the people all around me knew the language “in their bones”. It was their mother tongue as it was not mine; they had imbibed it with their mother’s milk, I had not. (HN 67)

In other words, the mother tongue is part of a body that belongs to nature, whereas Coetzee’s English belongs to culture—and not to a particular culture but to the canon of so-called world literature in English. Both kinds of language constitute the human but constitute it to different degrees: whereas the embodied language of the mother tongue constitutes a primary identity of the speaker, a primary language that is not a mother tongue offers only a secondary identity because it is disembodied. As Coetzee himself argues, his ‘bookishness’—his linguistic self-­ constitution through a language not his ‘own’—accounts for the lack of local colouring in his English. When he tells Auster that the French

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e­ditions of his works say “Traduit de l’anglais (Sud-Africaine)”, he remarks that “[t]o me it reads like anglais purged of markers of national origin, and a little bloodless for that reason” (HN 72). However, more than bloodlessness is at stake; the very concept of identity becomes unstable: “[H]ow much worse if you are good enough at English to hear in every phrase that falls from your pen the echoes of earlier usages, reminders of who owned the phrase before you!” (HN 67). Paul Rayment, who is created by Elizabeth Costello, illustrates precisely this bookishness. He is made out of books and literature and does not possess words that uniquely define him because these words would have to be embodied in a mother tongue. When Rayment says that he has always felt himself to be a ventriloquist’s dummy, it is clear that his relation to English mirrors his relation to Elizabeth Costello. Much has been written about the metafictional aspect of the novel as staged in the relationship between Rayment and his author Costello, but attention should be paid as well to the function of Slow Man’s metafiction in the context of national and human identity.2 To begin with, it is surprising that Rayment’s lack of a language as a primary identity does not free him from the epistemological limits of language. The common assumption would be that someone whose use of his native language was never rivalled by another language will be at the mercy of the former’s epistemological framework, for the simple reason that he has no point of comparison. In contrast, someone who only has a primary language but no mother tongue should be able to distance himself from that language, as Coetzee himself suggests in a letter to Auster: I agree that one’s weltanschauung is formed by the language that one speaks and writes most easily and, to a degree, thinks in. But it is not formed so deeply that one can never stand far enough outside that language to inspect it critically—particularly if one speaks or even just understands another language. That is why I say that it is possible to have a first language yet nonetheless not feel at home in it: it is, so to speak, one’s primary tongue but not one’s mother tongue. (HN 72)

Slow Man advances and tests the contrary hypothesis: that you have to be at home in a language in order to transcend it, and that a language in which you are not at home will speak you—as the English writer Costello, and in a sense J.M. Coetzee, ‘speak’ Paul Rayment—and not vice versa. This points to one of the few convictions about which the novel leaves no

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doubt: that it is necessary to have a home in order to feel sure of one’s humanity. As Deleuze and Guattari suggest, along with recent theorists drawing on their work, the perpetual in-between-ness of constantly travelling transnational subjects in a world without identity is utopian not in the sense that it does not exist yet but that it cannot exist at all. Even the cosmopolitanism of the Jokićs is marked by adaptability, not by a lack of identity. This does not mean that nationality is essentialized in the novel. It is no coincidence that one of the most detailed memories Rayment has of his childhood in France is of “a book called Légendes dorées” (SM 129), suggesting that his early image of France is as much fiction—or an imagined community, to use Benedict Anderson’s term—as it is truth. However, Slow Man shows that even as a collective fiction, the nation fulfils the function of defining a humanity that provides a common home for its subjects. This is what makes the nation attractive for the subject in the first place, as Balibar argues. It is France, rather than Australia, that shows the nation’s power over Rayment, even if he tries to brush aside the “national-identity business”. The homo nationalis of his imagination bears a French inflection because he expects himself to conform to the French model of a man and of a human being in general. That the idea of cultural variants of the human— of homo nationalis—is deeply embedded in Rayment’s consciousness is shown when he takes seriously remarks that others would shrug off as petty bickering, for example when he remembers what his ex-wife said about him: Cold was not a word his wife used. What she said was quite different: I thought you were French, she said, I thought you would have some idea. Some idea of what? For years after she left him he puzzled over her words. What were the French, even if only the French of legend, supposed to have an idea of? Of what will make a woman happy? What will make a woman happy is a riddle as old as the Sphinx. Why should a Frenchman have the power to unknot it, much less such a notional Frenchman as he? (SM 161)

Marijana, by contrast, would not even refute the idea of a homo nationalis because the concept would seem alien to her—which of course does not mean that her humanity is not defined by the nation. She is not free from internalized nationalism in Balibar’s sense either when she tells Rayment about Blanka’s theft of a chain from a shop. The Jewish shop owner, she says, claims the chain was of silver and demands an extortionate sum in

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compensation. When Rayment asks how Marijana knows the shop owner is a Jew, Marijana answers: “OK, he is Jew, he is not Jew, is not important”, and Rayment returns: “Perhaps I am a Jew. Are you sure I am not a Jew?” (SM 168). Rayment is uncomfortable with Marijana’s latent anti-­ Semitism, a sentiment that is most likely imported from Europe where it has a long tradition. European anti-Semitism, it must be kept in mind, was used to sharpen national self-definition through denial of the humanity of ‘non-Germans’, ‘non-Croatians’, particularly of the globally dispersed Jewish population that was not united in a nation. Emigration, Amputation, and Diminished Man Rayment is childless, divorced, retired, and living alone; he was barely connected to any social collective before his accident. The loss of his leg aggravates his isolation, as it limits his movements and provides Rayment a posteriori with a reason for his solitary existence, leading to even deeper isolation. The loss of his leg also reinforces his alienation from Australia. When Dr Hansen decides without Rayment’s consent that his leg must be amputated and a prosthesis fitted to the stump, Rayment realizes that the nation he sought to belong to will mutilate his physical wholeness for an idea of health that is not his own. Seemingly banal Dr Hansen turns out to represent the nation’s authority regarding the line between health and illness (see Balibar, We, People of Europe? 240 n. 21). First, Hansen severs the body which Rayment wants to keep whole by all means (see SM 15); then, rather than letting Rayment be his crippled self, Hansen seeks to manipulate his bodily identity further by forcing an artificial leg onto his stump. Of course, the same infringement on Rayment’s ‘authentic self’ would have occurred in other nations with similar ideas of health and wholeness, including France. But the accident happens in Australia, and those who operate on Rayment are Australian. The severed leg thus not only emblematizes to Rayment his alienation from Australia but also contributes to it. Dr Hansen is professional, emotionally detached, and lacking in charisma, a personification of bureaucracy, associated with papers rather than the surgeon’s knife. Like the knife, however, these papers make Rayment’s identity fit ideas that are not his own: “First the violation, then consent to the violation. There are papers to sign before he will be left alone, and the papers prove surprisingly difficult” (SM 8). The papers are difficult because they force Rayment to reveal his family situation and— even more importantly—to describe that situation in words that fit one of

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the boxes the nation-state offers for his answer: divorced, no children (see SM 8–9). Australia defines Rayment precisely when he least welcomes it. The hospital is related to that other national institution ensuring the homogeneity of the population—healthy, well-educated humans—that Slow Man repeatedly refers to: the school. Wellington College—the school Drago wants to attend—is not a state school, but as a feeder school for the Defence Force Academy (see SM 90) would strongly affiliate Drago with the Australian nation. Rayment stresses the importance of the school when he blames his own schooling for failing to prepare him completely for living with the French or with the Australians. When he returned to France, he lacked the experience of a French school and the youthful friendships that blossom in it, which rendered him not French enough to connect with his French relatives of the same age and to feel at home (see SM 196). Early schooling in Australia could have made him at home in that country too, but as with language, his mixed schooling has made Rayment the odd one out. The only Australian institution he associates with positive feelings seems to be the State Library of Adelaide, invested with Rayment’s hopes for self-inscription through the bequest of his Fauchery photographs. This may even be possible, but it may not be enough. What sense of home can Rayment’s philanthropy towards Australia entail, compared with the love he feels for Marijana’s family? The question anticipates a central dichotomy in The Childhood of Jesus, where the homogenizing school appears in a more sinister light than in Slow Man. This is the dichotomy between goodwill, which might be enough to keep a nation running, and love, which satisfies the desires of citizens—in Rayment’s case also a desire for a home. Even the National Library, it appears, can only spark Rayment’s goodwill but not the love that could make him feel at home. When the novel eventually suggests that Rayment and Costello could become a couple, it is no coincidence that their (im)possible union is described in terms that echo the novel’s concern with nationality and national institutions. Costello is imagining something she at least faintly knows is oxymoronic when she tells Rayment: “We could tour the whole land, the two of us […]. We would become a well-loved Australian institution. What an idea! What a capital idea! Is this love, Paul? Have we found love at last?” (SM 263). A “national institution” and “love”—these two do not go together, and neither do Paul Rayment and Elizabeth Costello. Trusting national institutions less than ever after his accident, Rayment feels that both his authentic self and his bond with Australia are damaged

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beyond repair. David Attwell has argued that Rayment’s unwillingness to actively embrace a diasporic identity has to do with his feeling of post-­ historicity. Although the accident prompts him to say that “a new life commence[s]” (SM 26), it is really only an afterlife of sorts: his formative experiences lie elsewhere and he enters a realm of private accommodations (see Attwell, “Coetzee’s Postcolonial Diaspora” 11). Since the novel associates the truncation of Rayment’s leg—a potentially lethal loss—with emigration and existential homelessness, Attwell’s comment suggests that emigration is somehow associated with the idea of an afterlife. The key to understanding the nature of this association is memory. The question of whether, after death, the soul retains a memory of the life it has passed on from is raised in Diary of a Bad Year, where the world of Childhood and Schooldays can be glimpsed in one of JC’s remarks: “[t]he persistence of the soul in an unrecognizable form, unknown to itself, without memory, without identity, is another question entirely” (DBY 154). Slow Man and the Jesus novels thus give us two versions of an afterlife— one with memory of the past life and one without. In the Jesus novels, nationality is strangely wiped from memory, and the journey to this afterlife seems less of an emigration than an erasure. It is more like being born again and thus truly deserving of the name ‘new life’. On the other hand, the pain radiating from Rayment’s missing leg is equivalent to the memory of the soul that has emigrated to an afterlife but is plagued by memories of the first life. This is why Rayment says: “There is no such thing as a new life. We have only one life, one each” (SM 246). Unlike David and Simón of Childhood, Rayment is not commencing a new life and cannot escape historicity because he remains attached to it through the umbilical cord of memory. Rayment’s life in Australia is a second, reduced stage of his life or a metaphorical afterlife. If it provides a reading of what emigration means, it is a dark reading, equating emigration with a crippling of the self that does not only involve the self’s body but also, as Rayment remarks, its soul. Some part of him, he realizes, will always stay French and will thus prevent him from ever becoming a homo australicus. Rayment’s insistence on an ‘authentic’, complete body is motivated by the memory of his former body that made him a ‘man in full’, while his yearning for an ‘authentic’ home is motivated by the memory of his birth in France. Balibar argues that the body is often the site of resistance against the nation-form’s attempts to break down and reconstruct primary identities (see We, People of Europe? 28–30). To be sure, the crippling of Rayment’s

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body and his humiliation are existential blows that damage far more than his ties to the nation. Rayment is one of Coetzee’s wooden men who will rather break than undergo a transformation into another being.3 Because of his insistence on the body as a primary identity, Rayment is not flexible enough to accept the prosthesis he is offered (see SM 10). But Rayment’s unwillingness to have his body reconstructed also bespeaks a resistance to national pedagogy. After all, he believes that his self has been crippled by the truncation of his leg, performed at the hands of his adopted nation’s servant, Dr Hansen (see SM 17). Shortly after the accident, Rayment still insists that only his body has been damaged, but that his humanity is somehow still intact: The man he used to be is just a memory, and a memory fading fast. He still has a sense of being a soul with an undiminished soul-life; as for the rest of him, it is just a sack of blood and bones that he is forced to carry around. […] [H]e is trying to remain a man, albeit a diminished man. […] A man not wholly a man, then: a half-man, an after-man, like an after-image; the ghost of a man looking back in regret on time not well used. (SM 32–34)

As JC states in Diary of a Bad Year (see DBY 181), all old people become Cartesians because they try to assert the integrity of their spirit vis-à-vis the decay of their bodies. Rayment’s accident, Costello observes correctly, is only an anticipation of what happens to all people growing old. His initial reaction to the accident is likewise the reaction of all people who are growing old: he attempts to salvage his spirit from the wreck of his body, which in his case allows him to hope for redemption for “time not well used”. The words refer to the obligation that Rayment feels in being a ‘man’: the obligation to procreate, which he has frivolously ignored. His awakening desire for Marijana, involving his desire to become part of her family or at least Drago’s godfather, promises this redemption, a redemption purely of the soul. The stump he carries around is, tellingly, an “unwanted child” (SM 58), that is, not the right one, but he nevertheless prefers crutches to a prosthesis because “[c]rutches are honest” (SM 58) in the sense that they do not pretend that his primary identity is intact. It is precisely this insistence on authenticity, however, that Marijana criticizes as more artificial than a prosthesis would be. Isn’t it more natural to walk like a normal, prototypical, unimpaired human—even if with the help of a prosthesis—than to walk the way an impaired person would ‘naturally’ walk? (see SM 59). The status of the prosthesis is ambivalent because

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it is a supplement in Derrida’s sense: the prosthesis belongs to the body because the body needs it in order to be complete and perform all its functions, and yet it does not belong to the body and is disowned by Rayment in his effort to be authentic. Brushing these difficulties aside, Marijana’s answer is pragmatic and clear: “Of course we want to hold on to our old memory systems. […] Otherwise we would not be human. But we must not hold on to them when they hinder our progress” (SM 60). It is not our sense of our humanity that matters, Marijana implies, but that we manage to get on, both in terms of physical movement and of adaptation to our new environment. Marijana reverses Rayment’s hierarchy of authenticity and adaptability when she pits her cosmopolitanism against Rayment’s belief in origins and primary identities. Marijana’s comments suggest a core tenet of a particular version of posthumanism: that the human is “fundamentally a prosthetic creature that has coevolved with various forms of technicity and materiality, forms that are radically ‘non-human’ and have yet made the human what it is” (Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? xxv). The human is a hybrid not only because human and animal are amalgamated in itself but also because it completes itself with things; and as the nature of these complements varies with infinite particularity, no universal claims can be made about the human.4 In this view, Rayment’s crutches and the prosthesis fulfil the same complementary function, though the prosthesis fulfils it more perfectly, less visibly; each option renders him a different but nonetheless authentic human being. Rayment’s and Marijana’s approaches to authenticity show how life experiences, rather than reason, shape beliefs and make persons more or less susceptible to views such as the prosthetic nature of the human. This point is even more explicitly made in Elizabeth Costello where Costello’s lectures are embedded in stories that shed light on what kinds of experiences might have led her to hold some of her opinions. Diary of a Bad Year follows a similar agenda by juxtaposing opinion and experience vertically on each page. If Rayment had found Marijana responsive to his love, he would possibly have been convinced by her belief in the transformability of identity. Marijana would literally have transformed him and performed the validity of her argument, but Rayment’s failure to win Marijana strengthens his belief that his authentic ‘man-hood’ is lost. As he believes less and less in the Cartesian demarcation between his damaged body and his mind, the loss of his leg is no longer just a material loss but a “hole in his existence” (SM 183). Rayment knows Augustine’s argument that bodily parts are

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unruly because of man’s fallen nature, but he disagrees. The body is him, and his most sublime love is also bodily love: “It all feels one to him, one movement: the swelling of the soul, the swelling of the heart, the swelling of desire. He cannot imagine loving God more than he loves Marijana at this moment” (SM 186). The impossibility of separating mind from body seems to affect Rayment’s ability to adapt to a new environment and adopt a new identity, and therefore to widen the gap between him and Marijana. Just as weighty as the fact that his primary bodily identity has been violated is Rayment’s discovery that his mind cannot emancipate itself from the body, regardless of whether or not that body is crippled. Refusing the prosthesis, Rayment is ready to suffer for the sake of his primary identity. Marijana’s cosmopolitanism, on the other hand, refutes the authority of the body when she proposes to get rid of “our old memory systems”. In her view, the body is permanently under construction by training and—if needed—by the addition of a prosthesis. If she can more easily identify with her new nation than Rayment despite his more extended residence in Australia, it is also because less stands in the way of her adapting to the new environment. Her example shows that cosmopolitanism, understood as an attitude and an ability rather than as a norm (see Vertovec and Cohen, Conceiving Cosmopolitanism 9–14), is not a lack of rootedness in nationality but the ease of adopting a new nationality. In her case, this ease involves an attitude towards the body that differs from Rayment’s. When Marijana says that we would not be human if we did not want to hold on to our old memory systems, and yet that we should get rid of them when they hinder our progress, she suggests that adaptation does not contradict authentic humanity even if it involves changing the body as the carrier of a seemingly ‘authentic’ humanity. Slow Man’s ambivalence regarding these different approaches to adopting a new national identity—and therefore of a new humanity in Balibar’s sense—shows in the body’s ill-fitting the new norms. Slow Man abounds with descriptions of the characters’ bodies—not only Rayment’s, but the bodies of stout Marijana, her tall and lanky husband, Drago and others. But only Rayment’s body is violated and serves to test whether the nation—including its approaches to health, mobility, and ultimately humanity—can construct his body without alienating him. Rayment’s bodily integrity is the most convincing justification of his clinging to notions of authenticity: its uniqueness and its being Rayment are immediately clear to the reader and illustrate that bodies cannot be constructed as freely as nationalities can. Rayment’s suffering demonstrates that there is

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no way to be something other than one’s body, and that being a Cartesian— in the sense of retreating to the realm of the mental—is an untenable position. There is, in other words, something heroic, if also rather Quixotic, in Rayment’s insistence on authenticity. His attitude suggests that the tendency to regard one’s body as a commodity that can be optimized through exercise and surgery is misguided. Marijana, to be sure, would not go so far, but her opinions on the training and supplementation of the body are congruent with the constructivist approach to the body resented by Rayment and, it seems, by Coetzee himself. Slow Man suggests that cosmopolitan adaptability as evinced by the Jokićs may only be possible because decolonization and globalization have not reinstated local culture in former colonies such as Australia but left them open to capitalism and particularly American mass culture. If the world has become more homogeneous, adaptation has become easier, but adaptation to what exactly? One of the trends in American capitalist society has been that the individual self-markets itself as a product for the labour market, the marriage market, and so on and therefore has to understand itself as malleable. This is especially the case for immigrants like the Jokićs, who held jobs with higher prestige and pay in Croatia—Miroslav was an engineer, Marijana a restoration curator—and who had to reinvent themselves in Australia as members of the upwardly mobile working classes: he as a mechanic, she as a nurse. Rayment thinks that Marijana does “not wholly cast off the old world in favour of the new” (SM 40) because she wears a headscarf “like any good Balkan housewife” (SM 40), but these seem to be clichéd projections on Rayment’s part. If Marijana wears the headscarf, the novel gives no reason to suspect that she does it to make a point about her Croatian origins. Cosmopolitan Adaptability and the Ghost of Yugoslavia Although the novel hints at a possibly negative background of adaptability, it seems unusually partial in deconstructing Rayment’s position and demonstrates that the Jokićs’ approach to the question of home and identity is more attuned to the globalized age. Things whose authenticity and preservation would be valuable to Rayment are hidden pragmatically by Marijana. Although she is Catholic, she takes care to keep her religion to herself in secular Australia; although she is an educated woman, she shows no pretensions of class, even less so than her husband, who does not want Drago to go to the fancy Wellington college because it seems snobbish

