"Surviving Progress"

             When Jane Goodall spoke at a book talk in New York she was wrapped in a silk scarf and her hair was pinned in her trademark gray tail.  Her latest book Hope for Animals and Their World described the many successes of the conservationist movement--the reintegration of species like the California condor into their habitats--detailing the extraordinary rescue efforts scientists and advocates make for the smallest progress.  As she concluded she removed a single condor feather from a leather tube; it seemed to stretch longer than one of her own legs.  The crowd, mostly urban and young, roared with approval.  Hope.  It is not just possible, it sells books, too.
              The memory of that talk and her beautiful book came to mind as I watched "Surviving Progress," not just because she is interviewed in the film, but because when confronted with the bleak realities of 21st century's globalized free market capitalism, one needs to hold on to something (even a single feather) of hope.  As she says in her interview, "Humans are a problem-solving species."
               In the documentary scientists, intellectuals, and writers take on the major concern of the next century:  Will humanity change its ways or ask for a bigger shovel?  For cynics, it should be said up front, humans aren't going anywhere.  No matter how much eco-freaks and God-botherers howl at an empty sky.  In Curt Stager's excellent book Deep Future we learn sure enough that we can't kill off the species through climate change, but we can make it miserable for the weakest and poorest among us; we can kill off huge portions of the population; and we can deplete (for us and our progeny) the natural abundance of resources in and on the Earth.  Yet it must be admitted that "Market fundamentalism," or the blinkered faith in progress, has tethered all of us to the crazed horse of a global economy with no stable of regulations and rules large enough to house it.
              One flattering problem the film reveals is that humans have been too successful.  It took 1300 years to add 200 million people to the world's population, now it takes 3 years.  With 6 or 7 billion people, some argue that this is too many by half.  But I don't see the ruling elite changing their behavior or the bottom half of the planet living much better just because there are less people.  Our numbers are going up, space and resources are limited, and as one interviewee says, "every time history repeats itself, the price goes up."
             An intriguing and reoccurring topic in the film is the "progress trap."  In learning and making progress 'we' saw at the very limb on which 'we' sit like the cavemen who discovered that charging a herd of animals over a cliff was easier than hunting them individually--smart but self-defeating if taken to extremes.
             Author Margaret Atwood preempts conservative arguments saying that we should think of the earth not as some holy abstraction but as a finite system.  "Unless we preserve the planet," she argues, "There isn't going to be any 'the economy' left."  Her comments carefully juxtapose with the experience of a middle class Chinese tour guide, made comfortable by the rising industrialism in his country, but one who self-silences:  He refuses to confront the problems of the environment directly for fear of retribution even when he and his own family recognize the drawbacks of development.
              Of course the greatest part of this film is blame.  It is not a conspiracy to speak of an international elite who literally dictate world policy.  It does exist.  And their instruments in the banking industry--who so excellently ensnared the developing world in debt obligations they could not possibly repay--have prepared the track for the great collisions of the 21st century:  Who will pay the debts?  Who says 'we' have to?  What will happen if 'we' don't?
              There are deficits to this sleek and beautiful film.  The pseudo-scientific babbling of Robert Wright never ceases to sound like a mad-chemist's parrot set loose on camera:  "Now more than ever you could argue that there's a unified social brain."  What nonsense is this?  And his imperative that we must make "moral progress" is as fantastical as it is a-historical.  As is one interviewees notion that "we're up against human nature...we have to reform ourselves, remake ourselves."  While he wasn't mentioned, philosopher and Enlightenment critic John Gray's recent (exceedingly bleak) arguments and historical work on this point are fairly conclusive.  (For more see The Immortalization Commission.)  Such a ridiculous frame for change as 'human nature' (whatever that turns out to be) will offer up human nature itself:  mercurial, uncertain, radically alternate.
              More convincing is the notion that we need to "prove nature wrong," as one scientist argues.  In this vein, we must prove that "making apes smarter is NOT a dead end."  (The experiment of civilization could topple, the film purports, unless we shore up our world.)  Human beings may not have a "united social brain" or be able to individually transform "their natures" but humans can arise to a challenge.  They can act collectively.  Perhaps the next challenge of societal progress--as opposed to human progress--is a collective decision to overcome impulses to greed for generations as yet unborn.  It will take reclaiming a simple word:  "We."
         

Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln"

                    For those looking to experience a movie that has all the visual quality of the best Civil War films and the charming character-driven plot of the best historical drama, check it out.  Daniel Day-Lewis's story-telling as the chatty Lincoln has a Brando-like quality:  you cant take your eyes off him (and neither can Lincoln's male helpers with whom he has several intimate moments.)
                  Of course the best kept secret of the film (and of the American history of Reconstruction) is Thaddeus Stevens--the powerful Pennsylvania Radical Republican--who has the precise amount of acid and scorn for the House's yokels, cynics, and hucksters.  If few contemporary educated and conscientious voters have an outlet to spout rage at the moronic inferno blazing in Michele Bachmann's district or at a Rand Paul stump speech, Stevens seems to act as a delightful proxy for us--albeit in the 19th century.  He lays waste to 'em!  Tommy Lee Jones, as ever, is masterfully patient in a stern and focused portrayal that could have been ruined by bluster.
                  My only issue is a historical one:  Where was Anderew Johnson, Lincoln's Vice President who, after inheriting the presidency, became our worst President?  Wasn't he, impeached and disgraced, worth seeing since he is the darkest decision in Lincoln's legacy?  And while I thought the dreamy sequences that illustrate Lincon's nightmares were haunting and unexpected, seeing Lincoln's face in a flame with a flashback to his second inaugural (after his assassination scene) was a bit much.  But Spielberg never can give up on the happy endings, can he?
                  The critic for The New Republic made a crucial argument for those who enjoyed this movie:
"That is the real lesson for now, in these few days. Being a nobleman or a saint is not enough in a leader. We need someone who can stoop to getting the job done, and wheedling the necessary votes in any way it takes. Lincoln the movie may look archaic and nostalgic in time—even in quite a short time. But for a few days or weeks now, it is the moment in a way few modern movies have managed. It’s very good, but that’s not the point. It’s necessary. Make sure your children take you to see it."
                  Of course, the 13th amendment passed and the movie does a strong job of illustrating the art of the bribe and the suspense of high-pressure negotiations.  But it also neglects the century blacks had to wait in order to gain political equality.  And it neglects to confront (rather than merely reflect) the dysfunctional and outmoded institutions that can allow such grievous injustices to be perpetuated.  While I would recommend this film to anyone, what our culture needs after Lincoln, a soothing movie about political healing, is a film about Reconstruction:  The moment when the best hopes of federal action were dashed by conservative "small government" types; when bought senators and paid representatives knowingly subsidized private industry; when black rights were buried under the flummery of "states rights"; when Lincoln's notion of a government by, for, and of the people disappeared for a generation into a Gilded Age.  

The Nine Lives of Marion Barry

                Cities like Gary, Detroit, and Newark with majority African-American communities have had little luck with mayors.  Kwame Kirkpatrick, Marion Barry, Tony Mack, Ray Nagin, Sharpe James, Pete Mandich and George Chacharis.  Big plans and lofty talk result in reoccurring tragedies, American-style.  Tales of racy sex, public dead ends, corruption, and scandal.  Yet, the tragedy--in which one's greatest strength results in self destruction--these communities devotedly support the very charismatic but deeply flawed men doing little while taking a lot.  Families in these cities feel the pinch of neglect and the crunch of choked budgets.  But the critical element of tragedy comes from the cynicism of men like Marion Barry who prey upon a feeling (real and imagined) of persecution to propel them listlessly onward, wasting our time.              

                 "The Nine Lives of Marion Barry" follows the four-times elected mayor, who was born the son of sharecropping cotton pickers in Mississippi.  A school board member, City Council President, and business-friendly candidate.  (Incumbent Mayor Walter Washington considered a franchise tax to close the budget deficit.  Barry, his opponent, helped scupper the tax and made friends in the white establishment, though they abandoned him in his 1978 run..)  Handsome, charismatic, and quite sharp (Barry was working on a PhD in chemistry before he joined the civil rights movement).  As the film's black and white shots demonstrate, Barry had potential.  According to the Feb. 19, 1990 Nation "Barry's accomodation to the city's moneyed interests was matched by a commitment to delivering services and employment to the city's black majority."
                 Barry's greatest sin was not his personal hubris, it was allowing an excuse for the conservative establishment and reactionary prosecutors an opportunity to topple participatory democracy in D.C.  To, in a sense, use the spectacle of his failed leadership as an excuse to disenfranchise thousands of poor and struggling people.  These forces used the drug laws to selectively act to pick off political opponents.  Barry was not a victim, but he allowed his troubles to marginalize his own community and allow moral crusaders an issue.
                  Journalists and authors speculate about his possibilities, one going so far as to compare Barry's potential with that of Martin Luther King.  But the footage we see of Barry from the 1970s belies such gauzy assertions.  Even then he was vain and pompous--a mercurial demagogue who would drop "dig" and "jive talk" in his dashiki just as soon as a he'd down highballs with the D.C. elite in a silk suit.  The compiled footage is astonishing:  Barry sermonizing to schoolchildren about the danger of drugs; a lithe Barry unable to walk up the steps to his apartment while running for city council in 2004.  They are the images of a shaky, sweaty, and swaying addict (with a city burning around him) speeding towards the wall.
                The film's frame is an election for Ward 8, a poor black district in which Barry notoriously won with 58% of the vote.  Because the make of a tree is its roots, the film follows Barry's structure from youth through the present day.  The charmer of the post-60s "empowerment" movement quickly leaps into the top spot of Reagan-era Washington as the bright gleam upon black politics.

                 In fact, his first term glowed:  He was viewed as a competent leader whose administration is a model of smart and savvy leadership, African-American leadership.  But with few funds and Republican Washington wedded to big business, Barry burns up dollars through contracts and large and crony-ridden public employment.  Promises became mere rhetoric, governance a sham.  And by his third term, his only policy is patronage; Barry loses control of himself and the city.
                 Quite dramatically, his downfall coincides with the degeneration of urban black life--from the idealism of emergent equality to the brutalities of coke-fueled post-industrial blight.  By 1987 more than half of the 400-plus homicides in Washington were classified as drug related.  Seventy-five percent of the victims and 86 percent of the assailants were black males.  The 80s brought disenchantment with government but it also ushered in a flood of drugs and mass incarceration. As Barry made his way from the mayor's office to the courthouse (charged with a misdemeanor) and back, the documentary shows how the Gingrich Congress stripped the re-elected mayor of his financial powers, rendering him little more than a figurehead.

                  The film skillfully captures the collapse of an individual life swinging from tragedy to farce.  Mayor Barry, who in 1978 described a government "for us by us," withers into a lonely fiend:  diminished, shameless, and unbowed.  But while Barry becomes a more transparent fraud the closer we lean, he is visibly magnetic, even at his most depraved.  In a major speech in his 1990s comeback, there is a  model of the man embodied in his rhetoric.  The bombast when read, like Mencken's word-by-word analysis of Harding's soothing "Gamiliese," exemplifies energy and style trumping substance:   "Our entire city can get itself off its knees and do for itself again, and bring itself out of where we are now again.

                  The hardest part for me was watching those in Barry's oribt--his intelligent godson and many admirers--consistently disappointed by his inability to shake personal vices, or even to control the last remaining pieces of his broken life.  He tells the camera "I don't think too much about the past."
                   How could he?
                   How could he allow himself to remember the grainy video of him smoking crack with a former mistress?  The wan face of his long-suffering wife?  D.C.'s chalked outlines, like a city-wide Pollock painting?  The increasing dropouts?  The endless murders?  AIDS? Public housing?  To dwell on a past he helped to produce would admit some level of culpability, of shame.  But as we see,  Barry has none.     

                The film's story is a cautionary one.  Americans are too often pulled by the star of the most powerful, charismatic, or even redemptive personalities:  Smooth Clinton.  Cool Obama.  Friendly Bush.  Lovable Reagan.  Yet the policies and product rarely match the packaging and the sucker left with the check, especially in the case of Mayor Barry, is the guy with few hopes and many needs.  But let it never be said that Washington is an unforgiving city.  Truman's line was that one seeking friendship in the nation's capital should buy a dog.  This might, in fact, be excessively harsh.  Ex-mayor, ex-prisoner, twice-divorced, and permanent addict, Councilman Barry, won reelection in 2008 by a landslide.  In fact, he has never lost an election in Washington D.C.
               