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(see SM 43, 86, 147). Drago in particular is the novel’s exponent of adaptability. The boy was born in Croatia and knows no other world than a globalized one, his age predetermining his crucial role in the Jokić family’s immigration to Australia. Slow Man makes the point that finding a new home is a skill that decreases the older one gets. As Peter Burke observes, there are typically social groups and age cohorts within a migrant population that advance the founding of homes while others stay more passive, and it is well known that young migrants commonly live a double life, one traditional and following the customs of their parents’ culture, and one adapted to the new home (see Cultural Hybridity 62–70). Drago has just enough experience of life in Croatia to understand it, and he has absorbed Croatian values and habits from his parents. He speaks fluent Croatian, is familiar with the native country of his parents from holidays (see SM 179, 183), and is able to switch between cultures for a telephone call; and yet he identifies with Australia, as demonstrated by his wish to join the national defence forces. Ironically, the flexibility that comes with Drago’s youth also leads him to question the relevance of age—along with the relevance of one’s geographical origin—when it comes to the ability to adopt new ways of life and possibly new identities. He tells Rayment of the grandparents he visited in Zadar last Christmas. His grandparents are “pretty old” and “overtaken by time” like Rayment, but they quickly adapted to using the computer Marijana bought for them, so they can now shop online, exchange emails, and receive pictures from Australia. “So you can choose” (all SM 179), Drago sums up, implying that adaptability is a matter of will rather than age. His grandparents may have lived their lives in a part of the world other people thought backward or even benighted, but this does not prevent them from quickly adapting to advanced technologies. Generally, Drago’s function in Slow Man is to make the point that categories like age, nationality, and even history have fluid borders and are not as limiting as Rayment thinks they are, and ultimately that the same goes for the concept of home. If there is a counterweight to optimistic Drago—a character so perfect he barely seems real (Costello likens him to an angel who has kept traces of his ‘home’, i.e., heaven [see SM 182])—then it exists only in the form of hints. The novel acknowledges the desire for essentials and authenticity as human and hints at the possibility that this desire may break through the homogeneous surface prepared by the nation-state, especially a nation-­ state that homogenizes a broad array of ethnicities. Even if Drago’s

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e­ xample suggests that a nation can inscribe hybridity into its statutes, this hybridity may be fragile. Little thought has been given to the question of why Croatia is Coetzee’s choice for Marijana’s native country. The fact that many Southern Europeans have recently migrated to Australia may have played a role, but more relevant is that Croatia is a former, severed part of Yugoslavia, the multi-ethnic nation that proved too weak to prevent ideologies of ‘authentic’ ethnicity (e.g., Serb or Croat) and ‘authentic’ religion (Christian or Muslim) from fuelling hostile conflict. The lesser evil of a national concept of the properly human gave way to civil war in which each group insisted on its exclusive humanity. Behind the cosmopolitan adaptability of the Jokićs thus loom at least nominally the failed nation of Yugoslavia and the Balkan wars, mentioned in passing just once (see SM 64) and indicating the danger that can lie in primary identities resisting the homogenizing forces of the nation. Peter Burke claims it is no coincidence that the present age of cultural globalization is also the age of reactive nationalisms or ethnicities (see Cultural Hybridity 7). While Coetzee is careful not to overstate any causality between Marijana and Miroslav Jokić’s emigration to Australia and the war in Croatia, the war may well have played a crucial role. “What were they fleeing when they fled the old country?” Rayment wonders about Marijana and her husband (SM 40). The reader is told that Marijana Jokić left Croatia for Australia twelve years before (see SM 27), and if the novel’s publication in 2005 may serve as a measure, the Jokićs emigrated around 1993, in the middle of the wars in Croatia (1991–1995) and Bosnia (1992–1995). Is it a coincidence that of all possible names Miroslav Jokić’s sister Lidija bears the surname Karadžić (see SM 135, 167)? The reader cannot but take this as an allusion to Radovan Karadžić, who was responsible for the “ethnic cleansing” of Serb-held areas of Bosnia, during which tens of thousands of Bosniacs (Muslims) and Croats were killed. The most heinous act attributed to Karadžić is ordering the murder of more than 7000 Bosnians in the town of Srebrenica in July 1995 (see Donia, Radovan Karadžić 248–73). Yet despite the brutality associated with the name Karadžić, the allusion here is an oblique one because Radovan Karadžić is a Bosnian Serb and the Jokićs are Croatian. The solution to the riddle could be that the very incongruence of ethnicities in one person’s name—Lidija Karadžić—may be the point. The question as to whether there is a Serbo-Croatian language or only Serbian and Croatian may also play a role. Lidija, who uses a Croatian

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proverb (see SM 135) and is herself most likely a Croat, has probably married a Serb. The ethnicities are intimate with each other on the most personal level, and yet they have been bitterly divided. “Lidija and Marijana do not get on, have never got on” (SM 135), Costello knows, strengthening the subtext of ethnic hostility despite being related through family. The nation, as Balibar shows, runs into contradictions in times of globalization and immigration. Slow Man’s oblique references to the Yugoslav wars suggest that the nation’s decline—and the consequent loss of social and personal identity insofar as the nation offers role models and particular careers—can also involve a loss of home that is apt to revitalize the primary identities of ethnicity and religion that set citizens apart, both from each other and the idea of a common humanity. The scenario remains in the background, but it preserves the rhythm of doubt that characterizes all of Coetzee’s writing about the human.

The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus Staging the friction between the need to adapt to a new world and the desire to transgress its laws, Franz Kafka’s Amerika (1927) is one of the most prominent intertexts of Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus.5 In Kafka’s novel, Karl Roßmann arrives in the New World and confronts a strange culture with unknown rituals and rules. In New York he looks for shelter and a father figure and meets several possible candidates: a worker handling the steam engine of a European ship; a supposed uncle who, to Karl, does not seem to be his uncle at all and who, when Karl finally lets himself be adopted, turns out to be hostile; the patronizing Mr Pollunder, father of a tyrannical daughter who forces Karl into physical contact; the villainous tramp Delamarche; and so on. In Amerika, the relationship between father and son, commonly understood to rely on biological ties, seems to be a matter of choice. Karl finds employment as a liftboy at the Hotel Occidental, an occupation that is the paradigm of transitional existence (see Alt, Franz Kafka 360). Karl finally travels to the so-called nature-­ theatre of Oklahoma, where people without money or property, and even suspicious-looking individuals, are admitted as actors without fail. For Karl, entering this dreamlike world is like immigration within immigration, albeit of a more metaphysical kind, for the theatre with its angels and devils resembles nothing so much as an afterlife. Gradually, however, the theatre seems more and more like a copy of Karl’s ‘first life’ in America, raising the question of whether there is, in fact, only one world and one

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life. This might also explain why the European identity of most people Karl meets in the New World is repeatedly stressed (see Engel, “Der Verschollene” 185). Gerhard Neumann has shown that Amerika is a novel about ‘first contact’ situations in a twofold sense. The hero encounters a new and confusing culture whose rituals are unknown and fraught with deep ambivalence because they elicit from him the opposed reactions either of adaptation and improvisation or of ritualization and theatricalization. On the one hand, the novel is obsessed with scenes where passports and papers have to be presented, reports are written and questionnaires completed. The bureaucratic rituals are performed by policemen, porters, chief waiters, and secretaries and most include cross-examinations. On the other hand, there are scenes that reverse such ritualized normalization of behaviour. The outcome of these scenes of improvisation is unclear because actions come spontaneously and creative theatre subverts society’s rituals. Neumann shows that Kafka forces both into one in the final episode of the nature-theatre of Oklahoma. When Karl is admitted to the theatre, he seeks to escape from the fixed norms of a ritualized society and is eager to obtain the supposed freedom of an artist, but he is forced back into bureaucratic rituals of registration and classification: several lawyers determine his status and occupation. Two processes block each other, thus exhibiting the risk involved in first contact situations: curiosity and discovery of new ways of perception, on the one hand, and submission to ritual and acceptance of ready-made definitions, on the other (see Neumann, “Ritual und Theater” 165–73, 178). If Slow Man can be read as a test of how the nation (de)limits and forms the human, Childhood and Schooldays take a step back from the details of the specifically Australian setting and ask, in more general terms, how the individual’s humanity is collectively constructed and to what extent it is moulded not only by the nation, but also by the state as political organization of collectivity as such. In Novilla, where Childhood is set, characteristics associated with nationality do crop up, including an absolute monolingualism (Spanish) and an educational system designed to produce citizens that fit a norm. Lynda Ng and Paul Sheehan correctly observe that the assimilation required of Simón and David is reminiscent of contemporary assimilationist policies of Western nations (see “Coetzee’s Republic” 96–101). The national characteristics of Novilla, though rudimentary, exert an influence that is far from negligible, and the same is true of the state’s institutions. Novilla is a minimal state with a legal and educational

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system but without a rich public sphere, a state in which people work but do not trade in the marketplace (see During, “Coetzee” 244). It is precisely the rudimentary nature of the state, and the barely existent, flickering nation-ness, that allows the Jesus novels to ask at a more basic level than Slow Man how nation and state shape humanity, and whether individuals can prevent nation and state from defining their humanity through subversive improvisation and stubborn insistence on standards beyond the grasp of the nation-state. Is there an essential human nature whose needs can be pitted against the demands of nation and state? How can a religious community exist within a national community? While Childhood culminates in the protagonists’ near-translation to a religious community, Schooldays imagines a third community beyond the (nation-)state and the religious community. This eccentric scenario involves a new approach to schooling that goes beyond Childhood’s idea of education as homogenizing pedagogy: a community of dancers, guided by the same absolute laws of the body and of numbers. ‘State’ stands for the institutions of government of a particular territory, which dispense law and perform other collectivist functions, uphold order, and maintain the monopoly on the means of physical violence (see Bealey, Blackwell Dictionary of Political Science 308–10). In contrast, ‘nation’ is a body of people who possess the consciousness of a common identity based upon common historical experience (which may partly be based on myth) and other shared features such as geographical propinquity and a common culture including a common language (see Bealey, Blackwell Dictionary of Political Science 219). The pedagogical aspect of the nation, aimed at the creation of a community, is lacking in the state, but it is present in Childhood’s Novilla (and later Estrella), where adult education and schooling are important aspects of public life: “Everyone is here at the Institute, improving themselves. Everybody is busy becoming a better citizen, a better person” (CJ 121). That may well be, but education principally serves to normalize the population and strengthen communal ties. Learning to speak Spanish—and Spanish only—is part of that education. The sense of community among the Novillans derives in large part from the fact that everyone is an immigrant and that no one remembers where she or he came from. Whereas in any historical nation, as JC writes in Diary of a Bad Year (see DBY 1–2), birth and entry into the state occur simultaneously, in Novilla birth and entry into the state are almost identical. Immigration becomes a metaphor for entering that world in

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birth, for something commonly assumed to be part of the ‘human condition’. This idea is already present in Amerika, where the narrator points out that [t]he first days of a European in America might be likened to a re-birth, and though Karl was not to worry about it unduly, since one got used to things here more quickly than an infant coming into the world from the other side, yet he must keep in mind that first judgments were always unreliable and that one should not let them prejudice the future judgments which would eventually shape one’s life in America. (39)

If Novilla does not have a history in the sense of a past remembered by its citizens, the reader will understand that it has a historical dimension pertaining to the birth, life, and death of the citizen. Benedict Anderson has shown that a principal function of the nation—in fact its raison d’être—is to mediate the relation and translation of this world to the next, to provide continuity and meaning beyond the life of the individual. The questions of where people come from and where they go after death are answered by the national narrative. The citizens live on in the nation; their children are born for the nation. For Anderson, the power of the nation and nationalism derives from its ability to fill the gap left after the decline of religious and dynastic communities and to offer answers to the mysteries of mortality and regeneration: The century of the Enlightenment, of rationalist secularism, brought with it its own modern darkness. With the ebbing of religious belief, the suffering which belief in part composed did not disappear. […] What then was required was a secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning. [… F]ew things were (are) better suited to this end than an idea of nation. If nation-states are widely conceded to be ‘new’ and ­‘historical’, the nations to which they give political expression always loom out of an immemorial past, and, still more important, glide into a limitless future. It is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny. With Debray we might say, ‘Yes, it is quite accidental that I am born French; but after all, France is eternal.’ (Imagined Communities 11–12)

Joyce Carol Oates has remarked that there are no churches, synagogues, or mosques in firmly secular Novilla (see “Saving Grace” 1). This is an apt description insofar as Novilla, lacking an official religion, invokes the nation as the sole answer to religious questions, just as the national

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l­anguage, Spanish, is the sole medium through which to ponder these questions, even if it is a new language to everyone. In accordance with the thesis from Slow Man that any language other than the mother tongue will inevitably be a bloodless and reduced language, the beginner’s Spanish spoken in Novilla adds to the place’s drabness, but the absence of other languages (and the collective forgetting of mother tongues) facilitates a process described as follows by the foreman Álvaro upon Simón’s arrival: “One day it will cease to feel like a language, it will become the way things are” (CJ 12). The absence of other languages makes the linguistic quality of Spanish disappear, and Spanish provides the sole, unquestioned matrix through which the world of Novilla is perceived by its citizens: a primary and national attribute invisible to the citizen, but still visible to the new arrivals. The same can be said of the very nation-ness of the new world. In Roland Barthes’ terms, as shown in the section on Dusklands, the nation and its official language are myths that go without saying, demonstrating that even if nations are ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson), their imagined nature does not forestall a belief in them so deep that it is no longer reflected. In this sense, the nation is real, commanding a reality that only David does not (want to) see when he insists on having his own language which, according to him, is the only true one. He is deaf to Simón’s admonishment that since they are all new to this country they need a common language to get along (see CJ 187). Fictions of Social Reality Versus Needs of the Body Yet in the course of Childhood, Simón himself comes to question not only the beginner’s Spanish spoken in Novilla, but also the community’s practices, the Novillan way of life. The novel’s intertextual strategies also invite the reader to such questioning. In particular, the invocation of Don Quixote allows reflection on the imagined nature of nationality and social reality as such. David reads a children’s version of Don Quixote. In the episode of Don Quixote’s visit to the cave of Montesinos, Don Quixote is lowered into the cave by a rope and stays down there for an hour until Sancho Panza and the scholar haul him up again. Don Quixote reports that his subterranean adventure lasted three days and nights, during which he saw wondrous things, amongst them the noble Dulcinea. When Sancho asks how his master recognized her, Don Quixote answers in a way that is reminiscent of Simón’s reasoning about David’s true mother: that he knew her when he saw her.

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In Cervantes’ novel, it is Sancho Panza’s role to question the tales of his master, but what is even more pertinent for the Jesus novels is that for the sake of keeping the peace, Sancho Panza accepts Don Quixote’s fiction about the cave of Montesinos for the time being and never truly refutes it afterwards. His acceptance makes the Montesinos episode a tale about the construction of social reality: a tale about a reality that has to be accepted rather than being true in and of itself. This reality may be based on fiction, but as long as it is not contradicted, it is a reality that allows agents like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza to engage with each other. Most importantly, whether or not to accept it is not a free choice but one that is enforced by hierarchies (Quixote the master vs. Panza the servant) or peer pressure (the majority already believing a fiction vs. the individual forced to accept it). When Sancho Panza finally demands to be shown one of the rubies or sapphires that Don Quixote claims to have seen in the cave as proof of the tale’s truth, the chapter breaks off; whether a precious stone is presented is never revealed (see CJ 162–66). Cervantes employs this technique of indefinite delay so that Don Quixote’s version of reality is never fully dismantled (see Don Quixote 597–613). Cervantes does not merely demonstrate the shattering of the hero’s abstract idealism—his fixation on a single, unrealizable idea—when faced with the material world, as György Lukács claims in the Theory of the Novel (see Die Theorie des Romans 83–90). He also shows Sancho’s intermittent but necessary acceptance of his master’s fictions so as not to upset the social reality in which they can deal with each other. Like the Jesus novels and like Kafka’s Amerika, Don Quixote is about ignoring and accepting rules, and about the fact that unquestioned fictions can be more fundamental to the creation of social reality than, for example, the unchanging law of numbers. As such, collective fictions inform the very humanity of human beings, who are, in Robert Pippin’s words, “ontological gypsies, restlessly wandering through various historical epochs and forms of life” (“What Does The Childhood of Jesus” 152), changing as they go while hardly any of them is free to choose how. The fact that Novilla is reminiscent of a post-world stresses the rudimentary nation-state’s status as real and fictional and enables the novel to negotiate religious questions without forcing the reader to literally take Novilla as set in the hereafter. The overlap of reality and fiction metafictionally points towards the historical link between novelistic fiction and the idea of the nation-state: the novel had a decisive share in enabling the imagination of national community by a large number of people (see

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Anderson, Imagined Communities 24–25). By drawing attention to fiction’s substantial contribution to the idea and practice of the nation-state, Childhood supports Simón’s questioning of whether the nation-state is in fact able to give meaning to mortality and at what costs. The silent conviction behind Simón’s grudge against Novilla’s drabness and its lack of excitement and sexual adventure is that the collective fictions of a community and the practices they engender must not infringe on the needs of the body, as these needs are unchanging and cannot be made to bow to arbitrary rules. Living by such rules would mean being a member of a community before one is a body. According to Balibar, this is indeed the ideal of the nation-state: before someone can be a woman, she has to be a German, French, or British subject. The means of making her that—of breaking down and reconstructing her primary identity—are education and schooling (see We, People of Europe? 29). The more weight is put on the eternal life of the nation, the less allowance is made for the needs and desires of the individual body. Simón complains that music, lovemaking, and food lack “their due weight” (CJ 64) in Novilla; people’s words seem expressions of the national language Spanish rather than of people’s individual convictions and passions. “If all were for the sake of a higher cause, it would be a different matter”, Simón says. “But eating in order to live and living in order to eat—that is the way of the bacterium, not the …”—“Not the what?”—“Not the human being. Not the pinnacle of creation” (CJ 109). What Simón fails to see—because he would be unable to believe it—is that there is in fact a higher cause: not the life of the species, as suggested in The Master of Petersburg or Disgrace, but the life of the nation-state as the “pinnacle of creation”, something the citizens of Novilla unthinkingly take for granted. When a psychologist from Punto Alegre comes to fetch David because “the law is the law”, and Simón replies that “there are higher considerations than obeying the law”, the psychologist is nonplussed: “Are there indeed? I would not know. For me, thank you, the law is enough” (CJ 256). Childhood contends the supremacy of the nation-state and its arbitrary laws not only in the form of Simón’s championing of the body. To gain a comprehensive understanding of its strategies, it is useful to look at the way in which Coetzee transforms Kafka’s Amerika. To begin with, there are changes concerning form. Childhood shifts from the mode of Kafka’s Bildungsroman—the main character experiences formative adventures— to an analytical and conversational mode. The Jesus novels are Coetzee’s most dialogical in Bakhtin’s sense of the term. Whereas metaphysical ques-

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tions press themselves on Kafka’s reader only because the limited consciousness of Karl Roßmann will stubbornly not ask them, in the Jesus novels these questions are discussed amongst characters who belong to different philosophical camps, or who can at least be identified with certain philosophical positions. Especially concerning the critique and subversion of Novilla’s way of life, it is important to consider how Coetzee transforms the three types of characters in Kafka’s Amerika: the protagonist who does not fit into the new nation (Karl Roßmann), the representatives of that nation (the uncle, Herr Pollunder, the chief waiter, the chief chef, and most others), and a group of criminals (Delamarche and, to a lesser degree, Robinson) who disregard the nation-state’s laws. This cast of types and their respective attitudes towards the nation-state is diversified in the Jesus novels, where Simón occupies a position similar to that of Karl Roßmann: the newcomer wondering about the strangeness of the new world, although equipped with a typically Coetzeean intelligence, education, and a slightly old-­ fashioned, male perspective. Whereas Karl Roßmann fails to integrate himself into the new world, Simón disagrees with its set-up. He believes that the nation-state’s universal demands must not and cannot entirely redefine bodily needs and desires, which allows Coetzee to contrast Novilla with an older world that is close to the one we know. He also insists on searching for a mother for David because he believes having a mother is a child’s natural desire. His behaviour is untypical of that of Novillans: neither officials like Ana and the psychologist nor Elena, Fidel, Álvaro, Eugenio, and the other co-workers question the idea that individual lives must serve the nation-state, and that they will be good lives if they do. Finally, there are the Delamarches of the Jesus novels, Daga and Dmitri. Daga beats up Simón’s colleague, steals money and a bike, and temporarily abducts David (see, e.g., CJ 44–48, 181). He is the rule-breaker of Novilla and, like Delamarche in Amerika, follows a lifestyle that can seem more desirable than the other characters’ drab existence. In Novilla, the character closest to Daga is, perhaps surprisingly, the child David. David is fascinated by Daga, who shares his disdain for rules of any kind. But whereas Daga acknowledges the existence of rules even if he breaks them to satisfy his personal desires, David ignores or does not even register them. In the Estrella of Schooldays, Daga’s place will be taken by the murderer Dmitri. If Daga, Dmitri, and David are the anarchists of the Jesus novels, David is the most radical one because he rejects all laws governing human community.