Bobby Jindal: We've heard it all before

              Governor Bobby Jindal is a shape-shifting fraud and a gross and habitual liar.  His stump speeches for Romney this year were deployed with his usual awkwardly wooden style--one that even gave GOP hacks the incentive to ignore him during VP selections.  Jindal, occupied by Hurricane Isaac, didn't make it to the RNC debacle, though Clint Eastwood saved him a chair.  "The Gre't State's" governor did, however, go to the usual stage-managed gatherings where he could play the color-blind individualist.
                "President Obama is the most liberal president since Jimmy Carter!" he never tired in hissing.  As if such a statement is something profound, clever, or even accurate.  It had all the intellectual depth and probity of Dan Quayle's son bellowing "President Obama is the worst president in history" before being ousted by the loons in a conservative primary.
              The "liberal" charge is an old but still useful tactic.  Jimmy Carter was no liberal--ask the PATCO union who grew so frustrated with his feckless leadership that they endorsed Reagan in 1980.  (The Republican hero notoriously rewarded them with pink slips after their failed strike.)  In 1978, the stock market was at its lowest point in three years, the trade deficit was growing, and inflation was quickly rising.  While Carter was accurately called the "last victim of the Vietnam War" he was also hostage to America's lack of an energy policy.  So how did the pious peanut broker and supposed "liberal" respond?  He urged Congress to cut spending and reduced federal job programs.  This, despite the opening tremors of de-industrialization, layoffs, and the ignored liberal coalition's demand that everyone deserved the dignity of a job.  
              Carter openly declared in 1978 that inflation not unemployment was America's greatest dilemma.  How is this, combined with no action on a health care bill and continued subsidies to conservative farmers on the federal dole, a liberal Presidency?  That Carter was followed by the tax-raising Reagan and Bush as well as the budget-balancing Clinton is not news, but it perplexes me why Jindal thinks "he's a liberal" attacks are at all interesting, vital, or accurate?
             In a CNN editorial ( http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/15/opinion/jindal-gop-election/index.html?hpt=hp_t3) Jindal mused on new ways to "move forward."  (While using obviously using no new ways to write.)  Of course these played-out tunes are simply sad re-giftings of conservative herd words.  They range from the cliche: "Stop looking backward." To the inane:  "Compete for every single vote."  There is some honesty:"stop being the stupid party."  In fact,  I was reminded of J.S. Mill who said in a Parliamentary debate in 1866, "I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it."  
             Jindal also encouraged his fellow budget cutters to "reject identity politics."  Though this should more accurately be read as "stop with the racism."  The recently released Lee Atwater interviews demonstrate how the enduring use of linguistic subterfuge as a strategy to instigate latent racism is so well sewn into conservative rhetoric that what once was simply a Southern strategy is now a national strategy.  One built on the twin pillars of resentment and self-delusion.  If the rhetoric doesn't repeat racist language, it surely rhymes with it.  (Here's Atwater's "Nigger, nigger, nigger" statements:  http://www.thenation.com/article/170841/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy)  
              Though, admittedly, it's nice to see Jindal tip the conservative kabuki mask, we've heard the dialogue before.   

Journey to New Beford

By BRETT WARNKE

             I was fortunate to arrive in New Bedford’s Whaling National Historical Park Visitor Center on a bright April day minutes before a special tour:  A ninety minute walk and talk through the Seamen’s Bethel and “The Mariner’s Home,” a former mansion turned boarding house.  The Seamen’s Bethel is open daily to the public.  The Visitor’s Center, formerly a bank built in 1853, is the locus of a thirteen block historical park.  The knobby cobblestone streets course through the crowded streets, on which, there once were 19 financial institutions. The Center’s eager volunteers and rangers encourage patrons to scan the historical dioramas and interpretive signs and are helpful with history, the site’s background, group tours, and maps for lost loners.

A short jaunt from the Visitor’s center, my tour group entered Seamen’s Bethel which still serves New Bedford seafarers.  It stands plain, proud, and white, but the cudgels of time and termites have diminished its quiet beauty.  The non-denominational church was made famous by Hollywood’s prow-shaped pulpit in John Huston’s Moby Dick.  Our tour guide looked at the 1960s pulpit like it was an imbedded tick: “It is so tacky, isn’t it?  But it’s what the public wants!”  Bethel’s grimmer but more interesting adornments are the chiseled cenotaphs.  Our guide provided a hand-out with questions about these and other information that visitors independently discovered.  After reading the cenotaphs detailing the shark-bit, the fevered, the drowned, and the lost, we reconvened to discover that seven of the cenotaphs were teenage sailors. 

                In between tours, I walked east out of the historic district over JFK Memorial parkway and MacArthur Drive.  The roads cleave the water from the city, but I could still see the forest of ship masts several blocks up the road.  I was met by the old wooden bark, the Ernestina, a surviving Arctic voyager donated from Cape Verde.

I tried to imagine the 1840s as thousands of young roustabouts, weary of poverty, rushed to New Bedford and spotted the inferno of oil barrels.  Imagine the flophouses they frequented and the smelly barks they boarded.  With only a bag and an empty stomach many hoped like Melville and Conrad to see and taste and sail the world.  Others simply went because it paid.  But only a few generations of whalers lived such lives.  The Civil War, the 1849 Gold Rush, and the discovery of oil began New Bedford’s rapid diminution.  Albert Bierstadt and Robert Swain Gifford, young artists living in the city at this time, were not known for painting steam ships.  No, they followed the money and energy to the West. 

                By 1857 there were 48 millionaires in New Bedford, a gritty and pretty city, swelling with money as the Quaker and Unitarian merchant class challenged Nantucket as the world’s whaling capital.  Melville, looking at their spare mansions wrote, “One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea.” 

Today, while New Bedford’s fishing industry survives, the 1825-1860 years are forever gilded.  The majority of the city’s jobs are in health care and construction.  As I walked down passed City Hall, “A Dead Whale or a Stove Boat,” a 1985 bronze sculpture of a harpooner at the helm of a proud boat leapt out at me.  Yet, beside this indomitable mariner, a woman was merrily handing out sandwiches to the needy.  If New Bedford seems everywhere brimming with history—the streets are peppered with historic markers and statues—it could be as a result of the very real possibility of forgetting:  20 percent of the city is foreign born and the majority of local workers in the recession-stung city, who reside further west of the coast, are as likely to have a millworker as an ancestor as a mariner. 

Next door to the Bethel is the 1787 Mariner’s Home, a plain, squat, four-story building now closed to the public but open once a year for this special tour.  It once was a wholesome boarding house for voyagers who were homeless between runs.  The inside was empty but bright (from its many windows) and Alcoholics Anonymous titles, holy books, and board games filled the shelves in a center room—evidence of its recent past.  But while we toured the hollow home, my head repeatedly met with the low-hanging door frames; beware ‘ye upright pedestrians! 

 William Roach, Jr., the little known titan of 19^th century whaling, built it as a residence.  Later, operators converted it to an inn, as cozy spot of “moral influence” and uplift to compete with the pesthouses and booze guzzles nearby. 

After all the talk of blubber and hardtack, I felt a rumble in the deep.  I took a short walk up Union Street to “Brick” a narrow and bright brickoven pizzeria with 8-12 dollar pies, $7 sandwiches, and $10 calzones.  It has a mellow mood and one patron cried out over a mound of artichoke:  “If I worked nearby, I would be in here every day!”  The chicken pesto pizza was substantial and delivered a punchy flavor.  But “Brick’s” true hero is the crust—a crisp exterior but moist within.

                For dessert, a four-minute drive to “Biera Mar Bakery” (Portuguese for “Sea Border”) was a delicious detour after a day of walking and learning.  I shuffled a bit after the pizza and the gulls honked at me as I entered, but I was craving a sweet.  The proprietress—a traveler herself—spoke no English but the goods were worth the confusion.  She adoringly pointed out hanging tiles of her church in Lisbon and produced a photograph of an Atlantic beach near the Vasco da Gama Bridge.  For food, she encouraged one of her $3.00 sandwiches.  But I was sated like a whaler’s hull.  I wanted a small potent dessert.  I gestured to a beguiling specimen beneath the glass; a large slice of fudgy crumb cake, dusted with coconut and packed with nuts.  With an espresso for the journey back to Providence, the entire dessert cost $2.25.  New World coffee and chocolate from a Western European immigrant near an east coast historic district:  New Bedford was worth the trip. 

If you go:  The Seamen’s Bethel (15 Johnny Cake Hill, 508-922-3295) is open on Saturdays, 10-4 and on Sundays 1-4 through April and more often in the summer.  The New Bedford Whaling National Historic Park includes 13 blocks south of Route 6.  Its visitor center 933 William Street, 508-996-4095; www.nps.gov/nebe) is open 9-5.  “Brick” is located at 163 Union Street, 508-999-4943.  “Biera Mar” Bakery is located at 82 Cove Street, a four-minute drive down JFK Memorial Highway which becomes West Rodney French Boulevard.  Turn left at Cove Street, 508-993-3211.  The Mariner House is no longer open to the public.

"The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers"

                      When my friend Jen Jen drove me past Beijing’s Tiananmen Square I was unsure where we were going. She was a college friend but also a “princeling,” one of the Party’s privileged elite. In New England, there is “old money,” and in China there is “old Party.” Her grandfather, Hua Guofeng, had been Mao’s immediate and short-lived successor (1976-1980). What couldn’t Jen Jen get away with, I thought, when her grandpa was once called “Chairman Hua”? She drove her sleek Honda into Zhongnanhai—a central and secretive Party leadership compound near the Forbidden City. The walls were high and guarded and the homes were gray but elegant. I clearly remember a sentinel with an assault weapon standing outside her home. Jen Jen dismissively told him I was a friend as she ran inside to get a scarf. He flashed a light my way, leering at me like a hungry owl. How long, I thought, would Party members in Zhongnanhai hold sway with soldiers like this and thus, control China’s monopoly of violence? Would this Central Guard, issued to all internal Party members, support the Politburo leaders until the end or would he, like the forces in the Shah’s SAVAK, the Tsar’s Okhrana, Honecker’s Stasi, disappear into the crowd upon the regime’s collapse?

The longevity and resourcefulness of the Communist Party is the subject of “The Party,” Financial Times journalist Richard McGregor’s revealing new book about China’s shadowy leadership. McGregor warns us in the prologue that the book “has no pretence to being comprehensive or definitive.” Yet, the scale and interest of McGregor’s interviews—most interestingly with progressive activists—as well as the many secrets he reveals about the Party’s self-serving maneuvers, tactics, and actions, renders this an important book.

                       To MacGregor the Party is a “colossus”, a “secretive hulk”, a “grand puppeteer”, a “Board of Directors”, a “panapticon”, a “consensus,” a “sinuous, cynical and adaptive beast.” It is an unelected cabal of apparatchicks as secretive as the Vatican who operate in unmarked buildings, speak on red Party-only phones, and live along a political knife-edge. To outsiders the Party seems a gray, stony fixture of Chinese society. But MacGregor reveals—like David Shambaugh’s Atrophy and Adaptability—the struggles of the world’s most insecure leadership. The Party dips its toes into every sector of society and culture to maintain its relevance. “You call it interference,” an official tells McGregor, “We call it leadership.” But its Leninist leadership—corrupt, authoritarian, nepotistic, inefficient, extra-legal, and top-heavy.

                       The thirty years of opening markets, initiated by the wily reformer Deng Xiaoping, has sustained the Party and doubled China’s economy every eight years. But Deng also led the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen. MacGregor falls short in explaining the reasons for the brutal backlash. He doesn’t even mention Chairman Liu Shaoqi, whom Mao jailed and essentially killed during the Cultural Revolution. Mao and the history of his radicalism were a dagger pointed at reformers throats. The history of the Great Helsman’s mid-century convulsions—which MacGregor deftly details—as well as the state-socialist failure of the USSR showed how far China could devolve and how weak the Party could be. Never again, seems the unspoken Party slogan.

Hera Gallery: Rhode Island's Poetry

By BRETT WARNKE

WAKEFIELD—At a small gathering in Hera Gallery, this reporter was fortunate to hear two local poets recite a few samples of their poetry.  But why poetry?  Let’s try an experiment:  Tear off a piece of this newspaper and write down as many advertising slogans as you can.  (Pause).  Now that you have run out of room and wasted the ink of two pens borrowed from your sassy waitress, in a spirit of apology, recite for her three poems you memorized in the last month.  (No takers?)  In here lies the dilemma of the poet.  We are in a noisy and speedy world with little time allotted for reflection.  Yet we can see that the world which sustains us is diminishing the numinous powers of language.  The poet, so ignored and sidelined in American culture (though even Plato said they should be banished from the city), describes the experience of being alive; she listens to our stories and pithily puts the contours of existence into text.     