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Humanity Beyond ‘Language Games’ and ‘Rule-following’: David’s Essentialism David’s approach to numbers seems to best illustrate his refusal of rules because it suggests the strongest kind of antinomianism.6 “One comes before two, David, and two before three”, Simón explains. “It’s a law even stronger than a law of nature. It is called the law of numbers” (CJ 148). In Simón’s view, the law of numbers will be valid in any possible world, and it will be true independent of any human being thinking it, whereas laws of nature might be true of our world but not of other possible worlds. Man-made laws are even weaker because they are more arbitrary, Simón implies, but they are not without force: we must accept them if, in the long run, we want to coexist with others. Whereas Simón merely questions these man-made rules and pits the rights of the body against the laws of the nation-state, David’s resistance to laws as such questions the very foundations of logic and numbers (see CJ 148–51). David’s refusal of the most basic laws of addition suggests that the boy will not accept any rules whatsoever. His anarchism goes beyond Simón’s occasional revolts against the man-made laws of Novilla, beyond Daga’s criminality, and, in its disavowal of rules, even beyond Dmitri’s. Only in Schooldays will he let a small set of numbers—the primes—guide his movements as he becomes a member of a transitory community of dancers. David’s antinomianism can only be understood when seen in the context of Wittgenstein’s ideas of ‘language games’ and ‘rule-following’. As Stephen Mulhall has shown, David and Simón recall the child and elder that populate Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, and David’s obstinate resistance to Simón’s teaching him about rules resonates ­particularly with the figure of the deviant pupil in Wittgenstein’s book (see “Health and Deviance” 22). This configuration of teacher and pupil allows Coetzee not only to question the basics of rule-following, but also to test the idea of the human through the child as a liminal case of humanity. As Alexander Honold reminds us in the context of David’s reading his children’s version of Don Quixote, the Latin concept of infans is used to characterize the child as a “non-speaking” creature (see “The Reading of Don Quixote” 189), that is, as a form of humanity hard to align with Aristotle’s notion of the animal rationale. Seen from this Aristotelian perspective, the playing of language games does not only constitute human societies; training in these games makes children human in the first place. Language games, according to Philosophical Investigations, are the form in which

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children learn to use words, and the term ‘game’ illustrates that teaching a child a language does not involve explication but play and imitation on behalf of the child in combination with training through demonstration on behalf of the teacher (see 4). Wittgenstein stresses that the ways a linguistic community uses a particular word cannot sensibly be questioned. Anybody who is taught these uses cannot fruitfully ask, for example, why we use the word ‘red’ for a particular colour. That is how one should understand Simón’s comment on David’s questions: “Why? Why? Why? That is not how we carry on a proper conversation” (CJ 172). In order to speak a language, one must not question but practise the behaviour that a community—or in Wittgenstein’s terms, a form of life—customarily connects with particular words. Only together do words and particular actions form meaning, prompting Wittgenstein to state that the meaning of a word is its use in language (see Philosophical Investigations 20). Since words derive their meaning from their embeddedness in social practices and their embodiment in speakers, familiarity with a language is familiarity with a form of life, where ‘form of life’ means the totality of practices of a linguistic community (see 20). To members of the community, these practices are so familiar as to seem natural. Outsiders to the language game, on the other hand, can learn the new language only by observing practices and by correlating with them the words that are used in them (see 82). Balibar’s claim that nationality determines which language games are properly human practices suggests that David’s private language (“La la fa fa yam ying!” [CJ 186]) makes him less than fully human in Novilla. Don Quixote chooses to play a kind of language game no one else plays anymore (if indeed they ever did), namely, that of the knightly romance. David plays the kind that has in turn become associated with Don Quixote, children, and the mad, that is, with not yet or no longer fully human beings: he reads signs literally, and his collision with the windmill takes the form of being put to school to practise the rules and language games of Novilla’s community. In Cervantes, the effect is a parody of the Spanish romances of chivalry devoured by Don Quixote.7 David’s literalism, by contrast, is one of the second degrees because it prevents David from reading Don Quixote as a parody of an absurd language game. While Don Quixote projects the language game of the romance genre onto early modern Spain, David’s training in the language game of Don Quixote does not teach him not to follow language games played by no one else. Instead, it encourages him to read literally and follow the rules he—and possibly

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only he—sees. David is thus an ‘idiot’ in the original sense of the word: someone who takes reality for the only thing of its kind.8 What, however, if it was the only thing of its kind? What if the idiot is right? David claims that only he knows the true names of things and numbers, and the novel does not rule out that there are indeed non-arbitrary words for things and ideas, and that there are non-arbitrary and community-­independent ways of using these words. In such a reading, David’s speaking the language of essential or true names makes him the only character who “rise[s] above mere nationality” (Y 64), above the state and above community as such. The idea of non-arbitrary, essential signification will return in Schooldays’ dance practised at the Academy of Dance in Estrella, which is, crucially, a non-linguistic performance. David’s claim to know the true names of things and numbers is reminiscent of some approaches to the kabbalah: attempting to reconstruct God’s own language that is the things it names, that creates them in the way Adam creates the animals he names.9 And indeed Simón has a religiously coloured premonition that David might be right when he asks himself whether David “is the only one among us with eyes to see” (CJ 250). David’s Jesus-like statement “Yo soy la verdad” (CJ 225) may literally be true: “For the first time it occurs to him that this may be not just a clever child […] but something else, something for which at this moment he lacks the word” (CJ 151). If Simón is right, he lacks the word precisely because the word is, like David, not part of the language game that speaks him as he speaks in it. That word is therefore a metonymy of David who, like Michael K, “take[s] up residence in a system without becoming a term in it” (MK 166), who slips away whenever one tries to pin him down because he deals in essences whereas human linguistic systems are arbitrary and conventional. It is not coincidental that it is Simón who seriously considers that David knows the essence of truth. Simón’s insistence on an essential human nature and on rights deriving from the body rather than from nation, state, or community predisposes him to sympathize with David’s belief in essential truths. Simon’s name also signals that he should be the one who recognizes the divine in David. In the Gospels, Simon (henceforth called Peter) is the first apostle to be recruited and is particularly susceptible to Jesus’ call: he immediately abandons his occupation as a fisherman. Later, and even more importantly, he is the only one among the disciples who recognizes that Jesus is neither John the Baptist nor a prophet but the living son of God (see Matthew 4:18, 16:13–18).

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In its presentation of the form of life called Novilla, and in its demonstration of resistance to that form of life by Simón and David, Childhood can be said to follow a poetic comparable to the one Wittgenstein recommends to the philosopher who wants to see the contours of his or her community’s language games more clearly (see Philosophical Investigations 50). By presenting to the reader a minimal nation-state with different yet remotely familiar language games and an alternative system of education, and by deploying the character of David who exhibits the outrageous possibility of the essential nature of a (body) language, Coetzee demonstrates the conventionality of our words through a comparison with another form of life. He liquefies what we take as the hard rock of ‘how things are’ into one possible world among many. If the meaning of a word is its use in language, the study of this use is a way of obtaining knowledge about that language; but in order to see the arbitrary national or communal inflection of a language, one needs to compare native language games with other and even merely possible ones. Schooldays continues this testing of distinctions between true and arbitrary names of things but takes the issue of signification beyond language, to the Academy of Dance. Yet David and Simón have to escape from Novilla and its national pedagogy before they can move beyond language. As in any nation-state, Novilla’s compulsory schooling serves a double purpose: the teaching of reading, writing, and other skills also serves to mould pupils according to national language games and rules. The question is whether the boy is to become principally a citizen of the nation-state, or a body of his own, realizing his potentially exceptional nature as a condition of happiness. Simón and Inés decide on the latter—and experience first-hand the nation-state’s means of forcing its subjects to comply. Formal requests are followed by a tribunal at the Office of Education, where the nation-state literally acts as a Supreme Court of Appeal: it determines that David must go to the Special Learning Centre at Punto Arenas (see CJ 215–16). Simón concedes that school is not just about reading and writing: “It is also about learning to get on with other boys and girls. It is about becoming a social animal” (CJ 219). Simón also realizes that “those people have the law behind them, and we are in no position to challenge the law” (CJ 231), implying that the question of schooling is one of power rather than good or bad laws. David and his family take flight. Childhood’s final tableau is one of a holy family, bonded by something more essential than nationality or biology. Simón, Inés, David, and the hitchhiker Juan, whom they pick up on

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the way, are not related in any obvious way, but Juan is described as “not a stranger” (CJ 273) to David, who insists that the others call him, David, by his “real name” (CJ 273). Now more than ever, that name would seem to be “Jesus”. No longer nationals, they become ‘gypsies’: “being a gypsy means that you don’t have a proper home, a place to lay your head” (CJ 231). If the band of gypsies is a community, then that community is most likely held together by—it can no longer be put in other words at this point—God. The reader knows that the story of that holy family has been played out before and links Juan with John the Baptist. The holy family’s pilgrimage from one community to the next evokes an even larger theological context: Augustine’s City of God, in which the reality of an eternal religious state (civitas Dei) coexists with the perishable earthly state (civitas terrena), although the value systems of the two worlds are incompatible. From this perspective, the family of fellow travellers is in transit from one civitas to the other. Paul J. Griffiths explains that, in the eschatological view of City of God, each individual has citizenship in exactly one of the two cities, the civitas Dei or the civitas terrena. God knows the final citizenship of each individual; the individuals themselves do not. Every given city has a mixed citizenry: some of its inhabitants will be part of God’s city, and some remain attached to its earthly counterpart. Since the fall of Adam and Eve, however, every human being is by default marked for eternal citizenship in the civitas terrena (see Griffiths, “Secularity and the saeculum” 42).10 In eschatological terms (or sub specie aeternitatis), citizenship is predestined, but in terms of what Augustine calls ‘this age’ (or sub specie saecularitatis), a change of citizenship is possible and even necessary for those predestined to become citizens of God’s city. For Augustine, no particular city can be identified with those who will be members of the civitas Dei, nor does a particular city stand for those who will remain in the civitas terrena. The two final cities are mixed and intertwined because citizens of each final city are to be found within every visible city (see “Secularity and the saeculum” 43). Both worlds demand to be taken seriously in the Jesus novels. When the family of David is travelling to the border of the nation “to start our new life” (CJ 277), the reader has to consider the city of God, or civitas Dei, as the possible destination of their journey, whether in the form of an afterlife or otherwise. Does David, who seems to belong to another realm altogether, know which civitas he is destined to be part of? At any rate, it looks like David, Simón, Juan, and Bolívar are on their way to a religious community that promises to reclaim the space usurped by the nation-state as imagined everlasting community.

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Seriality and the Escalation of “Passion”: From Childhood to Schooldays In the event, Estrella disappoints the reader’s expectation of a civitas Dei. God does not reveal himself there. As in Novilla, the police must be avoided to save David from being put in a special school. David’s elective family has to continue to lead the life of gypsies: with no fixed abode, they take on temporary manual labour (see SJ 1–22). Schooling turns out to be necessary not merely because the state demands it—in Estrella, David’s talents do not miraculously develop to the full but need help to grow. Simón and Inés’ choice of one of the privately run academies is a compromise resulting from the necessity to educate David and keep him invisible to the state authorities. Meanwhile, Simón and Inés, who never warmed to each other, move into separate apartments. Inés sells clothes in a shop, while Simón earns money by delivering advertising materials across Estrella. The setting could hardly be more mundane. The Academy of Dance at first fits that picture. Its teachings seem esoteric if not downright “mumbo-jumbo” (SJ 103), as Simón puts it: the children learn to dance in order to call down numbers from the sky, but not how to read or write. Only as events unfold is the reader offered glimpses of the possibility that the Academy is in fact more than a fraud. The reader learns that the dance at the Academy is at least potentially an embodied performance of universal truths and offers a kind of education that does not mould the individual according to the nation-state’s protocols. Knowing-that of the prime numbers seems to coincide with the bodily movements, or knowing-how, that enact these numbers, or “call the numbers down” (SJ 68), as Ana Magdalena explains. As I will show, the dancing bodies of the Academy are Schooldays’ vision of a temporarily materializing civitas Dei. In the dance, the individual becomes part of a collective in which each member is guided by truth in the act of embodying it. It is a vision in which Coetzee’s renegotiations of the relationship between human body and mind (as expressed in the term animal rationale) are reconciled with the fact that humans can only exist together with other humans (as expressed in the term zoon politikon). By slowly accustoming the reader to this unconventional idea and gradually introducing notions of schooling and community beyond the paradigms of the nation-state and rule-following, Schooldays repeats Childhood’s probe into the relationship between individual and nation-state with small but significant differences. The most important parts of this probing are

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clashes between private and social truths and fictions, and between individual desires and the demands of the collective organization of human lives. Repeating and varying these parts, Coetzee draws on seriality’s ability to undermine the Aristotelian differentiation between cause and effect as well as linear notions of temporality. In any series, the first part becomes visible as part only when it is repeated and varied. In this sense, the second part precedes the first (see Bronfen et al., Noch einmal anders 9). For the Jesus novels, this means that the reader’s attention is redirected from sequential plot to the problems at issue in the individual parts constituting a series. To begin with, the theme of private and social fictions and their import for the relationship between individual and nation-state returns in Schooldays. The novel insistently asks who believes in a fiction—oneself or others as well—and how to correctly believe in that fiction—by taking it literally, abstractly or allegorically. For example, when the story about the fisher who would be king is read to the children at the Academy, David insists that the fisher, turned into a king by a genie, remains king even though his fellow citizens deny him that status. The other children conclude that the fisher is not king, as his status depends on whether his fellow citizens recognize it (see SJ 105–11). David’s literal understanding of the story casts light on why he does not fit in with the citizens of Estrella. As in any state, people need to abstractly understand themselves as generic citizens in order to be recognized as citizens by the nation-state and their fellow citizens. David’s reading resembles his interpretation of the Montesinos episode in Don Quixote. Rather than understanding the story about the fisher who would be king as an allegory teaching that only shared fictions are social facts whereas private fictions are not, David insists on a literal reading in which only he believes. He thus finds himself in the same position as the fisher, whose belief in his own kingship is not reciprocated. When David’s mathematics tutor, Señor Robles, finds that David lacks the ability to think abstractly, this discovery applies to David’s mathematical ability but also to his view of his own status amongst the citizens of Estrella: David is unable to consider himself anything other than a unique being. The opposition between metaphysical truth and socially constructed truth applies to the motif of numbers in Schooldays as it did in Childhood. In Schooldays, the opposition takes the form of, on the one hand, the ‘noble’ prime numbers danced by the pupils of the Academy, whose dance is the numbers they dance—a realistic, that is, embodied knowledge of

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these numbers—and, on the other, the ‘base’ or ‘ant’ numbers constructed by addition and used in the census, where each number merely represents a citizen. In the imagined community of the nation-state, each citizen imagines him- or herself as an exchangeable member amongst a large number of national fellow-citizens. The imminent census puts David at risk of being discovered and sorted into a category—disabled, lacking in the cognitive ability to think abstractly—with other numbered citizens (see SJ 30–31, 213, 231). The fact that Coetzee implements a census in his novel testifies to the continuity of the theme of nationality and the nation-state as imagined community in the Jesus novels. The census, writes Anderson, has from the beginnings of nationalism been vital to the imagining of national community. The census was created to quantify particular groups within the population (men, women, children, etc.). This made it possible to treat any citizen in a particular group as a digit in an aggregable series of replicable citizens of the same group (see Imagined Communities 163–70). Politics as biopolitics—that is, the governing of the reproduction of citizens—is closely related to nationalism and its interest in creating or maintaining a homogeneous body politic. The most important use of seriality in the Jesus novels concerns Schooldays’ escalation of the conflict between human passions calling for satisfaction and human dependence on others, resulting in the necessity of a political order. Nothing illustrates this escalation better than the substitution of the petty criminal Daga by the more fully fleshed-out murderer Dmitri. Dmitri is ruled by strong and contradictory passions. What makes him truly stand out amongst Estrella’s citizens, however, is his insistence on yielding to his passions even if this means that he violates the norms of the community, and even if this runs contrary to any rational approach to his own well-being. It is even possible that he murders Ana Magdalena because his act violates the laws of the nation-state and the idea of ‘reasonable behaviour’ that these laws purport to express. If so, Dmitri’s deed takes to an extreme, and in fact perverts, a diagnosis repeatedly voiced by Simón in Childhood: that reason, if given exclusive weight in life, renders human existence insipid and not worth living. Described as a “monster” (SJ 130) by Simón, Dmitri appears like a composite of Dostoevsky’s most passion-driven characters: Dmitri Karamazov, the impulsive brother accused of murdering his father in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and Rodion Raskolnikov who, without any motive transparent to himself, murders an elderly lady in Crime and Punishment. He also bears traces of some of Kleist’s protagonists (to be discussed in the

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next section). Dmitri stands for an extreme anti-rationalism: “I follow the heart. Why? Because the heart is always right and the head is always wrong” (SJ 119). The heart, the metaphorical seat of passions, turns Dmitri into a murderer, even though it remains unclear precisely which passion has him in its grip at the decisive moment. Dmitri confesses to so many and such different passions that the true impetus of his violent act becomes more rather than less obscure: sometimes it seems that he temporarily went insane (see SJ 147), sometimes that he could not bear being refused by Ana Magdalena and that his love suddenly turned into hatred (see SJ 168). Then, Ana Magdalena’s love letters to Dmitri are found by Simón, showing that she did not refuse Dmitri after all (see SJ 158–59, 169). This development in turn prompts Dmitri to claim that passion was all on his side, not Ana Magdalena’s (see SJ 220). Coetzee’s magnification of Daga into Dmitri tests the idea of a humanity that consciously defines itself against the social collective of which it is part. Dmitri’s trial is itself a test in which discourse about Dmitri’s motives seeks to determine whether Dmitri is human, and if so, what kind of human being he is. The trial can be regarded as part of a series with Lurie’s trial in Disgrace. Like Lurie, Dmitri does not repent but accepts the punishment that the tribunal holds in store for men like him. Whereas Lurie specifies the passion that drove him to his questionable behaviour—eros— the precise motivation for Dmitri’s act remains obscure. Dmitri’s not fitting Estrella’s society seems closer to David’s experience than Lurie’s who, in the context of post-apartheid South Africa, appears to stand for a highly specific and apparently anachronistic combination of white and patriarchal attitudes. While Lurie’s humanity is never in question, Dmitri’s is elusive, as is David’s. Discussing the differences ­ between a tiger and a human being with David, Simón explains that tigers, like all animals, are beyond good and bad. David answers that he does not want to be a tiger, but that he does not “want to be human either” (SJ 36), a remark that pains Simón: bringing him up outside society might in fact mean that David will never know how to live like a social animal, or zoon politikon, that is, like a subject who controls his passions and takes responsibility for choosing between good and bad. Dmitri’s defence of his actions echoes David’s resistance to being either animal or human. “You are not a beast, Dmitri, nor are we beasts. You are a man and we are men” (SJ 149), the judge offers, but admits that he does not understand how a human being can act like Dmitri and not repent his murder: “Are you an erring human being, or do you belong to some other species, without a

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soul, without a conscience?”—“I belong to a foreign species” (SJ 154), Dmitri replies. He is content to suffer the punishment of being excluded from human society in an asylum. Yet this does not mean that he is indifferent to what he actually is: man, beast, or a special case like David, whose specialness, that is, not fitting any category provided by language, is a question of debate throughout Schooldays (see e.g., SJ 167–68). As the rape of Melanie Isaacs casts a critical light on Lurie’s insistence on following his desires, Dmitri’s crime of passion invites the reader to reconsider Simón’s earlier complaints about Novillan society’s disregard for sexual needs and any kind of ‘flavour’ in life. Eileen John has argued that a passion such as erotic desire may enable us to experience others as likewise desiring and to realize their existence more fully, but that using Eros as a moral compass means “granting that moral life grows out of the experience of morally unregulated forces of attractions and passion” (“Coetzee and Eros” 122). The risks disqualifying unregulated passion as moral compass are clearly evident in Dmitri’s case: there is no clean separation between natural human passions and unnatural, inhuman ones. Dmitri’s ‘perverse’ passion might even be more common than Simón wants to believe. In “Civilization and Its Discontents”, Freud argues that Eros and Thanatos, sexual desire and the death-drive, are at work in all individuals, and that civilization is ultimately the product of the struggle between both forces (see 132–33). Dmitri claims: “Simón here is as much of a mess inside as you or I. In fact, more of a mess. Because at least I don’t pretend to be what I am not. This is how I am, I say, and this is how I talk, all mixed up” (SJ 171). Simón translates this to himself in terms evoking an ­unconscious struggle between Eros and Thanatos: “According to Dmitri, at a buried level each of us desires to kill the one we love” (SJ 179). Unlike Dmitri, however, Freud holds that erotic and aggressive drives must be suppressed in order to enable humans to coexist, and that collective needs ultimately trump individual ones. The reader understands that this is—at least temporarily—Simón’s view, too, when he explains to David that passion originates from the body and makes adults have fantasies. Dmitri is a criminal because he put his fantasies above other human lives. Yet Dmitri’s case can also be recruited for an argument more critical of communitarian living and the nation-state. As extreme as Dmitri’s attitude and behaviour may be, his case raises the question of how a citizen can be required to take for real the imagined community of the nation, if that community simultaneously forbids him to realize desires that define his