The first poet, Mary Mueller, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for poetry by New Verse News.  She read her poems in a steady, quiet voice.  Wearing a deep red scarf she recited short poems such as “Minnesota,” about returning (emotionally and perhaps physically) to her home in the Midwest.  In it, we are taken to a darkly familiar place with dead cornstalks standing as “withered sentinels.”  Then, as if by an act of engulfing repression, clouds descend “blanketing the earth in mist/anointing the soil/taking souls back.”  Other poems like “Dionysis in Pawtucket” had a sprightly mood with Mueller’s characteristic lush imagery.  Mueller also read her poem, “Poetry Reading, The Towers, Narragansett” which evoked the same anticipation and wonder from the Gallery reading:

We wait upon the words/like night cats/alert to a twig’s snap/or a stirring of air/as it brushes the ground like silk,/a geisha turning to bow/as she attends the hint of a sigh.  We wait upon the words/to tell us a bedtime story/pure as a lullaby/and grim as the brothers’ tales/that send us off to dream/in sweet awe of night terrors.  We wait upon the words /that make us smile/not knowing where mysterious heat begins or ends/as we carry it from the tower/in a chalice white as a spring orchid/to meet the ocean mist.

            With a presence that could not differ more radically from Mueller’s, Julie Hassett completed the night’s reading.  Hassett alternated between chatty personal stories and poems about the emotional distance in her own large Irish family, as well as divorce, self-discovery, privacy, and motherhood.  In one poem, “Crime Scene” she writes of a friend with cancer:  “Look/You twist your head, display a necklace of tumors/just below your skin, insist that I witness/four round knobs,/popping to the surface, my eyes stopped/by the shock of the thief/snaking his way through your lung,/your lymph nodes, back for a second attack,/four fingertips pressed to your throat/as we both choke.”

            The last evening in the poetry series is March 3 from 6-8 but a project next month will focus on artists drawing about poetry and poets writing about art.  You can access poetry by these writers at www.origamipoems.com and can discover more about events at the gallery at www.heragallery.org/.

Coetzee's Turn to High-Modernism

Milan Kundera once wrote that a writer’s purpose is to “explore new possibilities of existence.”  Through literary exploration, Kundera understood that new truths would present themselves.  Similarly, Salman Rushdie decried the oft-claimed death of the novel by declaring literature to be a possible antidote for the contemporary unease with Truth.  These are rare and significant hopes for modern writing.  But no recent author has so uniquely explored and “thought the present” than J.M. Coetzee.  Renowned for his stone-hard prose and trimmed, incisive works he is undoubtedly the most philosophical novelist writing in English.  His style and the content of his writings speak to something discomforting and haunting in our era of mass distraction and complacency.  Before his Nobel win in 2003, his novels were predictably stark but they were realistic and allegorical.  But since his novel Elizabeth Costello—which was released shortly before he received the Nobel—Coetzee has deployed a curious, riddling high-modernism.  Why?  What is the impasse in contemporary literature and modern existence that Coetzee is exploring?  The truths that interest me (and which I hope to explore) are in Coetzee’s most recent modernist novels which, I believe, create a dialectic between care and shame.  If an intellectual cannot hope to solve or even escape from a contingent all-encompassing modernity—with its carousel of horrors—how should he respond? “Art” has always been the stock answer among moderns.  Like Nietzsche, who wrote that “Man has art so he may not perish by the truth,” Coetzee’s work demonstrates the necessity of fiction as a kind of ethics.  The work is hyper-conscious.  Modernist.  And presents a unique method of storytelling.  Puzzling and perverse, the work always reveals a unique way in which the public intellectual may think the present.    

Coetzee has won two Booker Prizes and was a runner-up for a third.  If there is a notable literary prize, he’s either won it or been nominated.  His works are short and deceivingly clear but when analyzed they reveal a striking philosophical complexity.  He once wrote that “all autobiography is storytelling, all writing is autobiography.[1]”  And since he eschews the public spectacle, his writing—even his critical writing—is all one has for analysis of his more curious work.  In his two books of essays, Coetzee has selected a unique cluster of authors to investigate.[2]  In IW, he selected seemingly dissimilar authors.  Yet many of his portraits reveal common themes of exile and persecution.[3]  Among those he investigates, two died as a result of political persecution and half came of age in the interwar era as the collapsing old order produced a new age of extremes.  Coetzee’s own biography, as an English-speaking Afrikaaner, parallels these portraits of dislocation even if it lacks political confrontation. 

A unique way Coetzee has been “thinking the present” is his use of newly edited non-fiction writing to inform, or at least hint at, the purposes and influences of his modernist work.  In one review, Coetzee discusses Nietzsche’s influence on the novelist Robert Musil.  Musil’s work and his “mode of philosophizing, aphoristic rather than systematic…suited his own skeptical temperament….and as he developed as a writer, his fiction became increasingly essayistic in structure, with only perfunctory gestures in the direction of realistic narrative.[4]”  Later, in the same review, Coetzee writes that “Musil’s work, from beginning to end, is of a piece:  the evolving record of a confrontation between a man of supremely intelligent sensibility and the times that gave birth to him, times he would bitterly and justly call ‘accursed.[5]’”  It is no coincidence that two years after this review—in a new ‘accursed’ age of global capitalism, moral relativism, and atonal identity politics—that Coetzee released his “novel” Elizabeth Costello.

This peculiar novel’s needle-thin characters are plunked into a series of Coetzee’s previously published essays.  In the book’s contemporary setting, academics are compelled to tour for money, argue about “the African novel” and even debate the question of equivalence between the Holocaust and today’s slaughterhouses.  The book could be termed “meta-fiction” and is a radical departure from Coetzee’s previous work.  However, like his earlier novels, Coetzee engages with the most crucial problems of the present.  Among other topics, EC discusses today’s obsession with the “Real” (through a critique of Realism) as well as the uses of fiction as a kind of ethics.  In the book, Coetzee’s protagonist is an elderly Australian author in the mold of a grumpy Doris Lessing.  She is scrappy, moralizing, and hardnosed.  Believing there is only the dim, insufficient candle of human reason to counter a flawed human subject, Costello finds herself at odds with nearly every other character in the book.  But the reader is never exactly clear about Coetzee’s intentions for his heroine.  Is Costello a mouthpiece or a simulacrum?  Coetzee deploys enough disguising postmodern tricks that the reader has doubts about where he truly stands.  While some authors declare, Coetzee gestures.[6]  By writing about an intellectual debate at a conference or a dinner party argument, the reader is exposed to each exerted sinew of an argument and left to determine (on their own) the legitimacy of Costello’s positions.  The reader is met with a single authorial demand:  Think for yourself. 

This demand echoes arguments Doris Lessing made in an interview sixteen years before Elizabeth Costello.   Lessing considered the constraints of Realism, “

Until the Realistic novel was born, everything was legend or fable or parable…but this was the tradition of storytelling…and now people talk as if Realism is the tradition of storytelling.  I think that people have lost the ability to use their minds any other way…they didn’t used to think ‘Ah, this means that.’  They could entertain the possibility it might mean many things.  I think our imaginations have become very much impoverished.[7] 

This impoverishment is what Coetzee is responding to through Costello.  Though I don’t believe it is a reaction as much as a return.  Despite the achievements of early Modernism the preferred literary form produced throughout the West is stock Realism.  Since philosophy and literature are competitive but also complimentary forces, Coetzee interestingly entwines the two while revealing the limits of Realism.  Rousseau, a similar agent of literary change, wrote Emile, Julie an epistolary novel, and his ground-breaking Confessions which altered the form of the memoir.  Similarly, a thinker like Descartes could develop an “essay” but also write a treatise in the form of his “Meditations.”  Taken in context, Coetzee is doing what the greatest have done:  make it new. 

If we remember that the 19^th century’s train of progress—its Enlightenment ideals of History, imperialism, and the use of reason—ran off the rails as the 20^th century opened.  In Badiou’s phrase, it was “a graveyard of positivist ideas of progress.[8]”  The new century was, in a Hegelian sense, a violent antithesis to the old.  After the sanguinary convulsion of World War I, the long 19^th century ended.  In art as well as politics, there began a reaction against doubt.  This appeared in a Romantic search for the definite, a desire to make the immaterial material—to Master history through a fantasy of the Real.  Lessing points out that “Realism” is a relatively new artistic movement.  But, in a time of “liquid modernity” Realism’s preeminent reign in the genre of fiction has called into question the very purpose and nature of literature.  EC like Coetzee’s other works Youth, Boyhood, and Summertime are thinly veiled (and often dubious) memoirs, forged in an age where the genuineness and “reality” of non-fiction has taken precedent over the overt constructions of fiction.  If, as Zygmant Bauman argues, our “liquid modernity” is an epoch in which “no qualities of things and acts count other than instant, constant and unreflecting self-gratification,” then the dilemmas of literary Realism are to be seen in how human beings view time.[9]  Can a realistic novel—no matter how complex—keep pace with the complexities and fragmentations of a liquid modernity?   The “This means that” Realism, according to Lessing, diminishes the readers power of interpretation.  Consequently, the burden of the creative modernist is to continue to “make it new” or else allow the precipitous fading of the printed word.  Echoing Lessing, though not as straightforwardly, Coetzee writes that, “Realism has never been comfortable with ideas.  It could not be otherwise:  realism 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.[10]”  Yet, Coetzee’s published works are not flippant or merely modernist for their own sake.  They are clear, lithe, and startling.  His subjects still focus on the dilemmas—literary and ethical—of the present.  In fact, in the realistic aspects of the novel, they exist solely as vehicles for these ideas.           

Along with the self-conscious stylizations of his novel, Coetzee addresses (through Costello) the impact of evil on writers and writing.  In a chapter titled “The Problem of Evil” Costello confronts a real author, Paul West, about his 1980 novel The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg.  She considers his descriptions of an execution scene gratuitous, even “obscene.”  In an awkward confrontation she says, “…you must have known the risk you were taking, you must have realized there could be consequences, unpredictable consequences, and now, lo and behold!’—she stands up, clasps the folder [holding her lecture] to her bosom—the consequences have arrived.  That is all.”[11]  The over-the–top self-righteousness is quite funny and draws attention to some of Costello’s frequent galumphing throughout the book.  Yet, the weight of “her” arguments is not so easily dismissed.  Coetzee writes of Costello’s deep concern about any form of gratuitous sadism.  This critique of pornographic violence is especially salient in a context of global horrors which may concern us, but never touch us.[12]  The true creative horror is that the writer may be complicit by “unwittingly make evil seem attractive.”  Therefore, Costello “chooses to believe that obscene means off-stage.”  “To save our humanity,” Coetzee writes, “certain things that we may want to see (may want to see because we are human!) must remain off-stage.”  When interviewed by the Ithaca News West had to (in what is probably a first) respond to the charges of a fictional character!  On the question of obscenity, West said,

I think [Coetzee] invented her to voice an opinion that he despised ... (She's) a sacrificial animal in that novel; she's carefully set up to be destroyed.  If you don't get into the nitty-gritty of this horrible stuff, then you are not sympathizing, empathizing with the people who went through it.  I think literature has an obligation to do that…If you close the gate on certain destructive forms of behavior, then you have failed your obligation as a novelist to be those people - in other words, you're not going to present a representative slice of human life and human horror if you don't do it.[13]

Yet, West’s analysis doesn’t square with what Coetzee has previously written.  Coetzee is undoubtedly following Joyce, leaving riddles in his work hoping that eager scholars will do the work of untying his many knots.  But if Coetzee’s evasions about the duties of the intellectual are more irksome than didactic his earlier journalism was more declarative.[14]  At a dark moment of the South African troubles in the 1980s (just as he was beginning to write Age of Iron) Coetzee wrote an article for the New York Times titled “Into the Dark Chamber.”  Long before the recent excesses at Guantanamo or the Orwellian “enhanced interrogation techniques,” Coetzee was presciently concerned with the effects of the torture chamber.  (Interestingly, he neglects a description of his own torture scenes in Waiting for the Barbarians.)