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sense of self. Is there not, in one sense, virtue in following one’s passion even if, in another sense, that means committing a crime? And how can blameless David, whose only ‘crime’ is being a child, be expected to subordinate his singularity to a community he does not want to and possibly cannot (yet) imagine? According to Bernard Williams, integrity consists in a person’s serious interests and projects that do not need to concern moral issues and that are nevertheless essential to that person’s core identity (see “Integrity” 108–17). Arguing against Kantian deontological ethics and against utilitarianism, Williams holds that excessive moral demands can infringe on a person’s integrity. Clearly, murder does not belong to the “serious interests and projects” mentioned by Williams. Just as clearly, though, Schooldays suggests that a person’s passions are one of the main sources of his or her interests, projects, and fantasies. Indeed, the passions are possibly even more significant than that person’s reasoning, and they can run contrary to the demands of behaving responsibly towards others. While Dmitri’s case raises the question of how freely he could have been acting while under the spell of his passions, David’s reluctance to accept the sociality of being human, and thereby humanity itself, opens up an even more provocative possibility: that being true to oneself can entail being regarded as inhuman by others, and that being true to oneself is ultimately of higher value than being recognized as human. Whereas the character of Dmitri showcases the horrendous consequences of this line of thought, David’s relentless questioning suggests humanism to be an -ism that declares inviolable the idea of the human as an autonomous thinker in control of his or her passions. This self-image ultimately serves the nation-­ state’s interest, as control of its citizen-subjects is most secure when each subject first controls him- or herself. Freud affirms the necessity of repression but simultaneously confirms the point suggested by David: repressed aggression turns against the ego and forms the super-ego, which supervises the ego as conscience. Compatibility of the individual and the community is achieved by instilling guilt and the habit of self-monitoring (see “Civilization” 123–30). Can Dmitri’s rejection of the laws of collective existence constitute an alternative way of being human, or can it only result in his exclusion from human society? Daga’s resistance to rules seems trivial by comparison, and yet Dmitri’s transgressions likewise ‘merely’ consist in a violation of laws and ethical norms and as such remain within the bounds of ethics (which enables his public condemnation) and of the particular language games of jurisdiction (which makes the tribunal and the sentence possible). By

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c­ontrast, David resists rule-following as such and thus the sociality of being human. Dmitri, expelled from Estrella and put in an asylum, still belongs to humanity, whereas David, though moving amongst Estrella’s children and citizens, is outside humanity and a “ghost” (SJ 113) among them, as he himself feels. The question is, of course, whether this invisibility makes him a different human, or something other than human. Dmitri’s resistance to sociality is open to any human being, but it will free neither Dmitri nor any other human of the need for other human beings. When Simón, against his own will, becomes Dmitri’s confidant after the murder, Dmitri pleads: “I don’t want to be private! I want to be human, and to be human is to be a speaking animal. That is why I am telling you these things, so that I can be human again, hear a human voice issuing again from this breast of mine” (SJ 219). Dmitri wants to be recognized—it is as if, for a moment, he acknowledges that his existence depends on recognition by others. Humanity, in his plea, is a shorthand for recognition, not an insistence on being human: Dmitri wants to be one of those who bestow recognition. But his wanting is itself a symptom of his human need for others and undermines his pretence of not being human. Being-Both, or Impurity If Dmitri cannot escape his humanity, however, this does not mean that he cannot also be something other than human. This is true of the other characters as well and might be the most crucial way in which the tests and trials of the Jesus novels revise the human. “The psychologists and the psychiatrists with their questions, they just can’t work out what I am, man or beast. But you see right through me” (SJ 172), Dmitri tells David. What Dmitri and David have in common is being more than human, as well as their explicit insistence on the possibility of being-more or being a special case. While the tribunal seeks to determine whether Dmitri is human or animal, there is nothing in Dmitri’s self-descriptions that suggests he should not be human and animal, ethically responsible subject and at the same time non-human creature. Similarly, while Simón wonders whether David is a regular child or inspired by God, like Jesus or “like like” (CJ 220) Jesus, he is possibly both human and divine. Dmitri and David embody the “and-or” (Y 160) that the John of Youth desires, the mode of thought that transcends the logical operator “either-or” at the heart of reason. Following his passions, Dmitri also consciously wills his passions to have their way. He seems to act on nothing but impulse

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(­following the “heart” only) and with absolute certainty in his every movement (from the outset, Simón thinks of him as “Dmitri the bear” [SJ 69]). Yet in his mutually exclusive but equally persuasive explanations of why he murdered Ana Magdalena, Dmitri also exhibits the most rhetorical skill amongst the novel’s otherwise bland characters. In Dmitri, the distinction between determination and deliberation collapses. David, it seems, is not subject to the needs and restrictions of human minds or human and non-­human bodies: he learns to read at a very early age and dances as if the laws of gravity had no effect on him. At the same time, David seems to have more in common with wild animals when he is unreceptive to being taught the rules of sociality, or when he is described as feeling most at home roaming the fields around the farm (SJ 13–21). His being a child is in itself a factor that can make him seem as close to animals as he is to human adults: common notions of animality and infancy overlap in attributes such as lack of reflexivity, lack of (proper) language, inability to postpone satisfaction of desires, and a general lack of abilities (see Agamben, “La Parola” 164–65).11 Readers can respond to Schooldays’ staging of Dmitri’s and David’s being-both by assuming the role of the judge in Dmitri’s trial, and attempt to decide whether Dmitri is human, animal, or divine. Or they can take the staging of Dmitri’s and David’s being-both as an opportunity to question the usefulness of the categories ‘human’, ‘animal’, and ‘divine’ as such. As discussed in Chap. 4, Derrida has critiqued the practice of drawing one divide between human and animal for overlooking the many distinctions among animals. Some animals might even have more in common with human beings than with certain other animals (see The Animal 30–34). One of the provocative questions raised by the Jesus novels is the following: if ‘the animal’ does not exist because there are only different animals, then why should ‘the human’ exist? Not even the composer Juan Sebastián Arroyo and his wife, the dance teacher Ana Magdalena Arroyo, seem to fit only one ontological category. Ana Magdalena, of perfect beauty, seems to lack all passion. After her death, Simón wonders whether “there [was] not, in truth, something strange about Ana Magdalena—stranger than strange, inhuman? Ana Magdalena and her pack of children, like a wolf mother with her cubs. Eyes that saw straight through you” (SJ 139). These words liken Ana Magdalena to an animal, but Dmitri’s comparison with a goddess seems just as appropriate:

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I think of those arms of hers, cool as marble, clasped around me, drawing me into her—me! me!—and I shake my head. Something wrong there, Simón, something deeply wrong. Beauty and the beast. That is why I used the word cosmological. Some mistake among the stars or the planets, some mix-up. […] The appetite was all on my side. On her side, nothing but grace and sweetness, as if a goddess were stepping down to grace a mortal man with a taste of immortal being. (SJ 220)

The idea of a “mix-up” between gods and humans is the stuff of comedy (and sometimes tragedy). Its most important literary treatment is Kleist’s Amphitryon. One of Kleist’s radical modifications of Molière’s play is that Alkmene is not the only character to be changed by the experience of the divine: Jupiter, too, feels envy for the desire and marital love experienced by humans, who turn out to have little need for gods like him. As we shall see, Kleist serves as a model for Schooldays’ revisions of the human. For present purposes, suffice it to note that the reader can either interpret Ana Magdalena as a contradictory, even incoherent being, a ‘monster’ like Dmitri composed of human, animal, and divine parts; or take her apparent incoherence as an occasion to question the categories ‘human’, ‘animal’, and ‘divine’ altogether. Ana Magdalena is characterized by a gaze that sees through people, by absolute confidence and grace of movement, and by absolute lack of hesitation and doubt. As will become clearer in the next section, these qualities have, in the history of aesthetic thought, been attributed to ‘the animal’, but they have also been associated with ‘the divine’. Ana Magdalena’s example suggests that if it was not for the attributes of immortality and lack of passions, the divine would be bewilderingly hard to tell apart from the animal. Ana Magdalena is mortal, but it remains a possibility that she does actually lack all passion. While the animal and the divine are traditionally considered extreme poles of a continuum with the human in between, these extremes meet in qualities such as those Ana Magdalena possesses, qualities that she has in common with Dmitri. Victim and perpetrator of the capital crime in Schooldays are thus inextricably linked. From the perspective of the human, God and the animal overlap in yet another way. Jacques Derrida uses the term “divinanimality” (The Animal 132) to describe “the quasi-transcendental referent, the excluded, foreclosed, disavowed, tamed, and sacrificed foundation of what it founds, namely, the symbolic order, the human order, law and justice” (132). The

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term is a useful shorthand for Schooldays’ staging of the animal’s and God’s sameness in the eyes of the secular state. To the state, both are that which must be suppressed and excluded in order to maintain the fiction of a pure category of the human. Seen in this light, Dmitri and Ana Magdalena could be taken as particularly striking examples of the Jesus novels’ general suggestion that the relation between human and non-human beings must be perceived in terms of proximity, continuity, and entanglement (see Nowak-McNeice, “Belonging to the Human” 6–7, 17). However, Schooldays does not merely illustrate divinanimality. It qualifies this principle by realistically embedding it in the specific social environment of Estrella and its legal system. It is crucial that in Estrella, only the perpetrator is forced to fit one and only one ontological category: Dmitri is either human or animal according to the judge, who represents the state. The politics of divinanimality does not target Ana Magdalena. Here, we glimpse the gist of Coetzee’s modification of the scenario found in Amphitryon. First, Coetzee multiply refracts Ana Magdalena’s and Dmitri’s ontological status: the divine creature descending on man overlaps not only with the human but also with the animal, and the man descended upon has animal qualities. Second, Coetzee simultaneously mirrors and inverts the god’s descending upon a woman in intercourse by having a man descend upon a goddess in murder, thus complementing Eros with Thanatos. This multiplication of ambivalence is, in a third step, played out in a legal context—foreign to Amphitryon—that institutionally represents the state and reduces ambivalence to certainty. Coetzee’s rewriting of Kleist suggests that ontological categories such as the human and the animal support some of the state’s basic functions: to guarantee the safety of its citizens by monopolizing violence; to define who counts as legal subject and who does not; to deal out punishments to subjects who transgress laws; and to remove, incarcerate, or eliminate non-subjects who threaten the social order.12 What emerges is akin to Agamben’s anthropological machine that produces human and animal life not based on inherent qualities, but on the political motive to include those who accept the imposed order and to exclude those who do not. The modern anthropological machine, according to Agamben, identifies human and non-human parts in all human beings. However, this Aristotelian acknowledgement of the inherent being-both of the human only serves to identify segments of the population that are more animal than others (see Agamben, The Open 33–38). In the Western world, the criminal, particularly the criminal who commits crimes of passion, has

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often been classified as beast or monster throughout the centuries. Cesare Lombroso’s notorious physiognomic and psychiatric characterization of criminals along these lines in Criminal Man (1876) is only the most well-­ known and explicit expression of a persistent attitude (see Howe, Monstrosität 1–50, 121–24). Coetzee’s scenario does not preclude that Dmitri, on some level, has an identity other than the one the nation-state attributes to him. But by suggesting that the qualities associated with animals and gods overlap, Schooldays demonstrates that whatever Dmitri might truly be, and on whatever level he is defined, the categories ‘human’, ‘animal’, and ‘divine’ will always be ideal notions inadequate to his or any other being’s singularity. All we can conclude from someone’s quality of not being subject to the whims of passion, for example, is that this being tends towards the divine or towards the inanimate. It is with this caveat in mind that we have to approach the extreme tendencies exhibited by the characters of the Jesus novels. The law’s process, forcing the complexities of being-both into single categories, need not inform our reading of David, Dmitri, and Ana Magdalena. The lack of passion in pale and cold Ana Magdalena also characterizes Juan Sebastián Arroyo, who seems remarkably unperturbed by his wife’s murder. The character’s name immediately brings to mind Johann Sebastian Bach (just as Ana Magdalena’s name evokes Bach’s wife, Anna Magdalena). In fact, the similarities between the historical and the fictional composer are striking. Bach had seven children with his first wife Maria Barbara, and another seven daughters and six sons with his second wife Anna Magdalena (see Michels, DTV-Atlas Musik 329). Juan Sebastián and his wife have a large family as well. Both compose music following a complex system, moving forward not in spontaneous leaps but with ­seeming inevitability. The concentrated peacefulness of their music captivates, even moves, the listener. In one of the essays in Diary of a Bad Year, JC writes: “The best proof we have that life is good, and therefore that there may perhaps be a God after all, who has our welfare at heart, is that to each of us, on the day we are born, comes the music of Johann Sebastian Bach” (DBY 221). When Bach’s music is described as a gift that makes life ‘good’, the aesthetic pleasure given by that music is characterized as fundamentally different from pleasure derived from satisfying one’s passions. It brings a kind of ‘welfare’ that is spiritual rather than material, as if, by performing a higher order, it redeems human fallenness. That, according to the essay, is what Bach’s music does: it administers an act reserved for the divine.

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This claim resonates with judgements on Bach’s music made by his contemporaries, and it chimes with the affinity perceived in Bach’s time between the divine and mathematics. Crucial syntagmatic structures and harmonies of Bach’s works can be mathematically explained and even seem mathematically inspired, as Douglas Hofstadter has shown with regard to self-recursive loops in the compositions (see Gödel, Escher, Bach 3–28) and as Ruth Tatlow has demonstrated with regard to Bach’s use of numbers for symmetry, proportion, and parallels (see Bach’s Numbers 1–130). Christoph Wolff explains that the Aristotelian principle ‘art imitates nature’ was central to what Bach considered musical science and that Bach’s contemporaries compared him to Isaac Newton. For Bach, art lay between the reality of the world (nature) and God, who ordered this reality. Newton, it was assumed, had shown that mathematical science describes the basic structure of God-made reality. The mathematical inspiration of Bach’s musical structure was perceived to link his music to the order of nature and to its divine cause: a recreation of the divine in mathematically inspired music (see Wolff, Johann Sebastian Bach 5–6). Arroyo’s music illustrates what the Jesus novels’ strange characters David, Dmitri, Ana Magdalena, and Juan Sebastián Arroyo have in common: each possesses an aspect of purity and of the absolute. Juan Sebastián’s music is of pure beauty and goodness (as Simón feels), and also of pure truth (as it calls forth, together with the dancer’s movement, the prime numbers); Ana Magdalena is of absolute beauty, and absolutely lacking in passion; David knows the true names of everything and possibly is the truth (“Yo soy la verdad”); while Dmitri is as purely driven by passion and as free of rational deliberation as Arroyo’s music is not. Yet the Arroyos are mortal, and Dmitri craves to be recognized as fellow-human even though he brags about ignoring human laws. David might be immortal like Jesus, but he still is subject to the human and animal business of eating, digesting, and defecating, as the Jesus novels stress. According to the Gospels, the disciples do not believe that Jesus was resurrected when they see him, and they still doubt when they touch him. But they believe in his existence when he eats (see Luke 24:41–43).13 In the Jesus novels, David’s eating and digesting likewise give substance to his humanity. Coetzee’s strategy of presenting, in these characters, purity-within-­ impurity, or absoluteness-within-imperfection, tempts us to categorize them as purely divine or animal only to immediately thwart our efforts. Coetzee’s four hybrid characters are test cases that trigger our tendency to think in pure categories of the ‘divine’, ‘human’, and ‘animal’ but make us

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realize that the characters’ singular being is neither purely divine nor purely animal, nor purely human either. Remembering that Aristotle acknowledged that the human is always also partly animal (see Agamben, The Open 13–16), we may conclude that the impurities of David, Dmitri, Ana Magdalena, and Juan Sebastián are magnified versions of an impurity that characterizes all living beings. This means that using ontological categories such as the human and the animal generally means imposing requirements of purity on the impure reality we aim to contemplate. Mulhall calls the imposition of requirements on reality the original sin of philosophy, a sin from which literature can save us by attempting “to attend to what is there to be seen, in all its variety and complexity” (The Wounded Animal 14). The Jesus novels reveal that even our ordinary thinking—not just that of philosophers— depends on ontological categories that cut across the world of the living and parcel it into supposedly pure forms of life. More importantly still, the Jesus novels suggest that these pure ontological categories have not always been part of our minds, that they are produced by epistemes that serve the organization of human collectivity, that is, the maintenance of political order. The state’s attempts to normalize David in a special school and the assessment of Dmitri’s humanity during his trial demonstrate that pure ontological categories allow the nation-state to alter or remove by force individuals who resist rule-following as such, or who knowingly break the rules. The concern with the structural bind between pure ontological categories and the state is one that Coetzee shares with the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, whose work has deeply influenced Coetzee’s (see “Homage” 7). Both writers are especially fascinated with the ways in which states (South Africa, Poland) have instrumentalized the ontological categories in question. Both writers can be said to be animated by the attempt to redeem impure ontologies, and both grapple with the question of whether Christianity and mythology could help in redeeming them. Interestingly, Herbert’s poems suggest that Christianity can only serve the agents of purity, even though Christianity was suppressed in socialist Poland. Coetzee’s Jesus novels, on the other hand, seem to imply that Christian ideas can help to redeem ontological uncertainties, even though the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa was notoriously complicit in the apartheid regime’s project of maintaining racial purity. Maria Boletsi has noted the resonance with Herbert in Childhood. She reads Herbert’s “From Mythology”, a poem on humankind’s changing

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relationship to religion, as a model for Childhood’s simultaneous offering of itself to—and thwarting of—allegorical, metonymic-literal, and ironical readings.14 Yet it has to be kept in mind that, especially after the publication of Schooldays, the gods are not only of interest to Coetzee because their treatment in Herbert’s works serves him as a model for modes of writing and reading. Coetzee’s engagement with Herbert also drives his revision of the place of the human with regard to the animal and the divine. In this context, the question of the literality of the gods is not central: even if the gods did not literally exist, they would be conceptually necessary for defining the place of the human. Coetzee’s essay “On Zbigniew Herbert” in his Late Essays (2017), published after Schooldays, casts such an illuminating a light on the Jesus novels’ concern with passion, the human and the divine in relation to the state that it warrants detailed discussion here. Many of Herbert’s poems, Coetzee writes, “turn on an opposition between purity (purity of theory, purity of doctrine), which he aligns with the divine or angelic, and the impure, the messy, the human” (LE 160). “Apollo and Marsyas” is one of these poems. The God Apollo, “inhuman and therefore without human feelings” (LE 160), flays alive the human Marsyas and shudders at Marsyas’ howl that “expresses every atom of his exposed (skinned) human (ungod-­ like) being with a petrifying intensity that the god cannot equal” (LE 160). The poem is only one of Herbert’s poems that “put the case for the human in its unequal contest with the divine” (LE 160): “[t]he gods believe they are omnipotent; but in fact suffering as animal beings suffer, unable to escape the body in pain, is beyond their ken. Being powerless is beyond the power of the gods” (LE 162). However, Coetzee adds in parentheses, in the greater pantheon there is a god who responds to the charge of being above and beyond suffering by committing himself to suffering in a human way, without relief, unto death. This god, the Christian Jesus, has no presence in Herbert’s poetic universe. (LE 162)