Instead, his article ruminates on the torture chamber as a “fantasy” chamber, a blank slate onto which the author can project any nightmares of the Real.  Coetzee writes about the dilemmas posed by this position, “[T]here is something tawdry about following the state in this way, making its vile mysteries the occasion of fantasy. For the writer the deeper problem is not to allow himself to be impaled on the dilemma proposed by the state, namely, either to ignore its obscenities or else to produce representations of them. The true challenge is how not to play the game by the rules of the state, how to establish one's own authority, how to imagine torture and death on one's own terms.[15]”  The “deeper problems” is for the writer!  At the height of apartheid!  The “evil grandeur” given to police—like West’s executioners—instead of challenging the state’s “obscenities” and crimes allow for the artist’s pornographic complicity.  At the very least, such grandeur produces uncaring clichés that leave the status quo unchallenged. 

But even while tackling the ethical subject of torture in literature, Coetzee can be mystifying on other topics.  While he’ll continually stresses the importance of public intellectuals in the struggle for the environment, the struggle with the state, and while his work deeply ponders the methods of writing, he writes that Costello’s works “evince no faith in art.[16]”  If she holds “his views” or at least something orbiting around them, how can it be that his life’s work can be done in bad faith?  Or, to take another example, he will challenge writers (however drily) who take Shelley’s “unacknowledged legislator” remark too far.[17]  In one instance, Vargas Llosa’s wrote that “[literature] is a living, systematic, inevitable contradiction of all that exists.”  The response was vintage Coetzee:  “…[H]owever unwittingly, [Llosa’s position] suggests that the risk run by the writer-as-hero is the risk of megalomania.[18]”  This led Llosa to challenge directly at a literary conference.  When it was Coetzee’s turn, instead of a speech, he read a story.  Llosa said that he didn’t want to hear a story he wanted to know what Coetzee thought.  Is Coetzee withdrawing from the globalized age of Book TV, instantaneous news, and competing sources for our attention?  Or is he just too cautious to state his position clearly?  In Diary of a Bad Year, Senor JC, another Coetzee double writes about the hunger in our age for truth.  JC writes, “But how can this hunger be satisfied by the mere writer (to speak just of writers) when the grasp of the facts that the writer has is usually incomplete or unsure, when his very access to the so-called facts is likely to be via media within the political field of forces, and when ,half the time, he is because of his vocation as much interested in the liar and the psychology of the lie as in the truth?[19]” Huh?  What does “he” mean by “so-called facts”?  If this is Coetzee’s position (one can never be sure) are these modernist meditations enough?  Coetzee seems more than willing to “state the facts” about animal slaughterhouses and the gruesome manner in which livestock are stuffed with grain and butchered.  Why then is there hesitation or mystification when speaking about other issues?

Bucking literary Realism is uncontroversial; writers have done it for a century.  But the intersection of thought and politics is a bloody crossroads.  Coetzee’s most controversial statements have come from The Lives of Animals chapter in EC.  If anything, this chapter (and the book of the same name) represents an enduring motif in Coetzee’s work, one of “care” and its resulting sense of “shame.”  Being raised under the protection of the unjust, illegitimate Afrikaaner state undoubtedly left its mark on the young Coetzee.  But the unclubbable author describes in all of his memoirs the near autistic distance he felt between himself and other people.  What other way would there be to show solidarity than through art?  If it is not a defect of personality, than it is one of choice, as in the case of Adorno.  In his Minima Moralia, he describes a similar feeling of care and shame:  “For the intellectual, inviolable isolation is now the only way of showing some measure of solidarity….The detached observer is as much entangled as the active participant; the only advantage of the former is insight into his entanglement, and the infinitesimal freedom that lies in knowledge as such.[20]”  But the thinker’s isolation must yield illumination.  For example, after Costello’s lecture in which she compares the Holocaust to Chicago slaughterhouses she sits with her son who asks what it is she hopes to cure mankind of.  She responds, “John, I don’t know what I want to do.  I just don’t want to be silent.”  And while other characters find her views loathsome or even “jejune” and “sentimental” the reader can again and again take notice of a compulsion on behalf of Coetzee’s thinker-protagonists to speak. 

I see dialectic between care and shame in Coetzee’s work.  Repeatedly, protagonists are met with a compulsion to speak or act.  However, the consequences of this escape into action results in a charge of “moralizing” (in the case of Costello) or a resulting failure (as in the case of Age of Iron’s Cullen and Disgrace’s Lurie).  For Costello, care for animals inevitably results in the shame of being alive, a feeling of disgrace in an ever-diminishing capacity to act.  One of Coetzee’s characters maintains that “shame” is the sole component which differentiates man from beasts saying, “[Animals] have no sense of shame, we say:  that is what makes them different than us.  But the basic idea remains uncleanness.  Animals have unclean habits, so they are excluded.  Shame makes human beings of us, shame of uncleanness.  Adam and Eve:  the founding myth.  Before that we were all just animals together.”  The idea that shame is unique to man is not exactly a new idea.  Mark Twain argued that man was the only animal that blushed, or needed to.  But this shame weighs heavily on Costello.  She doesn’t just sound off about a neglected cause; her character (among others in Coetzee’s work) is consumed with shame at what she views as the normalization of evil.  She says,

I seem to move around perfectly easily among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them.  Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions?  Am I fantasizing it all?  I must be mad!  Yet every day I see the evidences.  The very people I suspect produce the evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me.  Corpses.  Fragments of corpses that they have bought for money…I look into your eyes, into Norma’s, into the children’s, and I see only kindness….Everyone else comes to terms with it..I say to myself…why can’t you?