But Jesus does have a presence in Childhood and Schooldays. While the Christian notion of God is absolute, the idea of Jesus’ straddling the ontological categories ‘divine’ and ‘human’ allows Coetzee to harness Christian thought against the pure ontological categories imposed by the state. Mulhall has observed that the muddling of ontological categories in the person of Jesus made Christianity seem foolish to the Greeks. In this sense,

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Coetzee’s project of revising the human is inspired by Christian rather than Greek thought. The incarnation of God in Christ is a model for Coetzee’s attempt to embed one reality in another, the ideal in the material (see “Health and Deviance” 31), the pure in the impure. If David is a kind of Jesus, then Coetzee’s rendering him doubly impure semantically overdetermines him as embodiment of the idea of Jesus: David is divine and human, but also human and animal, animal and divine. While the idea of Jesus has no presence in Herbert’s poetry, Coetzee’s novels place Jesus in a world that is Herbertian. “On Zbigniew Herbert” leaves little doubt that Novilla and Estrella are inspired by Herbert’s poems, in which the world is created by God in imitation of his own perfection: these worlds are of supremely reasonable design, but for humans they turn out to be uninhabitable. Coetzee’s characterization of the settings of Herbert’s poems evokes Novilla and Estrella not least by including details such as the separation of mothers and children and the loss of memory experienced by immigrants upon arrival in the next world: The world that God created, and that carries the imprint of divine reason, may be perfect in theory but is hard to bear in reality (“In the Studio”). Even the next world turns out to be pretty unendurable by human standards. As new arrivals discover at the heavenly gates, not the tiniest memento of their old life will be allowed to accompany them; even babes are to be removed from their mothers’ arms “since it turns out / we shall be saved each one alone”. God’s Heaven turns out to have an uncanny resemblance to Auschwitz (“At the Gate of the Valley”). (LE 160–61)

Herbert, Coetzee goes on, warns of ideologies such as Christianity and Marxism that promise a perfect world, an inhuman world, a heaven on earth. Both Christianity and Marxism have been invoked by critics as models for Coetzee’s fictional worlds, with Novilla being characterized both as an ‘afterlife’ (see Mosca, “Ideas and Embodied Souls” 135–36) and as a realm of ‘anarcho-syndicalism’ (see During, “Coetzee as Academic Novelist” 250). In Herbert’s works, humans remain impure beings even in heaven; “what we end up with is an afterlife not too different from life in People’s Poland (‘Report from Paradise’)” (LE 161). Novilla and Estrella are not replicas of the infernal paradises of Herbert’s poetry. But Herbert’s undermining of the divine/human hierarchy through picturing suffering and mortality as a gift unobtainable by the gods, and his redemption of the human as impure being, clearly informs

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Schooldays. Herbert poses the question of how to resist the “heartless, bloodless angels and their demand that he [Herbert’s persona Mr Cogito] give up his humanity. Smell, taste, even hearing—these he will be prepared to relinquish” (LE 161), but not sight and touch. This, too, is a model for Simón’s insistence on the right to human passions in drab Novilla. It is a model of resistance to being purely rational, a model that Dmitri takes to extremes and that he ultimately perverts in his murder of passion. Yet even his crime cannot overshadow a crucial fact: the effect of the idea of the human as an autonomous rational agent, tending towards the divine in his or her control of the passions, reaches far beyond Western notions of responsibility. It serves the state’s interest in self-preservation and self-­ reproduction. Calling for a controlled use of the passions, the idea promotes a self-monitoring that complements the state’s juridical means of disciplining the citizen; instilled in the human subject, it helps to make the passions subservient to biopolitics (see Foucault, Discipline & Punish 104–94 and Society Must Be Defended 242–44). The Human as Dancer I have shown that Childhood ends with a vision of a religious community: an extended holy family is on the brink of leaving behind the nation-state that, historically speaking, has taken the place of the imagined religious community. Schooldays does not realize the promised civitas Dei. It demonstrates the nation-state’s power to force its subjects into ontological categories, to prosecute what it defines as impure. However, Schooldays goes beyond a critique of pure ontologies. After the nation-state and the religious community, a third community enters the picture: a community of dancers moving in harmony, guided by immutable laws of numbers and of the body. Schooldays’ vision of this community is nostalgic because it pictures humans before the fall from grace, that is, before thinking of themselves principally as epistemic creatures tasked with representing in their minds a world of external objects (including their own bodies), and it is utopian because it is embodied in children, in a humanity in the making. The figure of the dancer as a counterpart to the solipsistic human-as-­ thinker is not unprecedented in Coetzee’s oeuvre. In Summertime, John’s former dance teacher Adriana tells his biographer: Now this man comes to me, to the mistress of the dance. […] So I show him, show him how we move in the dance. […] And he listens and tells

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himself, Aha, she means pull the red string followed by the blue string! […] But that is not how you dance! […] Dance is incarnation. In dance it is not the puppet-master in the head that leads the body that follows, it is the body itself that leads, the body with its soul, its body-soul. Because the body knows! It knows! When the body feels the rhythm inside it, it does not need to think. That is how we are if we are human. That is why a wooden puppet cannot dance. The wood has no soul. The wood cannot feel the rhythm. So I ask: How could this man of yours be a great man when he was not human? (S 199)

Adriana’s remarks are reminiscent of basic tenets of practice theory and symmetric anthropology, and so is the Academy’s philosophy of dance. As discussed in Chap. 2, practice theory and symmetric anthropology revaluate the body and provide an embodied account of knowledge and social practices. In Schatzki’s terms, Adriana’s remarks about dance apply to all human practices, but dance is a particularly clear example of practice because the body—sine qua non of any practice—is its own tool and the only tool in it. This is why practice theorists occasionally use dance as a metaphor for practice as such.15 Whether they are dancing, resting, or drinking, humans do not exist outside of practices because they are always already embedded in them. Practices are not first of all discourses but embodied knowledge; the body is the expression of knowing-how that cannot be translated into propositional terms (see Social Practices 53). Dance as explained by Adriana is also reminiscent of Latour’s attempts to show the artificiality of the separation between natural and cultural explanations of the human and the world. Latour argues that only since the ideas of Galileo Galilei (1564–1641), Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), René Descartes (1596–1650), Robert Boyle (1626–1691), and Isaac Newton (1642–1726) have we been comfortable with a resolute separation between natural facts and social constructions. However, if we want to adequately understand the human and human practices, we have to go back to before the inception of modernity (see We Have Never Been Modern 15–32). In order to move beyond artificial boundaries, we have to restart from before the scientists and philosophers who, in Schooldays, are summed up under the name “Metros” (SJ 225) and who contribute to the modern sense that everything in the universe can be measured (see SJ 235), including “Man the Measurer of All Things” (SJ 225). With Metros, the idea of the human as thinking subject situated in a spatiotemporal matrix filled with objects takes hold—a point to which I will return later.

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In Schooldays, dance not merely demonstrates the embodied nature of knowledge in practices. Dance has a further vital quality already highlighted in Foe. Susan Barton keeps wondering why Friday dances, until it strikes her that we “dance and spin and transport ourselves” (F 104). To dance is to temporarily escape to another world, as Sufi dancers do when they connect with God in their whirling that imitates the planets’ revolving around the sun (see Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam 183). The dance taught at the Estrellan Academy both blends and transforms Summertime’s idea of dance as embodied knowledge, a merging of body and soul into body-soul, and Foe’s idea of dance as transport to another world. Schooldays’ transformation of these ideas involves the question of where the dancer is transported to. In Foe, Barton suggests that Friday is transported to a religious realm specific to his culture and unknown to her. In Schooldays, the dance calls something down from the stars rather than transporting the dancer to a culturally constructed and therefore arbitrary elsewhere. That which is called down is not arbitrary: it is the immutable truth. The Academy’s syncretistic philosophy of dance involves a neo-­ platonic theory of memory and—like the nation according to Anderson— offers a solution to the religious problem of how to connect this world with the next or the previous one. When we begin our new life, Ana Magdalena argues, we do not have true memories of the last life and only sense shadows of it (another order of knowledge). Children still feel these shadows vividly. They have no words for them, as we have lost the appropriate language when we left the world we came from. All that is left of that “primal language” (SJ 67) are a few “transcendental words” (SJ 68), the prime numbers (out of which the other numbers are composed) being the most prominent. It is the prime numbers that the children evoke in dancing. The dance they learn is not graceless or carnal but ordered, “body and soul together” (SJ 68). In dance, the numbers cease to be mere ideas and become real (see SJ 67–68). What Ana Magdalena proposes describes embodied knowledge, or knowing-how, and her husband adds: We believe [that …] music and dance together, music-dance, is its own way of apprehending the universe, the human way but also the animal way, the way that prevailed before the coming of Metros. As we at the Academy do not distinguish between music and dance, so we do not distinguish between mind and body. The teachings of Metros constituted a new, mental science, and the knowledge they brought into being was a new, mental knowledge.

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The older mode of apprehension comes from body and mind moving together, body-mind, to the rhythm of body-dance. In that dance old memories come to the surface, archaic memories, knowledge we lost when we voyaged here across the oceans. (SJ 243)

Juan Sebastián Arroyo’s association of the body and dance, on the one hand, and music and mind, on the other, can baffle, but his analogies fit the particular dance practised at the Academy and the particular music to which the dancers move. Simón feels that Arroyo’s music, despite being rational and unimpassioned, proceeds in harmony with the dancer’s movements (see SJ 125, 245–46). Moving without impassioning, the music does not precede and give rise to the dance; rather, the dance embodies that music in performance. This is Simón’s impression, too: the music leads the dancer, but it is also “the dancer who leads and the master who follows” (SJ 246). The dance is a practised use of one’s body that transcends the language games and rule-following in which society organizes the coexistence of conflicting human passions. It replaces these games and rules with immutable numbers and the limits of bodily movement themselves, the authority of the body: the body is the immutable numbers it dances, and the numbers are that body. In dancing, the numbers are knowing-how rather than immutable ideas independent of the body. Simón, the Jesus novels’ man of common sense who is frequently given to doubt, is convinced of this when he sees David dancing the number Seven: As if the earth has lost its downward power, the boy seems to shed all bodily weight, to become pure light. The logic of the dance eludes him entirely, yet he knows that what is unfolding before him is extraordinary; and from the hush that falls in the auditorium he guesses that the people of Estrella find it extraordinary too. […T]he being who dances before them is neither child nor man, boy or girl; he would even say neither body nor spirit. Eyes shut, mouth open, rapt, David floats through the steps with such fluid grace that time stands still. Too caught up even to breathe, he, Simón, whispers to himself: Remember this! If ever in the future you are tempted to doubt him, remember this! (SJ 246)

It is instructive here to remember that much of Childhood is devoted to Simón insisting on the natural needs and authority of the body, and to David insisting that his private language is the true one. The dance taught at the Academy is a fantastic synthesis of Simón’s obstinate belief in the body’s authority, and David’s kabbalistic promise that the language he

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speaks consists of the true names of things: a body language that is what it signifies, a language in which the body signifies the prime numbers as much as the prime numbers signify the body. David’s dance merges before Simón’s eyes the empirically undeniable reality of the body (‘I feel pain or pleasure, therefore I am body’) with the conceptually undeniable reality of the prime numbers. “Mind”, according to Schatzki, “is the expressed of the body” (Social Practices 53). In David’s dance, the body is also the expressed of the mind. In “Among School Children”, William Butler Yeats finds striking images for the hope that it might not yet be too late for humanity to learn to dance in such a way. The poem begins with a visit to a school where children are taught in the “modern way” (Selected Poems 151). It moves on to mock the teaching of disembodied ideas, as Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagoras were wont to do (the latter known for investigating the mathematical basis of music). The poem concludes with a stanza that uses the parallel images of the tree and the dancer to affirm that ideas only exist in an embodied state and can only be learned (blossom, danced) by the unified body-soul.     Labour is blossoming or dancing where     The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,     Nor beauty born out of its own despair,     Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.     O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,     Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?     O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,     How can we know the dancer from the dance?              (Selected Poems 153)

The Arroyos do not want to know dancer and dance apart. Each needs the other to become real, to be realized in the sense of Coetzee’s realism charted in Chap. 2: the dance gives body to the prime numbers that would otherwise remain insubstantial; and the prime numbers structure the music which governs the body whose movements would otherwise be uncoordinated. It might seem arbitrary that, of all numbers, the primes should structure Arroyo’s music. While it is true that musical sound in general exhibits numerical properties (see Smith Bridle, The New Music 42–43), there is no reason to believe that the primes are more essential to music than other numbers. However, if we consider Bach’s compositions and those of other

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Baroque composers, the connection is compelling. Bach’s habit of basing his music on the relation between special numbers (see Tatlow, Bach’s Numbers 1–130) was not untypical of his time. As Ulrich Michels explains, the music of the Baroque (1600–1750) grew out of and responded to a view of the universe as rationally and harmonically ordered: hence the music’s speculative symbolism of numbers, its specific order of harmony and rhythm (basso continuo), and its universal reference to God. The animal passions in humans—Bach’s educated contemporaries would have Hobbes’ phrase homo homini lupus in mind—were thought to be governable through rational order, in politics as much as in music. Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler all contributed to the belief in a universal order of planets, and Descartes proposed a rational model of the human mind informed by his studies in mathematics—a discipline that was central to composers of Bach’s age because the order of numbers was believed to structure the universe and all of its phenomena. The Baroque was also the age when the first academies of music were founded. They propagated these teachings premised on the belief that the spherical harmony—the sound created by the movements of planets—is music, and that all music symbolizes universal order (see Michels, DTV-Atlas Musik 267). As the prime numbers cannot be produced by multiplying other numbers, Baroque composers were bound to consider them more original elements of God’s creation than composite numbers. This is the no longer medieval and not yet modern historical background against which the evocation of the prime numbers through music and dance in Estrella’s Academy must be understood. That the prime numbers “live among the […] stars” (SJ 68) and are called down in dance is a thought likewise not foreign to the Baroque. Particularly illuminating in this regard are the ideas of the Dominican ­philosopher Tommaso Campanella, whose utopian work Civitas Solis [The City of the Sun]—published in 1623 and inspired by Augustine’s Civitas Dei, Plato’s Republic, and Thomas More’s Utopia—imagines an osmosis between society and the stars. The citizens of the Civitas Solis regard the sun and the stars […] as the living representatives and signs of God, as the temples and holy living altars […]. They contemplate and know God under the image of the Sun, and they call it the sign of God […]. Therefore they have built an altar like to the sun in shape, and the priests praise God in the sun and in the stars, as it were His altars, and in the heavens, His temple as it were; and they pray to good angels, who are, so to speak, the intercessors living in the stars, their strong abodes. For God long since set signs of

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their beauty in heaven, and of His glory in the sun. They say there is but one heaven, and that the planets move and rise of themselves when they approach the sun or are in conjunction with it. (The City of the Sun 68–69)

The denizens of this planetary order are all equal because they exist only in relation to God. Everything from houses to horses, children, and wives is shared in Campanella’s vision—qualities that can partly be detected in Novilla’s and Estrella’s ‘communist’ societies, but also in Inés and Simón’s parentage of David. Even the idea of dance as control, rather than release, of passion, imitating the controlled movements of the heavenly bodies, is present in Campanella (see 65). These premodern ideas, together with others inspired by the Baroque and earlier periods, are amalgamated into the body of teachings on which the community of dancers at the Academy is founded: ideas of a community ordered by the stars, of immutable numbers structuring nature and society, of a music that evokes these numbers, and of a dance that is mimetic of planetary movement.16 In this universe of ideas, Juan Sebastián’s music is not aloof of the world: it is the music of the world. If the dance at the Academy is a language (parole), it can serve as the basis for a new kind of community of those whose bodies speak—that is, dance—the music (langue). As the dancers’ movements are in unison with the same prime numbers that structure the music to which they dance, this body language does not leave its practitioners in need of imagining a community, as do national languages such as the Spanish spoken in Novilla and Estrella. Fluency in that body language entails factual membership in a community linked by truth in the form of the prime numbers. While Schooldays does not feature a permanent civitas Dei ordered by a God who is truth, the dance at the Academy forges a community held together by truth: a performance reclaiming the place of metaphysics and religion arrogated by the nation-­ state. What Simón learns about David’s lessons at the Academy, and what Simón sees when he sees David dance, suggests that practising this dance is learning to leap simultaneously with body and mind, with foot and faith—to leap foot-faithfully over the modern gap between matter and idea that opens up in in the process of reflection. Neither passion nor reflection leads: for Simón, David’s dance is evidence of this accomplishment (see SJ 246). Significantly, the Academy teaches children. Ana Magdalena’s claim that children still have memories of the previous world suggests that they master the dance more easily than adults because the children do not yet

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take the language games and rule-following conducted in Spanish for the way the world necessarily is. Their thoughts are not yet dominated by notions of what can reasonably be assumed and what cannot. “Dancing is the same as counting” (SJ 62), David knows. Another reason why children are ideally suited to the dance practised at the Academy, Simón suggests, is that they are not yet, or at least not as much, in the grip of desire that can lead the movements of dancers astray. Simón explains to David that only adults feel passion, which must be “experienced from the inside before it can be understood from the outside” (SJ 20). But what if reasoning—about passions spoiling the dance or anything else—spoils the dance as easily as passion itself? Why is the dance practised at the Academy, if it used to be the default way for humans to apprehend the world, “also an animal way” (SJ 243) of apprehension, as Juan Sebastián says? And what does Ana Magdalena mean when she says that learning to dance is to train the soul not only in the direction of truth but also “in the direction of the good” (SJ 44)? For answers to these questions, we must turn to Kleist’s genre-defying “On the Marionette Theatre”, a short narrative think-piece that arguably is the single most important key to understanding Schooldays’ treatment of dance. The novel acknowledges indebtedness to Kleist’s text by alluding to it: Juan Sebastián Arroyo paraphrases its claim that marionettes cannot dance because they do not have a soul (see SJ 97), and David receives the gift of a box of marionettes from the three sisters (see SJ 186). “On the Marionette Theatre” is, for the most part, a dialogue between a first-person narrator whose identity remains covert and a professional dancer at the local opera house, referred to as Herr C. The narrator tells C. that he was astonished to see him watching the popular spectacle of the marionette theatre on the market square. C. replies that the trajectory of the marionette’s members might appear simple from a mechanical point of view: the puppeteer does not have to move the single members of the marionette but only control its centre of gravity (see 22). Things are more mysterious, however: the trajectory is, in fact, nothing else than “the path of the soul of the dancer” (23). Through this trajectory the puppeteer places himself at the marionette’s centre of gravity; in other words, he dances. The narrator expresses doubt about these proclamations, goading C. on to the surprising claim that a perfectly made marionette would be able to dance more gracefully than any dancer; unlike a dancer, a marionette would never be affected by the whims of the soul, which sometimes occupies a point other than the movement’s centre of gravity. C. gives a

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theological explanation of why this grace could never be achieved by a dancer: ever since the fall from grace, consciousness mars the purity of human movement. Only God’s infinite consciousness could match the marionette’s grace (see 23–24). The narrator is surprised by C.’s account which, despite its eccentricity, reminds him of a personal experience. The narrator tells the story of how one of his friends had “lost his innocence—and Paradise too, simply because of an observation he made that I witnessed at the same time” (24–25). One day, after taking a swim together, the friend happened to dry his foot. In that moment, his pose was exactly like that of a sculpture both men had seen in Paris of a young man pulling a splinter from his foot. When the friend noted the likeness and told the narrator, the latter jokingly remarked that his friend was seeing ghosts. At once, the likeness between friend and sculpture disappeared. Despite subsequent efforts, the friend could not reproduce the sculpture’s pose. Since then, all happiness and virtue left the young man (see 24–25). The reader now expects C. to apply his theory of dance to this story. Instead, C. tells another story whose meaning, he announces, will be clear enough. C. once competed with a young nobleman in fencing. Despite his adversary’s considerable skill, C. defeated the nobleman, who then presented to him a bear trained for fencing, and invited C. to fence with the animal. The bear, on its hind legs, parried each of C.’s blows with a slight movement of his paw. Whenever C. pretended to attack, the bear simply did not move, as if he could see straight into C.’s soul (see 25). C. now sums up his theoretical deliberations: the less reflection and the less knowledge in the dancer, the more graceful the dance. Only when reflection has passed through eternity and returns upon itself does grace reappear. “[G]race […] appears to best advantage in that human bodily structure that has no consciousness at all—or has infinite consciousness—that is, in the mechanical puppet, or in the God” (26). Before assessing the significance of “On the Marionette Theatre” for the motif of the dance in Schooldays, one must register the complex ways in which the form and content of Kleist’s text relate to each other. While C.’s speeches explain how the purity of the body’s movement is hampered by consciousness, these explanations no more convey knowledge of how to dance than the conscious attempts of the young friend manage to restore the sculpture’s pose. Aunt Mercedes from Schooldays observes the same difficulty in teaching and learning to dance: “If your son were to

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explain his dance he would not be able to dance any more. […] That is the paradox within which we dancers are trapped” (SJ 191). The dancer’s movements are only beautiful if unconscious. Kleist’s frame narrative about the meeting in the park also demonstrates how C.’s ideas on dancing are inflected by his own bodily constitution and the situation in which he utters these ideas. The fact that a professional dancer defends his reasoning against a man who expects him to be skilled in dancing, not reasoning, suggests that C.’s argument is influenced by a possibly unconscious ulterior motive: the motive to validate his own artistic existence vis-à-vis the view that the mind ranks higher than the body, regardless of the body’s skills. Put positively, the switching between frame narrative, C.’s theoretical remarks, and anecdotes illustrates how narrative can convey ideas and arguments inflected by the knowing-how entailed by the embodiment and sociality of thinking. In fact, “On the Marionette Theatre” can be seen as a model for Coetzee’s poetic of revision: a narrative performance of embodiedness and embeddedness that, at the thematic level, addresses the question of embodiedness and embeddedness to revise the idea of the human as a superior mind mounted on a base animal body, and to shift humanity’s position amongst the divine (God), the animal (bear), and the inanimate (marionette). Kleist’s embedding of discursive and narrative passages on the relation between the divine, the human, the animal, and the puppet returns in Coetzee’s fictions, most explicitly in the lessons on “The Lives of Animals” in Elizabeth Costello.17 Schooldays also adopts Kleist’s realistic qualification of arguments about dance by body and social context: a narrative performance of the bodily and social conditions of arguments that relocates the human amongst the divine and the animal. It is with this realism in mind that one must read Schooldays’ revisions of the human as they become visible in a comparison with Kleist. To begin with, Kleist’s “On the Marionette Theatre” itself revises assumptions about the human. Christian Moser has shown how the text revises Friedrich Schiller’s aesthetic, according to which grace is a product of the harmonious interplay of human faculties rather than of accident; for Schiller, grace cannot appear in the animal. Moser argues that in Childhood, Coetzee follows Kleist in critiquing this aesthetic (see “Social Order and Transcendence” 51–55).18 However, Schooldays’ more extensive and complex dialogue with “On the Marionette Theatre” suggests that Coetzee is principally concerned with the text’s implications for the status of the

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human. While marionettes are mentioned by Juan Sebastián Arroyo, and while David is given marionettes as a gift, David ignores them, and Arroyo also signals his disinterest: The dance is not a matter of beauty. If I wanted to create beautiful figures of movement I would employ marionettes, not children. Marionettes can float and glide as human beings cannot. They can trace patterns of great complexity in the air. But they cannot dance. They have no soul. It is the soul that brings grace to the dance, the soul that follows the rhythm, each step instinct with the next step and the next. (SJ 97)

Schooldays shifts the focus from the beauty of dance (Kleist’s focus) to the relevance of dance for the idea of the human. The human as dancer is the human as body-soul. It is this body-soul that responds to music in dance that dances: not only the body, and not only the mind. In order to dance, the mind must “step down from the position” of authority, “the position of […] ‘the subject supposed to know’” (DP 65), to borrow Coetzee’s words on serious writing. Dancing, in this sense, is similar to serious writing: to delegate authority to one’s body just as the serious writer delegates authority to the situation he always already finds himself in: writing in the shadow of writers before him. For an adult like Simón—the modern man of reason and doubt—stepping down from this position of authority requires a leap of faith. Simón finally makes this leap when, at the end of Schooldays, he offers his services to the Academy. He commits himself to a belief in a metaphysical realm he knows he does not understand—he himself cannot dance, at least not yet—but that, he is now certain, must exist because David moves gracefully in it, is its embodiment. In Schooldays the child, for whom reflection has not yet become second nature, learns the dance with little effort. A romantic figure of innocence and prelapsarian existence, the child becomes the image of unfallen humanity in the novel: the representative of a humanity before becoming modern, before growing up. Focusing on the child instead of the marionette is part of Coetzee’s emphasis on the question of the human instead of the question of beauty; but it is also part of his zooming in on the critical transition of humanity from childhood to adulthood, from premodernity to modernity; a transition that, according to the ideas invoked by the novel, gradually occurred approximately between 1500 and 1650 in the timeframe that scholars, depending on disciplinary affiliation, refer to as Baroque, Renaissance, or the Early Modern period.

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In “On the Marionette Theatre”, Kleist tells his story from the standpoint of a fallenness at once biblical and deeply personal, at once primordial and very recent. Around 1801, Kleist was reading Kant. The argument that time and space do not belong to reality but are categories of the human mind, and that humans do not perceive things as they are but as they appear to them, deeply unsettled Kleist’s sense of being at home in the world (see Földényi, Heinrich von Kleist 225–32; Müller-Salget, Heinrich von Kleist 52–57). In “On the Marionette Theatre”, the fall from grace and into modernity is indeed the loss of trust in the epistemic abilities of the human. In Genesis, Adam and Eve’s awareness of being naked marks the onset of reflection. “On the Marionette Theatre” blends this biblical moment with the post-Kantian awareness that human reflection itself is exposed to error: henceforth, every step is accompanied by hesitation and doubt. In Schooldays, the feebleness of rational reflection, of logos in both its senses of reason and language, spoils the spontaneity and grace of dance. This feebleness is why the Academy teaches dancing as opposed to speaking or reasoning, as Ana Magdalena points out: “Words are feeble—that is why we dance” (SJ 68). Yet Schooldays suggests that humans’ fall from grace into modernity does not merely consist in the realization that they cannot perceive things as they truly are, but in coming to understand themselves principally as epistemic creatures. In Schooldays, humans’ fall from grace concerns their epistemic identity, not their epistemic ability. With the arrival of Metros, what is actually a limitation to thinking is beginning to be mistaken for humanity’s defining ability: to accurately describe, according to its relative measures of time and space, the external world of phenomena. The fact of only being able to measure the world of phenomena becomes the proud declaration that “there is nothing in the universe that cannot be measured” (SJ 235). The fact that “there can be no absolute measurement” (SJ 235) becomes the grandiose idea that humanity is the centre of the universe because “measurement is always relative to the measurer” (SJ 235). The philosopher Moreno, who introduces Estrella’s citizens to Metros, argues that the arrival of Metros marks a turning point in human history: the moment when we collectively gave up the old way of apprehending the world, the unthinking, animal way, when we abandoned as futile the quest to know things in themselves, and began instead to see the world through its metra. By concentrating our gaze upon fluctuations in the metra we enabled

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­ urselves to discover new laws, laws that even the heavenly bodies have to o obey. Similarly on earth, where in the spirit of the new metric science we measured mankind and, finding that all men are equal, concluded that men should fall equally under the law. No more slaves, no more kings, no more exceptions. (SJ 242)

Abandoning as futile the quest to know things in themselves evokes Kant. However, the positive assumption that everything—including humankind—can be measured precedes Kant’s insight that everything can only be measured by the relative measures of time and space. Put poignantly, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is a theoretical afterthought to the empirical and mathematical practices of measuring instituted by the likes of Galileo, Newton, Kepler, and the mathematician-philosopher Descartes. Metros entails the repercussions of these practices on the idea of man as the “measurer of all things” (SJ 225), that is, as a subject examining objects in space. No one has criticized the changes brought by ‘Metros’ more incisively than Heidegger. In Being and Time he pictures the shift from being-in-­ the-world (a state in which the world is the realm of others and things with which I am engaged in goal-directed activities) to the Cartesian world (a three-dimensional space in which things become objects that the subject must correctly identify). In fact, Heidegger argues, the world is not divided in two substances, matter and mind; epistemology, as the bridging of the gap between both, is not humans’ principal activity (see Being and Time 49–83). As I have discussed in Chap. 2, Heidegger does not acknowledge the import of the body to his argument. Coetzee’s pitting the dancer against the disengaged thinker is an attack not only on Descartes but also on Heidegger, who saw Descartes’ errors but recoiled from rehabilitating the human’s animal body to right them. Not so Schooldays’ Academy. When Arroyo states that “[t]he child does not need to think, for the child can dance” (SJ 97), he argues that dancing is a pre-rational way of apprehending the world that involves what from Elizabeth Costello through Summertime to the Jesus novels is called the body-soul: mind-body always already involved in practice, rather than the mind turning theory into practice by controlling the body’s measured movements (“pull the red string followed by the blue string” [S 199]). By replacing C.’s theological argument about the fall from grace with Arroyo’s argument about the arrival of Metros, Schooldays combines ideas reminiscent of practice theory with a nostalgic-utopian return to premodernity. This return resembles

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Latour’s deeply Heideggerian longing for a worldview in which the universe is not external, spatial, and measurable but that in which I am always already engaged. In Schooldays, it is not only the child that embodies prelapsarian humanity. As in “On the Marionette Theatre”, the animal also represents embodied knowing-how of the world instead of knowing-that disowning its embodiedness. Kleist scholarship has long noted his apotheosis of the unconscious (see, e.g., Blöcker, Heinrich von Kleist 189–96), and more recent studies have shown that Kleist’s revaluation of the irrational and the unconscious as antipodes of rationality and consciousness goes along with a hybridization of the human and the animal (see, e.g., Földényi, Heinrich von Kleist 233–35). Concerning influence on Schooldays, the most important of Kleist’s hybrid characters is Penthesilea, the heroine of the eponymous play and the writer’s most radical attempt at a character who is both human and animal. The amazon queen loves the Greek warrior Achilles. Her passion is absolute, unimpeded by reflection: this is what makes her companions describe her in animal terms. She finally bites her beloved Achilles to death in an act that eludes rational explanations. László Földényi describes Penthesilea as a hybrid creature in several respects: she resembles a dog-woman when she mauls Achilles to death and is repeatedly called ‘sphinx’ in the play, which is also the name of one of her dogs; at other times, she is described as a winged creature akin to the sun-god, as a god-woman; finally, her tiny hands and flexible body also make her seem a child-woman. This multiply hybrid creature dances with grace and exhibits the same effortless elegance when mauling Achilles (see Heinrich von Kleist 172, 233–34). Grace, in Kleist, is the beautiful harmony of body and soul, a prelapsarian consonance that, after the fall from grace, gave way to a mind reflecting on the body and marring its graceful movement. After the fall, grace can return only for moments. It is spiritually experienced by his characters as spontaneous, unmerited gift of salvation, or in other words, as the religious experience defined by theology (see Cross, Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church 700–02); and it is outwardly visible in the ephemeral, perfectly beautiful movement of body and soul reconciled with each other. Simón catches a glimpse of this perfection when he watches David dance the number Seven: “[f]rom some buried memory the words pillar of grace emerge, surprising him” (SJ 246). In contrast to Christian theology, both Kleist and Coetzee suggest that grace is not limited to the human, that animals can exhibit it, and that hybrid creatures are capable of displaying animal grace in actions that,

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from a human perspective, are morally appalling. In “On the Marionette Theatre”, the fencing bear moves with perfect grace. So does Penthesilea when she mauls Achilles (see Földényi, Heinrich von Kleist 174–77), and so does the bear-man Dmitri who kills his beloved Ana Magdalena in an act as rationally inexplicable as Penthesilea’s. If we look at Dmitri through Kleist’s works, he is a cross-breed of the dog-woman Penthesilea and the fencing man-bear of “On the Marionette Theatre”: “Dmitri the bear” (SJ 69) who is one with his body and its passions and always follows his heart. In Schooldays, always following the heart, unimpeded by reflection, is the animal’s way of being. The animal is a living body-soul, and as such exhibits grace even if its actions cannot be good or bad because it stands outside these categories—just as God, who stands outside morality as well, would dance with perfect grace if ever he did (see “On the Marionette Theatre” 24). The problem posed by Penthesilea and Dmitri is by what measure to judge their actions. What would a human-animal measure look like? Dmitri’s case shows that from a moral, that is, human point of view, absolute trust in the heart and the passions is naïve—not because animals are cruel or evil, but because they are simply “outside good and bad” (SJ 36). In “On the Marionette Theatre”, grace appears in bodies either unhampered by reflection, that is, in animals such as the bear and marionettes, or bodies filled with infinite reflection, that is, in God. From the point of view of grace, the animal and God look indistinguishable. Coetzee adopts this divinanimality of grace from Kleist by embodying grace in the bear-­ man Dmitri and in the god-child David. But only David and the other children at the Academy form an ephemeral, quasi-religious community within the civitas terrena of Estrella. As the children are practising ­movements guided by immutable truths, Ana Magdalena can say they are also trained “in the direction of the good” (SJ 44). In premodern theological thought such as Augustine’s, God is the supreme truth and the supreme good: both supreme qualities are not two different substances but one (see De Trinitate 15–22, 89–93). Ethics and epistemology coincide insofar as the good is knowledge of the truth. In his reworking of “On the Marionette Theatre”, then, Coetzee shifts the focus from beauty to humanity, from the marionette to the child, and from the individual to the community, turning the dance practised at the Academy into a vision of both grace and community. Based on unchanging mathematical laws, music inspires the body’s movement and is at the same time materialized by the body’s movements in dance. The reciprocal

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relation between music and dancer replaces Kleist’s hierarchical image of puppeteer and marionette and creates a community not imagined but based on the standards of the body—each dancer is embodied the same way—and of the numerical laws of music. The result of Coetzee’s revision of “On the Marionette Theatre” is no less eccentric than Herr C.’s claims. If anything, Kleist’s piece becomes a platform for a vision of humanity even more radical, both in the sense of ‘extreme’ and ‘concerning the roots’. Embodying its strange and strangely consistent ideas in David, Dmitri, Ana Magdalena, and Juan Sebastián, and embedding these ideas and characters in the world of Estrella, Schooldays invites the reader to seriously consider, if only for a moment, the “what if” entailed in its narrative. Serious consideration is not conviction, and it is not belief. But it marks the beginning of questioning the categories at our disposal to think the collective, political dimension of the human, such as state, nation, or nation-state; just as Dmitri’s being human-and-animal, Juan Sebastián’s being human-and-divine, and David’s and Ana Magdalena’s being human-­ and-­animal-and-divine extend an invitation to question the categorical inventory allowing us to think the individual human. Reconsidering the pure category of the single human in favour of an impure ontology proximate to and continuous with the animal and the divine supports a reconsideration of collective humanity. In secular thought, political orders tend to be negatively defined in contrast to animal orders—for example, in Hobbes’ idea of the social contract, where the Leviathan supersedes the natural state in which individuals are wolves to each other. In monotheistic thought, political orders are positively defined by their directedness towards God. If the single human cannot absolutely be told apart from the animal or the divine, animality, and divinity no longer serve as reliable negative or positive ordering principles—hence the need for an alternative. Schooldays leaves enough interpretive space for the reader to brush off such reconsiderations of individual and collective humanity as ‘mumbo-­ jumbo’. The dancing teacher Mercedes represents an approach to dance that seems more reasonable than the Arroyos’. Near the end of the novel, Mercedes suggests that the dance taught at the Academy is not human at all when she asks David: Can you do human dancing? […] You are a human being, aren’t you? Can you do any of the dances that human beings do, such as dancing for joy or dancing breast to breast with someone you are fond of? […] Until you learn to do what human beings do you can’t be a full human being. (SJ 234)

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The world of Estrella is the same as the one of Novilla, a human world. As Mercedes suggests, the body that dances a human dance does not—cannot?—rein in its passions because these passions make it human in the first place. David may not want to learn human dances, but he will have to live a human life, his elective parents agree. When David is finally put in a state school, the nation-state reaffirms its power. The permanent reality is that of the civitas terrena: of a social life whose practices and rules are instilled by pedagogy and enforced by law. Yet Schooldays also allows the reader to conclude that nothing but modern habit suggests that Mercedes’ view of dance is necessarily the correct one, and that the ethnic, national, and/or state-governed community based on arbitrary but conventional language games and rules is the natural order of human collectivity. The novel remains, to date, Coetzee’s most extensive and serious engagement with the idea that our permanent reality might be punctured by fleeting moments of grace.19 Mercedes’ truth-claims about the humanity or inhumanity of dance might themselves be symptoms of a false view, just as the Academy’s philosophy about the truth of dance might be. The novel’s vision of a community of dancers remains hovering between the possible and the impossible, or better: between the recoverable and the irretrievable. Coetzee’s revision of “On the Marionette Theatre” adapts Kleist’s story of a ‘fall’ while turning this fall into something less conclusive. Entrusting the performance of grace to children instead of marionettes, Schooldays puts grace outside the reach of adults but within reach of humanity: a past but humanly possible state, recoverable by future generations.

Notes 1. This quote is taken from the essay “Identité/Normalité” from Balibar’s Nous, citoyons d’Europe? Since the essay is not included in the English translation, I have translated this text from the French original. 2. Tonje Vold writes: “Coetzee’s references to his own work become the means that allow him to loop the reader back to his own writing whenever she wanders astray trying to measure its importance with reference to literary ‘centrality’ in the world of letters, its ‘national themes,’ the author’s South Africanness or anything beyond the worlds of the novels. By these disorientating strategies, Slow Man attempts to move beyond the hindrances and frameworks of national literature” (“How to ‘rise above mere nationality’” 48). Most recently, Alexandra Effe has extensively and illumi-

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natingly considered the metalepses involving Costello. She argues that these dramatize Costello’s being in a state of limbo, not fully realized in the storyworld, and subject to doubts and uncertainties on behalf of the reader whose reading act codetermines her ontological status (see J.  M. Coetzee 61–98 [esp. 79–97 on Slow Man]). This state resembles Rayment’s status as an immigrant who never fully arrived. 3. Compare, for example, Coetzee’s fictionalized alter ego John in Summertime whom his former dancing teacher Adriana describes as a “wooden man” (S 200). 4. Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” was an early and influential model for the argument, although her manifesto was primarily to show feminism a way from essentialist identity politics to a politics of chosen affinities (see Simians, Cyborgs and Women 149–81). Posthumanism has broadened this claim and often given Haraway’s cyborg metaphor a more literal reading. 5. The novel’s intertexts are as diverse as Peter Pan, Voltaire’s Candide, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the Bible, Plato’s Symposium, Phaidros, and Republic, and other texts discussed below. Amerika and The Childhood of Jesus also resemble each other in their sketchy characterization, in the pervasive cheerfulness that is as irrepressible as it is incomprehensible. 6. Baylee Brits calls David’s approach to numbers—but also to anything else—nominalist rather antinomian. Nominalism is the philosophical position whereby universal entities are denied existence, while the existence of particular or singular entities is affirmed. According to this view, numbers are not ordered by sequence but exist singularly, without any rule establishing an order between them (see “The Name of the Number” 140–41). While I share Brits’ diagnosis that David can think only in singularities, I find the term ‘antinomianism’ more helpful in the Wittgensteinian context of rule-­following that I bring to bear on the Jesus novels. 7. Cervantes ridicules the Spanish romances primarily because of their implausibility, not the historical obsolescence of the code of conduct exhibited by Amadís: what is criticized is the absurdity of the literary genre (see Close, “The Legacy of Don Quixote” 22). 8. In The Real and Its Double, Clément Rosset explains that idiocy, from the Greek idios, means “that which is the only one of its kind” (see 1–10). 9. Kabbalah is a term that has meant different things in the very different contexts of its use. The context I am referring to is European religious and intellectual history. In this context, the kabbalah has been defined as an ancient, mysterious doctrine of Jewish descent that was integrated into Christian theology and European philosophy and science by Florentine Renaissance thinkers (e.g., Pico della Mirandola). These thinkers first associated the kabbalah with, among other things, numerological speculations

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and merged it with conceptions of a multilayered harmonious universe that have continued to characterize modern European esotericism to this day (see Dan, Kabbalah 61–69, 111). 10. Augustine describes the ‘state of nature’ of the two cities as follows: “When those two cities began to run through their course of birth and death, the first to be born [i.e., Cain] was a citizen of this age, and the second [i.e., Abel] was a pilgrim in this age, belonging to the City of God. The latter was predestined by grace and chosen by grace; by grace he was a pilgrim below, and by grace he was a citizen above […] for in every case, as I have said already, man is first reprobate. But though it is of necessity that we begin in this way, we do not of necessity remain thus; for later comes the noble state towards which we may advance, and in which we may abide when we have attained it. Hence, though not every bad man will become good, it is nonetheless true that no one will be good who was not originally bad” (The City of God 15.1). 11. Agamben’s project, in his early work, is to replace the idea of the human as speaking animal with the idea of the human as infant animal, that is, as a not yet speaking animal forced to receive language from somewhere else. 12. In the essay “On the Origins of the State” in Diary of a Bad Year, JC discusses these basic functions of the state with reference to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, where the citizens surrender to the state their right to physical force in order to be guaranteed safety in return. JC explicitly points out that he who is not counted as a member of the state—the outlaw—can be disposed of without legal procedure, whereas criminal insiders are at least guaranteed to receive a punishment that is condign with the offence (see DBY 3–4). Determining that a creature is an animal has for centuries been a way of banishing non-human beings from the purview of the law, of outlawing them. Unlike humans born into states, “animals do not have identity papers” (DBY 4): they are not recognized as members or citizens. 13. “And while they yet believed not for joy, and wondered, he said unto them, Have ye here any meat? And they gave him a piece of a broiled fish, and of an honeycomb. And he took it, and did eat before them.” 14. Irony, in Herbert’s poem, appears to characterize the last stage of humans’ relationship to the gods; it is the literary mode of a world in which authors can no longer literally speak of gods but could just as well be read as a literal representation of irony as a substitute for the divine. Irony and literality thus do not mutually exclude each other—a mode of writing that, according to Boletsi, also characterizes Coetzee’s novel (see “Faith, Irony, Salt” 139–43). 15. As in the following example: “If we think of the general ‘dance’ of teaching, for example, or of the much more particular ‘dance’ of teaching chil-

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dren about the elements of prose used to entertain and engage readers, then each is a ‘dance’ of a particular kind. Looking at practices as ‘dances’ in another way, one might see connections between the particular (teacher) ‘dance’ of preparing lessons, for example, and the (teacher and student) ‘dance’ of accomplishing a lesson” (Kemmis et al., “Ecologies of Practices” 34). 16. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s ideas of a rational language of numbers and of cosmological harmony arguably also inspire Schooldays’ combination of mathematics, language, and cosmology. Leibniz inspired the Russian futurist Velimir Khlebnikov to develop a ‘star language’ called Zaum whose words are the true labels of things, as Khlebnikov claimed. Helpful introductions to Leibniz’s ideas and to Khlebnikov are Gilles Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (London: Athlone Press, 1993) and Raymond Cooke’s Velimir Khlebnikov: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 17. The closest Coetzee comes to discussing the ontological status of puppets in works other than Schooldays is, arguably, his concern with the prosthesis as inanimate human form in Slow Man. Kleist’s piece can also be considered a model for Kafka’s “Report to an Academy”, a text in which the narrative plays with ideas of the human and the animal, and a text which in turn left its traces in Coetzee’s writings (see Chap. 4). 18. Moser shows how, in Childhood, Coetzee alludes to “On the Marionette Theatre” in a moment when Simón decides to teach unruly David a lesson and “raises a threatening hand. The boy does not bat an eyelid. He feints a slap to the cheek. He does not flinch” (CJ 47). The scene recalls Kleist’s fencing bear, who only moves when actually attacked by the fencer. Moser comments: “Like the bear’s, [David’s] instinct turns out to be infallible, and he thus displays a purely natural grace. David seems to be either god or animal; he is not to be classed with the middle ground of humanity” (“Social Order and Transcendence” 60). 19. The frequency with which the term ‘grace’ occurs throughout Schooldays supports this qualitative judgement. ‘Grace’ occurs 17 times in Schooldays but only twice in Childhood. In Disgrace, by comparison, ‘grace’ occurs four times, ‘disgrace’ ten times. (Uses as nouns and verbs are included in these counts.) I have argued elsewhere that what the theologian Rudolf Otto calls the ‘creature-feeling’ leads to moments of secular grace in Youth, Disgrace, Life & Times of Michael K, and Elizabeth Costello (see “The Creature-Feeling as Secular Grace”).

CHAPTER 6

Epilogue

After reading The Schooldays of Jesus it is instructive to look back to Dusklands. The protagonists of Coetzee’s first novel produce narratives that claim to be history. These narratives suggest that Vietnamese and ‘Hottentots’ are less than human because they lack the reason that governs Eugene Dawn’s and Jacobus Coetzee’s own, human minds. Trying to be mind alone by negating their physical existence, the solipsistic Dawn and Coetzee suffer madness and the body’s violent reassertion of its authority in the form of involuntary movements and physical illness. The dancers of Schooldays are the dance in which the body is in the mind and the mind is in the body. They experience their shared embodiedness in a dance in which they form a prelapsarian community that, at least for the time of dancing, is more stable than any community based on conventions. The experience of shared embodiedness is a source of grace: a spontaneous, unmerited salvation, however transitory, from the solipsistic individualism that goes hand in hand with modernity’s casting of the human as thinker facing an external world. This synopsis throws into relief three ways in which the focus of Coetzee’s revisions of the human has shifted. First, it has shifted from exhibiting the division of body and mind in the discursive construction of the (in)human, and the physical and mental suffering inflicted by this division on the self and other humans, to imagining the unified body-soul in practices and as a source of grace. Second, it has shifted from debunking the paradoxes and pathologies of rational thought that exclusively follows © The Author(s) 2019 K. Wiegandt, J.M. Coetzee’s Revisions of the Human, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29306-2_6

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the form ‘either-or’ to putting the ‘and-or’ back into thinking and into the idea of the human by allowing for impure ontologies: human-and-animal, human-and-divine. And third, it has shifted from a focus on the individual human to being-with-others and community. Broadly speaking, the first two shifts testify to Coetzee’s ongoing revisions of the idea of the human as animal rationale. These revisions run through Coetzee’s entire oeuvre and show parallels with the rise of practice theory and symmetric anthropology (see Chap. 2). The third shift, towards the human as being-with-others, marks a revising of the idea of the human as zoon politikon. This idea is important in Dusklands, In the Heart of the Country, Life & Times of Michael K, and Disgrace insofar as these novels show that living outside of society is, ultimately, a form of death. The novels feature only fragments of communities: dysfunctional bonds of kinship, of love, of ethnicity, and nationality. Even the communities of death remain half-realized: Elizabeth Curren’s cancer lets her feel part of the community of those suffering under apartheid but does not ensure that her sympathies are reciprocated; David Lurie feels akin to the dogs about to be euthanized and lives among them but does not join a community in a more tangible way. Only Slow Man and the Jesus novels move beyond dysfunctionality and absence in grappling with the idea of community. They are Coetzee’s most explicit and complex experiments with Aristotle’s idea of the zoon politikon and the discourse this idea gave rise to. The focus of Coetzee’s revisions shifts here from the human need to live with others to the enabling potential of being a political animal. Aristotle explains in Politics that in contrast to other animals living in groups, human beings live together not merely to survive and satisfy their basic needs. Only in the company of others can they develop their full potential as speaking, rational, and ethical creatures, form friendships, and live a good and happy life (see 11–14, 166–71, 184–94). Paul Rayment’s bid to be accepted into the Jokić household as a godfather and benefactor, and the Jokićs’ offer of a gift that would allow him to visit (see SM 223–25, 254–58), are glimpses of a possible community. The Jesus novels go further by envisioning a new form of community. While Coetzee uses religious register in his earlier novels, particularly in his dramatizations of short-lived unions of body and soul, the movement in his ‘Australian’ phase towards positively imagining humanity as being-­ with-­others is accompanied by a veritable turn to religious and premodern registers and ideas. I want to finish with some observations on how these developments interrelate. Comparing Coetzee’s reimagination of

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c­ ommunity with recent theorizations of community will help me to clarify the specific, yet not unrelated, uses of religious and premodern thought in the Jesus novels and to chart the horizon of ideas against which the singularity of Coetzee’s revisions stands out. The classics of modern social thought associate modernity with a loss of community. Karl Marx argued that workers are alienated from their own humanity and from each other through capitalist modes of production. Max Weber demonstrated that religious doctrines no longer give shared meaning to the world and that the modern rule of rationality cannot close this gap. Georg Simmel charted how rural communities give way to the anonymity of modern cities and monetized interpersonal relations. Writing towards the end of the twentieth century, Jean-Luc Nancy argued that such mourning for lost community is in fact a cover for modernity’s inability to think community without the humanist assumption that the immanent human being—the absolute, detached individual—is the basic element of community. The individual, according to Nancy, is merely the residue of the experience of immanence: that which remains after belief in the divine has left the world (see Inoperative Community 2–3, 8). Modern conceptions of community, even communism’s, depend on an identity (based on ethnicity or culture, class, nationality, etc.) shared by all members of a community. Such conceptions necessarily negate the internal differences between individuals in favour of that identity. Modern communities thus tend towards the totalitarian even while meant to remedy the losses associated with modernity (see 9–12). Already Kleist, whose “On the Marionette Theatre” speaks of a desire to return to transcendence and provides Coetzee with utopian ideas of community, exemplified the danger inherent to modern ideas of community: in his political writings he voiced ideas of community that have been read as harbingers of German fascism.1 The Jesus novels are not blind to the dangers inherent to communities based on identity. Their evocation of Herbert’s poetic vision of the afterlife in the form of totalitarian perfection uncannily resembling Auschwitz (see LE 160–61) can be read as cautionary gestures. So can the words of the dance teacher Mercedes, who characterizes the dancing of numbers as too purified of passion to pass for human dance (see SJ 234). Yet Schooldays’ imagining of a community of dancers is explicitly premodern. It shares with Nancy the aim to imagine community without recourse to identity. Nancy’s answer to modernity’s privileging of the individual in communitarian thought is to think human existence as being always already ‘being-with-others’. ‘Being-with-others’ must take the

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place of the ‘subject’ as the primary unit of philosophical analysis (see Inoperative Community 103–05).2 In this conception, human beings do not need to share an identity to form a community. The community Nancy envisions encompasses the singularity, or non-identity, of human beings: a utopian, and in fact paradoxical, project that Nancy consequently calls ‘inoperative community’ (see 15). I have shown that at the heart of the Jesus novels is the conflict between human singularity and common order and their utopian-nostalgic reconciliation. The novels raise the question of how the singular can partake of the political without being reduced to one of the ontological categories (‘human’, ‘animal’, ‘divine’) that allow the state to assign a particular identity to a subject. The novels’ questioning of the political order of Novilla and Estrella is political insofar as the political, according to deconstructive approaches to community, is precisely the conflict over the form of human community. The political is the challenging of the always already existing order by those who are not allowed to be part of it because they lack an identity recognizable by the state (see, e.g., Rancière, Disagreement 26–31). Coetzee’s turning to premodern ideas and religious thought in his reimagination of community is a strategy not uncommon in recent political philosophy. Perhaps no contribution to the debate illustrates this better than Agamben’s The Coming Community. Agamben draws on the Talmud, Spinoza, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, John of Salisbury, and Uguccione da Pisa, and on medieval logic and the language of paradox, to move beyond the either-or relationship between the singular and the common that characterizes modern ideas of the human as zoon politikon and to envisage humanity as community-without-identity. David, Ana Magdalena, and Juan Sebastián Arroyo are singularities: their ontologies are ‘impure’ (in the sense specified in Chap. 5) in ways specific to each. They cannot be captured by the state’s language of identity, determining where they belong. They form a community that the state cannot recognize (cannot tolerate, cannot comprehend) and arguably instantiate what Agamben calls the “coming politics”: The novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be a struggle for the conquest or control of the State, but a struggle between the State and the non-State (humanity), an insurmountable disjunction between whatever singularity and the State organization. […] Whatever singularities cannot

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form a societas because they do not possess any identity to vindicate nor any bond of belonging for which to seek recognition. In the final instance the State can recognize any claim for identity […]. What the State cannot tolerate in any way, however, is that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging […]. The State […] is not founded on a social bond, of which it would be the expression, but rather on the dissolution, the unbinding it prohibits. For the State, therefore, what is important is never the singularity as such, but only its inclusion in some identity, whatever identity. (The Coming Community 85–86)

In dance, David, Ana Magdalena, Juan Sebastián Arroyo, and the children at the Academy form a non-linguistic community while remaining whatever singularity (humanimal, divinuman, divinanimal). What bonds them is not knowing that they are the prime numbers they dance; such knowledge would constitute a stateable identity (“A is x”). They know how to be the unchanging numbers in dance: an embodied knowledge that cannot without loss be translated into propositional knowledge. That which they know how to be—the prime numbers—is both immanent part of the physical world in dance and metaphysical. The dance is premodern because it collapses the modern either-or relations of body and mind, nature and culture, signifier and signified, immanent and transcendent, secular and the sacral, human, animal, and the divine in a practice of knowing-how. Religion and premodern thought provide the vocabulary for this dance beyond modern binary oppositions. The dance’s attendant philosophy is built from the kabbalistic idea of a non-arbitrary language, collapsing the modern either-or relation of signifier and signified. It is built from the Baroque idea of music that replicates the spherical music of the planets, collapsing the modern either-or relation of nature and culture, as does Campanella’s vision of an osmosis between society and the stars. And it is built from the Christian idea of grace that, in Kleist’s nostalgic-utopian vision, becomes the beautiful harmony of body and soul, collapsing the modern either-or relations of mind and body, secular and sacral. Such reimagining of the human as political animal cannot but resist our understanding. Schooldays envisions a community whose viability, if viable it should be, must paradoxically be concealed by being barely intelligible to modern humans.

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Notes 1. Kleist wrote in 1809 under the impression of Napoleon’s European conquests: “We must defend a community whose thousand roots, like an oak’s, reach into the earth of time […], a community whose existence no German soul shall survive and that shall only be borne to its grave with blood darkening the sun” (Kleist, “Was gilt es in diesem Kriege?” 378; my translation). 2. Nancy uses Heidegger’s term ‘being-with-others’ (Mit-Sein), which Heidegger subordinates to the term ‘human existence’ (Dasein) which refers to the individual human.

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Index1

A Adorno, Theodor W., 126 Afrikaans, 168, 188 Afterlife, 13, 41, 162, 193, 200, 212, 227, 251 Agamben, Giorgio, 5, 8, 10, 12, 37, 40, 46, 99–103, 106–111, 113, 114, 118n15, 118n17, 118n18, 127, 130, 148, 220, 222, 225, 246n11, 252 Age of Iron, 9, 43 Alber, Jan, 22 Alt, Peter-André, 90, 92, 101, 113, 146, 200 Améry, Jean, 150–151 Anderson, Benedict, 190, 203, 204, 206, 215, 230 Animal, the animal body, 51, 147, 172, 188, 237, 240 animalization, 8, 109, 126 animal rationale, 48, 49, 51, 96, 119, 174n7, 208, 213, 250

animal studies, 5 and ethics, 1, 43, 142, 149, 150, 157, 171–173, 175n9 and rights, 148, 240 Anthropocentrism, 39, 42, 43, 53 Anthropology literary, 9, 17–21, 25, 30–32, 56n2 structural, 38, 116n4 symmetric, 5, 10, 46–56, 229, 250 Apartheid, 47, 67, 75, 76, 78, 80, 96, 106, 116n6, 121, 152, 225, 250 Apter, Emily, 186 Aristotle, 40, 49, 80, 99, 102, 109, 123, 135, 148, 165, 174n5, 208, 225, 232, 250 Assmann, Aleida, 19 Attridge, Derek, 28, 29, 78, 98, 103–104, 111, 118n19, 175n16 Attwell, David, 9, 16n8, 61, 72, 78, 81, 116n2, 116n3, 117n12, 120, 174n1, 193 Auerochs, Bernd, 90

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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INDEX

Augustine, St, 212, 233, 242, 246n10 and the soul, 89, 195 See also City of God Auster, Paul, 188, 189 Australia, 13, 177, 178, 180, 181, 183–185, 187, 188, 190–193, 196–199 Authority, 6, 10, 33, 37, 59, 69, 72, 74–76, 123, 134, 191, 238 of the body, 14, 182, 196, 231, 238 Autobiography, 33, 34, 62, 119, 175n14 Autonomy, 2, 6, 26, 32, 33, 37, 44, 75, 119, 121, 126, 134 Autrebiography, 37, 177 B Bach, Johann Sebastian, 223, 224, 232, 233 Badiou, Alain, 121, 122 Baker, Phil, 124 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 2, 10, 27, 28, 30, 34, 35, 154, 175n17, 206 Balibar, Étienne, 14, 178–182, 190, 191, 193, 196, 200, 206, 209, 244n1 Barbarism, 11, 77, 79–82, 88–90, 93–95, 117n9 Barthes, Roland, 10, 11, 27, 38, 62–64, 71, 73, 95, 204 and semiotics of myth, 62, 63, 66 Bealey, Frank, 202 Beckett, Samuel, 5, 8, 10, 12, 23, 29, 36, 96, 101, 121–129, 134, 137, 140–142 poetic of drive, 12, 123–127 Behaviourism, 12, 123, 125, 128, 134 Being-both, 219–228 Being-in-the-world, 48, 97, 143, 240 Benjamin, Walter, 76, 118n16 Bible, 103, 245n5

Biopolitics, 12, 40, 46, 99, 110, 114, 115, 215, 228 Blank, Juliane, 148 Blindness, 69, 74, 82, 84, 86 Blöcker, Günter, 241 Bloor, David, 55 Blumenberg, Hans, 25 Boas, Franz, 10, 29, 38, 66, 67 Body authority of, 14, 75, 182, 196, 231, 238 of the animal, 50, 138, 147 Bogost, Ian, 58n14 Boletsi, Maria, 79, 80, 225, 246n14 Bowra, C. M., 176n19 Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life (B), 61 Bracht Branham, R., 136 Breuer, Horst, 121, 125–127 Brits, Baylee, 245n6 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 214 Brooks, Peter, 84, 102 Brown, Bill, 58n14 Buell, Lawrence, 42 Burke, Kenneth, 56n2 Burke, Peter, 198, 199 Butler, Judith, 6–8, 15n5, 39, 47, 79 C Calarco, Matthew, 10, 37, 45, 56n6 Campanella, Tommaso, 233, 234, 253 Caracciolo, Marco, 24, 155 Cartesian dualism, 5 See also Mind/body dualism Castillo, Debra, 68 Cavafy, Constantine P., 79 Cavell, Stanley, 171 Cervantes, Miguel de, 205, 209, 245n7 The Childhood of Jesus (CJ), 200–244

 INDEX 

Christianity, 48, 57n9, 68, 87, 163, 175n14, 225–227 City of God, 212, 246n10 Clarkson, Carrol, 10, 27, 28, 30–32, 34, 35, 95 Close, Anthony J., 245n7 Coetzee, J. M. essays; “Censorship in South Africa,” 64; “Comments on Paola Cavalieri, ‘A Dialogue on Perfectionism,’ ”, 167; “Confession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky,” 85, 133; “Erasmus: Madness and Rivalry,” 69; “Homage,” 225; “The Novel Today,” 26, 27; “On Appetite, the Right to Life, and Rational Ethics,” 168 fiction and books of criticism (see under each title) Cohen, Robin, 196 Coleman, Deirdre, 175n9 Colonialism, 5, 80 Communism, 251 Community and belonging, 180 imagined, 14, 190, 204, 212, 215, 217, 228 national, 202, 205, 215 religious, 14, 182, 202, 212, 228 Confession, 41, 81, 119, 133, 134, 141, 149, 181 Conrad, Joseph, 68, 80 Constructivism, 6, 7, 10, 15n5, 37–40, 46, 60 Cosmopolitanism and adaptability, 197–200 and Diogenes, 137 and nationality, 190, 196 Countervoices, 17, 27–29, 32, 35, 69 Cross, F. L., 140, 241

273

Cyborgs, 40, 245n4 Cynicism, 10, 41, 44, 133, 136, 138, 141, 142, 175n9 cynics, 5, 12, 80, 123, 133–138, 141, 142, 145, 174n6 See also Diogenes D Damrosch, David, 186 Dan, Joseph, 246n9 Dance, 14, 44, 165, 210, 213, 214, 220, 228–244, 246–247n15, 249, 251, 253 Danta, Chris, 147 Darwin, Charles, 10, 37, 109 De Waal, Frans, 16n6 Death, 50, 51, 73, 77, 78, 87, 91, 94, 96–99, 101, 107, 119, 122, 139, 142, 146, 147, 149, 150, 159, 164, 172, 173, 193, 203, 220, 226, 241, 246n10, 250 death-drive, 217 Deconstruction, 5, 36, 45, 182 Dehumanization, 8, 59–116 Derrida, Jacques, 1, 5, 33, 34, 37–39, 43–45, 56n7, 57n11, 69, 144, 152, 158, 171–173, 175n14, 176n24, 179, 195, 220, 221 Descartes, René, 6, 41, 54, 62, 69–72, 89, 124, 148, 149, 151, 165, 172, 229, 233, 240 and doubt, 62, 69–71 and mind-body separation, 54, 70 and solipsism, 69 Desire, 3, 11–14, 30, 32, 37, 46, 47, 57n10, 62, 78, 82, 84–86, 102, 118n15, 121, 124, 125, 127, 128, 131, 133, 141, 150, 156, 165, 167, 176n20, 183, 185, 192, 194, 196, 198, 200, 206, 207, 214, 217, 219–221, 235, 251

274 

INDEX

Dialogism in Bakhtin, 10, 27, 30, 34 in Dostoevsky, 10, 30, 34 Diamond, Cora, 43, 44, 46, 48, 50, 57n11, 144, 149, 150, 153, 156, 171 difficulty of reality, 50, 150, 153, 171 Diary of a Bad Year (DBY), 9, 32, 46, 52, 177–180, 187, 193–195, 202, 223, 246n12 Diogenes, 10, 12, 29, 35, 36, 123, 133, 135–138, 140, 145 Disgrace (D), 121–142 Divine, the, 14, 41, 68, 69, 74, 103, 105, 106, 110, 113, 114, 128, 130–132, 138, 140, 144, 151, 157, 161–166, 210, 219–228, 237, 243, 246n14, 251–253 Dog, 89, 128, 132, 135–138, 141, 142, 152, 173, 174n6, 186 dog-man, 136, 138, 139, 174n8 Donia, Robert J., 199 Don Quixote, 204, 205, 208, 209, 214 Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (DP), 6, 27, 31, 39, 76, 77, 85, 87, 89, 95, 101, 105, 238 Doubt, 47, 62, 69–71, 74, 77, 83–85, 106, 107, 145, 146, 158, 163, 166, 184, 185, 190, 221, 224, 227, 231, 235, 238, 239, 245n2 rhythm of, 141, 200 Dreams, 65, 80–84, 86–88, 116n7, 169 Durantaye, Leland de la, 99 During, Simon, 202, 227 Dusklands (DL), 60–77 Dvorakova, Alena, 57n10 E Eagleton, Terry, 26 Eckstein, Barbara, 89

Ecocriticism deep ecology, 42 ecofeminism, 43 Eco-Marxism, 42 environmentalism, 42 social ecology, 42 Education, 14, 182, 202, 206, 207, 211, 213 Effe, Alexandra, 29, 244n2 Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (EC), 142–173 Embeddedness, 5, 17, 24–35, 46, 47, 77, 120, 121, 143, 144, 149–157, 163, 164, 167, 170, 171, 175n12, 209, 237 Embodiedness, 5, 6, 10, 13, 17, 21–26, 28–32, 34, 35, 44, 47, 48, 77, 120, 121, 143, 144, 148–155, 167, 170, 171, 173, 237, 241, 249 Emigration, 13, 177, 178, 184, 191–197, 199 Empire, 63, 66, 77, 79, 83, 86, 90–92, 95, 104 Engaged agency, 3, 46–56 Engel, Manfred, 201 English, 127, 183, 184, 186–189, 244n1 Enlightenment, 3, 7, 10, 28, 36, 40, 44, 53, 57n8, 69, 80, 203 Enlightenment subject, 7, 44 Ereshefsky, Marc, 57n12 Eros, 12, 123, 127–133, 174n3, 216 Ethics, 1, 2, 35, 36, 43, 44, 139, 142, 149, 150, 157, 167, 168, 171–173, 175n9, 175n12, 218, 242 Europe, 80, 178, 191 Evernden, Neil, 41 Evil, 162–164, 167, 199, 242 Experiment, 10, 17, 25, 30–32, 35, 48, 60, 125, 126, 145, 166, 175n10, 250

 INDEX 

F Fauchery, Antoine, 182–184, 192 Felman, Shoshana, 71 Fludernik, Monika, 22–24 Foe (F), 9, 25, 28, 38, 39, 41, 43, 80, 102, 115, 141, 230 Földényi, László, 239, 241, 242 Foucault, Michel, 6–8, 27, 38, 39, 47, 54, 69–71, 74, 99, 100, 114, 115, 117n8, 179, 180, 228 Frank, Joseph, 94 French, 13, 63, 183–188, 190, 192, 193, 203, 206, 244n1 Freud, Sigmund, 10, 37, 63, 64, 80–83, 87, 116n3, 124, 125, 134, 139, 174n4, 179, 217, 218 Frye, Northrop, 56n2 Fuentes, Agustin, 16n7, 175n12 G Gaard, Greta, 43 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 15n4 Gaita, Raimond, 44, 65, 169 Gandhi, 97, 103 Garrard, Greg, 41, 42 Geiger, Ido, 158 Gender, 7, 178, 179, 181, 186 Genealogy, 40, 63 Generation, 46, 47, 55, 116, 119, 120, 141, 143, 244 Genesis, 9, 33, 34, 116n2, 175n14, 239 God, 33, 41, 49, 50, 57n9, 60, 65, 69, 73, 87–90, 102, 103, 106, 112, 113, 122, 123, 126–133, 140, 144–146, 151, 152, 161–167, 174n7, 175n14, 176n19, 176n20, 196, 210, 212, 213, 219, 221–224, 226, 227, 230, 233, 234, 236, 237, 242, 243, 246n14, 247n18

275

God-likeness, 2, 13 Gordimer, Nadine, 111, 115 Goulet-Cazé, Marie Odile, 136 Griffiths, Paul J., 212 Grosz, Elizabeth, 58n14 Guilt, 60, 74, 91–93, 117n9, 119, 134, 218 H Hallemeier, Katherine, 181 Haraway, Donna, 10, 40, 245n4 Harman, Graham, 58n14 Hayes, Patrick, 73 Hayles, Katherine, 40 Heidegger, Martin, 5, 11, 15n4, 37, 42, 47–54, 57n13, 58n14, 97, 123, 127, 129, 130, 138, 172, 174n2, 174n7, 174n8, 240, 254n2 Being and Time, 15n4, 47, 50, 51, 130, 240 and being-in-the-world, 48, 97, 240 Herbert, Zbigniew, 225–228, 246n14, 251 Herman, David, 22, 23, 155 Heteronomy, 6, 121 History discourse of, 26 and myth, 38 national, 183 natural, 103, 120 Höfele, Andreas, 57n8 Hofstadter, Douglas, 224 Holocaust, 12, 100, 151, 152 and industrial killing of animals, 151, 152 Honold, Alexander, 208 Howe, Jan Niklas, 223 Hughes, Ted, 49, 169, 171 Humanism, 10, 36, 37, 40, 41, 44, 48, 49, 54, 126, 160, 218

276 

INDEX

Humanities, 2, 6, 11, 13, 14, 16n7, 18, 19, 27, 30, 40, 59–62, 65–68, 70, 72–75, 77, 78, 81, 87, 89, 92–94, 96, 109, 110, 115, 121, 130, 138, 143, 145–148, 158, 160–162, 164, 166, 172, 174n7, 176n22, 177–244, 250–252 Human, the human-animal distinction, 12, 13, 33, 39–41, 45, 173 minimal human, 12, 39, 59–116 and rights, 148 superhuman, 102–106, 112, 130, 161 I Idealism, 7, 137, 205 Inhumanity, 62, 73, 75, 86, 90–93, 111, 117n9, 244 Instinct, 3, 12, 103, 107, 111–113, 122–125, 127–135, 138, 139, 141, 150, 152, 173, 174n8, 175n9, 238, 247n18 Intertextuality, 21, 28, 29 In the Heart of the Country (HC), 9, 41, 43, 47, 54, 59, 71, 73, 75–77, 79, 105, 141, 168, 250 Iser, Wolfgang, 9, 17–21, 23–25, 27, 30, 32, 56n2 J Jews, 110, 146, 149, 151, 152, 191 John, Eileen, 217 Jolly, Rosemary J., 117n9 K Kabbalah, 210, 245n9 Kafka, Franz, 5, 8, 10–14, 29, 35, 36, 77, 88–95, 99–102, 104–106,

112–114, 121, 145–149, 157, 158, 166, 175n10, 176n18, 200, 201, 205–207, 247n17 Amerika, 200, 201, 203, 205–207, 245n5 “The Burrow,” 36, 99–102, 104–106 “The Cares of a Family Man,” 12, 112 “In the Penal Colony,” 11, 77, 88–95 Kannemeyer, John C., 60, 61, 120, 178, 188 Kant, Immanuel, 6, 7, 145, 154, 172, 239, 240 Karadžić, Radovan, 199 Kemmis, Stephen, 247n15 Kenner, Hugh, 72, 73 Kleist, Heinrich von, 10, 29, 35, 117n12, 165, 176n21, 215, 221, 222, 235–239, 241–244, 247n17, 247n18, 251, 253, 254n1 “On the Marionette Theatre,” 235–237, 239, 241–244, 247n18, 251 Knowing-how, 3, 14n1, 21, 25, 26, 28, 29, 31, 48, 51, 52, 182, 213, 229–231, 237, 241, 253 Knowing-that, 3, 14n1, 25, 26, 31, 213, 241, 253 Köhler, Wolfgang, 48, 53, 125, 145, 158, 175n10 and Red Peter, 145 Köppe, Tilmann, 56n1 L Language foreign, 187 language games, 14, 53, 208–212, 218, 231, 235, 244

 INDEX 

limits of, 189 mother tongue, 168, 186–191, 204 Late Essays (LE), 117n12, 123, 126, 226–228, 251 Latour, Bruno, 10, 12, 39, 47, 53–55, 57n14, 58n15, 120, 229, 241 Law, 14, 54, 91, 92, 99, 107, 108, 118n15, 119, 124, 137, 200, 202, 206–208, 211, 215, 218, 220–224, 228, 240, 242–244, 246n12 of numbers, 205, 208 Learning, 52, 104, 134, 138–142, 174n4, 180, 202, 211, 234–236 Lestel, Dominique, 16n6 Levi, Primo, 107 Levin, Janet, 22 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 38, 39, 116n4 Life & Times of Michael K (MK), 95–116 Lingis, Alphonso, 44 The Lives of Animals, 36, 43, 57n14, 142, 144–150, 152, 157, 158, 160, 161, 163, 164, 167, 172, 175n13, 176n22, 237 Logos, 69, 146, 160, 161, 239 López, María J., 29 Luck, 138–142 and grace, 140 Lukács, György, 126, 205 M Madness, 11, 38, 62, 69–75, 79, 95, 116–117n7, 117n8, 141, 176n22, 249 Marx, Karl, 10, 37, 38, 251 Marxism, 48, 227 The Master of Petersburg (MP), 9, 47, 55, 116, 119, 120, 127, 129, 143, 156, 206 Materiality, theories of, 17, 53, 58n15

277

May, Brian, 117n11 McKay, Robert, 149, 150, 152, 175n13 Medin, Daniel L., 176n18 Metafiction, 189 Metaphysics, 11, 48, 49, 54, 89, 234 Michels, Ulrich, 223, 233 Midgley, Mary, 45 Mind/body dualism, 52, 54 Minimal human, 2, 11, 12, 39, 59–116 Modernism, 1, 37 Monolingualism, 188, 201 Morality, 87, 135, 150, 242 Mortality, 14, 41, 43, 44, 50, 51, 57n11, 84, 98, 147, 151, 152, 162, 165, 172, 173, 203, 206, 227 Moser, Christian, 237, 247n18 Mulhall, Stephen, 3, 4, 15n2, 51, 152, 154, 159, 166, 176n20, 208, 225, 226 Müller-Salget, Klaus, 239 Muselmann, the, 106–109 Music, 136, 169, 206, 223, 224, 230–234, 238, 242, 243, 253 and mathematics, 224, 232, 242 Myth in Barthes, 38, 62–64, 66, 71, 204 in Boas, 38, 67 demystification, 60, 75, 77 and history, 38 Mythologies, 38, 63, 64, 73, 95 and propaganda, 64, 67 N Nagel, Thomas, 22, 57n14, 149 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 251, 252, 254n2 Narrative epistemic potential of, 17, 21, 23, 25 narrative strategies, 18, 34

278 

INDEX

Narratology, 4, 10, 15n3, 17, 21–26 Nationality, 13, 52, 177–182, 184, 187, 190, 192, 193, 196, 198, 201, 204, 209, 211, 215, 250, 251 Nation-state, 13, 14, 41, 179, 192, 198, 202, 203, 205–208, 211–215, 217, 218, 223, 225, 228, 234, 243, 244 Nature-culture, 12, 37, 38, 46, 47, 54, 55, 57n14, 58n15, 120 Neumann, Gerhard, 201 Ng, Lynda, 201 Nida-Rümelin, Martine, 22 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 10, 37, 41, 57n10, 71, 80, 174n3 Norris, Margot, 56n5 Nowak-McNeice, Katarzyna, 222 Nünning, Ansgar, 15n3 Nünning, Vera, 15n3 Nussbaum, Martha, 43, 57n11 O Oates, Joyce Carol, 203 Oral novel, 158, 159, 170 P Pain, 44, 50, 72, 73, 78, 79, 81, 83–90, 94, 95, 107, 109, 113, 117n9, 117n11, 122, 123, 165, 172, 193, 216, 226, 232 Palmer, Alan, 22 Paranoia, 64, 66 Performance, 7, 21, 25, 27, 35, 47, 149, 150, 155–167, 170, 171, 173, 210, 213, 231, 234, 237, 244 Pfister, Manfred, 29 Philosophy, 1, 3, 4, 12, 16n7, 26, 30, 33, 35, 36, 40, 42, 48–50, 70,

85, 126, 136, 137, 142–144, 148, 150, 153–155, 170, 171, 225, 229, 230, 244, 245n9, 252, 253 and literature, 3, 16n7, 137, 144, 150, 170, 171, 225 Photography and authenticity, 183 and emigration, 184 Pippin, Robert, 205 Plato, 2–4, 12, 18, 19, 80, 123, 133, 137, 158, 160, 232, 233, 245n5 Platonic dialogue, 2, 155 Plumwood, Val, 43 Poetic of drive, 12, 123–127, 142 of testing, 10, 38, 41, 75 Poetry, 4, 15n3, 49, 130, 159, 168–171, 176n23, 227 Polanyi, Michael, 15n1 Post-apartheid, 216 Postcolonial criticism, 1 Posthumanism, 3, 5, 10, 11, 17, 35–46, 51, 56n5, 56n6, 195, 245n4 Cynical posthumanism, 10, 41, 46 See also Diogenes Powers, Donald, 44, 166, 183, 185 Poyner, Jane, 68, 116n3, 116n6 Practice theory, 5, 11, 17, 36–47, 51–53, 58n15, 229, 240, 250 Primary identity, 181–183, 185–189, 193–196, 199, 200, 206 Prosthesis, 46, 191, 194–196, 247n17 Psychoanalysis, 12, 18, 87, 123–125, 128, 134 Puchner, Martin, 2 Q Qualia, 22, 23, 25–27

 INDEX 

R Rancière, Jacques, 252 Rape, 32, 127–129, 131, 132, 135, 139, 152, 217 Rationality, 11, 28, 47, 49, 51, 69, 70, 72, 73, 75, 126, 144, 146, 148, 162, 167, 169, 174n7, 241, 251 Realism, 5, 9, 10, 15n5, 17, 25, 27, 34, 35, 37, 39, 87, 151, 153, 155, 156, 166, 176n18, 232, 237 Reason and doubt, 238 instrumental, 48, 49, 53, 54, 130, 145, 161 limits of, 3, 44, 125 madness of, 11, 69, 71, 72 See also Descartes, René Reckwitz, Andreas, 38, 39, 52, 53 Red Peter, 13, 145–150, 157, 158, 160–162, 166 See also Köhler, Wolfgang Religion, 46, 98, 131, 133, 181, 197, 199, 200, 203, 226, 234, 253 Riedel, Christoph, 57n8 Ritzer, George, 66 Roden, David, 56n6 Rohman, Carrie, 175n9 Romanticism, 12, 128, 130, 132 Rosset, Clément, 245n8 Rule-following, 208–213, 225, 231, 235, 245n6 Ryle, Gilbert, 14n1, 15n1 S Sartre, Jean-Paul, 176n20 Scarry, Elaine, 78, 79, 81, 83–85, 88, 91–94, 117n9, 117n10 Schatzki, Theodore R., 51, 52, 229, 232 Schiller, Friedrich, 237 Schimmel, Annemarie, 230

279

Schläger, Jürgen, 24 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 2 The Schooldays of Jesus (SJ), 200–244 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 124 Secular, the and grace, 44, 140, 247n19 and sacral, 253 Self-consciousness, 2, 148 Self-reflexivity, 9, 49 Seriality, 213–219 Sexual drive, 55, 123, 127–131, 134, 135, 141, 173 Shakespeare, William, 95, 171 Shame, 127, 172, 173 Sheehan, Paul, 201 Slave, 73, 109, 126, 174n5, 240 Sloterdijk, Peter, 137, 138 Slow Man (SM), 182–200 Smith, Carter, 121 Smith Bridle, Reginald, 232 South Africa, 60, 61, 64, 66, 75, 76, 80, 81, 96, 115, 116, 134, 152, 160, 177, 216, 225 Speech disabling speech, 11, 79 and reason, 122 speechlessness, 81 Stagl, Justin, 16n7, 19 Stranger Shores: Essays, 1986–1999 (SS), 34, 107 Subhuman, 130 Subjectivity, 6–8, 114, 121 Sulk, Kay, 108 Summertime: Scenes from Provincial Life (S), 177, 228, 230, 240, 245n3 Superhuman, 102–106, 112, 130, 161 Sutrop, Margit, 24 Sympathetic imagination, 57–58n14, 149, 156, 161, 164, 173

280 

INDEX

T Tatlow, Ruth, 224, 233 Taylor, Charles, 48, 55 Theatre, 4, 23, 200, 201 Theißen, Gerd, 57n9 Time eschatological, 102–105 of history, 20, 103, 104, 118n15, 118n16 “Time, Tense and Aspect in Kafka’s The Burrow,” 101, 104 Tolstoy, Leo, 87 Torture and erotic fascination, 78 and “In the Penal Colony,” 11, 77, 90 and “Into the Dark Chamber,” 87, 89 Transhumanism, 37, 56n6 Translation, 55, 186, 203, 244n1 Tucker, Herbert F., 42 U Utopia, 233 V Valdez Moses, Michael, 93 Van Heerden, Adriaan, 131, 174n8, 175n9 Vegetarianism, 143 Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 176n19 Vertovec, Stephen, 196 Vietnam, 61–63, 66, 178 Voice, 6, 9, 12, 23, 25, 28, 30, 34, 35, 43, 56n7, 65, 69, 70, 76, 78, 79, 81, 82, 85, 89, 92, 94, 95, 111,

132, 153, 154, 158, 159, 170, 219 See also Countervoices Vold, Tonje, 244n2 W Waiting for the Barbarians (WB), 77–95 White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa, 68 Wiegandt, Kai, 29, 119 Williams, Bernard, 218 Winko, Simone, 56n1 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 26, 51, 75, 168, 169, 208, 209, 211 Wolfe, Cary, 10, 37, 39, 43, 46, 56n6, 57n11, 195 Wolff, Christoph, 224 Women, 43, 65, 76, 117n9, 133, 140, 141, 180, 215 Wordsworth, William, 12, 132, 141, 167, 168 World literature, 186, 188 Wright, Laurence, 133 Y Yeats, William Butler, 232 Yeoh, Gilbert, 101, 102 Youth (Y), 37, 177, 210, 219, 247n19 Yugoslavia, 185, 197–200 Z Zilcosky, John, 147 Zimbler, Jarad, 110 Zoon politikon, 96, 138, 213, 216, 250, 252