In Slow Man, Coetzee continues this dialectic of care and shame by resurrecting Costello and dropping her into the life of Paul Rayment, his new protagonist.  Paul is a retired photographer whose leg is amputated after a bicycle accident.  In his new life he is “trying to remain a man, albeit a diminished man” and as he recuperates, he hears the clack-clack of keys. Costello emerges, though not just as a character.  Costello is a self-conscious literary vehicle who is dictating and indeed pupeteering his life onto her keyboard.  After his surgery he lives in shame; he doesn’t want “to be seen in his new, curtailed, humiliating, and humiliated state.[21]”  Paul is brought low by circumstance, like so many of Coetzee’s characters.  A scholar should log the humiliations and defeats—the bouts of incontinence, rape, and injustice in Coetzee’s books.  His vision of the world is almost Schopenhaurian:  Life is a walking nightmare. But after each bleak and humiliating erasure of hope, each concession to a philosophy of pessimism, characters have the ability (in Lenin’s phrase) to begin from the beginning, again. “A leg gone,” Paul ponders, “What is losing a leg in the larger perspective?  In the larger perspective, losing a leg is no more than a rehearsal for losing everything.[22]”  But beginning again is difficult.  Paul’s life is frivolous.  Childless and retired, he Coetzee describes him as a “wasted chance…sliding through the world.[23]”   It is only through an event, the care of his Balkan nurse Marijana that he learns empathy.  Learning this, he is open to the possibility of salvation.  But upon healing his emotions are a confusion of misplaced love, loneliness, desperation, and shame.  Paul desires Marijana’s love but as this is impossible, he decides to give money to help her son Drago go to school.  (We may be in a fictional world, but the power relations of capital remain desperately real.)  Drago’s father is hesitant about the loan but Paul persists, “You should remind him there is no shame in taking a loan from a friend.  Because that is how I would like to be thought of:  as a friend.[24]  But is he?  His lack of understanding or outright misunderstanding of other character’s feelings illustrates the difficulty of individuals ever truly knowing one another.  Perhaps Coetzee is showing us man’s native vice, indifference.  Why else select an immigrant family from the Balkans?  In this age of displacement Paul, too, is an émigré, but from France.  Yet, the choice of the blood-soaked Balkans cannot be a coincidence.  Mariajana and her family are the human face of a world in ferment.  All Paul can do is write a check, attempt care (as she is compelled to do by circumstance), and educate himself on Balkan history for their interactions.  What else can he do with the weight of such shame?  If there is a symbol in this work, it is the prosthesis that Paul can never attach.  He limps independently on crutches.  “prosthesis” is not just a limb, it is an object that fills a lack.  What is missing becomes complete, what is defective becomes renewed.  But as Paul is unable to truly empathize with either Costello or Marijana, he remains by the novels end “a man not wholly a man…a half-man, an after-man, like an after-image; the ghost of a man looking back in regret on time not well used.[25]” 

This palpable sense of shame has become a recognized if condemned motif in his novels.  Coetzee has a character ponder whether or not “shame might outweigh pleasure.[26]”  The stylistic wizard Martin Amis weighed in.  He recently stated that Coetzee had “no talent.” After reading one of Coetzee’s books [yes, only one!] he found it “predicated on transmitting absolutely no pleasure.[27]”  But the motif of shame is met with an ethical demand, a sense of “caring,” that Coetzee’s characters exhibit despite the bleakness and feeling of doom he creates.  But what is this caring, philosophically?  Is it simply guilt?  Is it morality, duty, ethics?  If literature offers impressions and stories, philosophy reaches for answers and proof.  But neither can properly exist without the other.  Mere style cannot hope to properly think the present—and though the accusation has been made, I wouldn’t charge Amis with this.  But can Coetzee’s lithe and often cliché style properly think the present?  If not, than the weight of his ideas seems to be enough.  But what is becoming more evident today is that the politics and philosophy of the present are insufficient for the times.  Badiou’s Ethics denies the analgesic of “human rights” and holds to irreducible concepts of equality and justice.  Badiou takes aims at the politics of particularity in the form of “tolerance,” “multiculturalism,” and the “right to difference” which he views as conservative divisions masquerading as radicalism.  Instead, he argues for an ethics of truths.  Each word in Badiou’s lithe works seems pregnant with the belief in a possibility but with an understanding of the fragility of situations—the rarity of Events.  And lurking always in the background is the threat of reaction, a right turn, whose consequence is terror, betrayal, and disaster.[28]  If Badiou’s understanding of an Event is a necessity for a rejuvenated conception of ethics—the Good—than Coetzee’s fiction illuminates the incompatibility of an ethics with present circumstances.  It is, thus, becoming harder and harder to live a good life knowing what we know.  Slow Man’s Paul lives on despite disaster as a diminished man.  Costello feels alone but compelled by a sense of pervasive evil.  Even Lurie, the protagonist of Disgrace after the gang-rape of his daughter and his own personal humiliation limps on, albeit caring for animals as they are poisoned and incinerated.  There is care and there is action in these characters, however meager and inconsequential.

Another double is the fictional “Senor JC” (Coetzee’s initials) who is an author of a book called Waiting for the Barbarians (Coetzee’s novel) and lives in Adelaide, Australia (Coetzee’s new home).  The book is written in like a sheet of music with three interlocking pieces, each of them narratives.  JC like Coetzee in Summertime is “lonely, unnaturally lonely.[29]” He is an aging leftist intellectual who, after meeting Anya, a beautiful young woman who lives in his building, asks her to type his manuscript.  Diary of a Bad Year is great for any ADD sufferer.  Perhaps a wink at our culture today?  The top half is JC’s meditations on events ranging from the origins of the state to Bach.  The second and third portions of the page carry the reader through a realistic narrative.  What interests me about this book is again, the reoccurrence of shame as a motif but also the political manifestation of that shame and the evasive positions Coetzee takes in order to think the present.  JC writes in what he calls a “dark time” and his book is “not a memoir” it is “a response to the present in which I find myself.[30]” 

Some of JC’s thoughts are absurd and contradictory.  Following Saramago’s novel Seeing and Critchley’s critique of an unmotivated parliamentary democracy in Infinitely Demanding, Coetzee paints a grim Hobbesian picture of state authority:  “The state shakes its head.  You have to choose, says the state:  [candidate]A or B.”  But then JC will later write in a passage about Guantanamo Bay, “Impossible to believe that in some American hearts the spectacle of their country’s honor being dragged through the mud does not breed murderous thoughts.[31]”  He later calls the leaders “criminals” and is baffled that there has been no attempt to assassinate them.  First, whose murderous thoughts?  For what, Khalid Sheik Muhammad being water-boarded?  Secondly, how can the state both be a cynical method of power (a la Hobbes) but also one that has “honor worth defending?”  In his usual oily fashion, Coetzee slips into the narrative hints that JC may or may not hold his views:  “Tread carefully…you may be seeing less of my inmost depths than you believe.  The opinions you happen to be typing do not necessarily come from my inmost depths.[32]”  These evasions deal partially with storytelling but more with politics.  Many authors easily walked into the political realm, few emerged unscathed.  Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Lewis, and Sartre come to mind.  Interestingly, in Summertime there are clues to Coetzee’s mystification of his politics.  In one passage he writes about Neruda.  A colleague is being interviewed about the character Coetzee’s death and says, “Neruda may have even have been a model—an unattainable model—of how a poet can respond to injustice and oppression.”  True, partially.  Neruda’s blinkered allegiance to Lenin and Stalin allowed for great controversy that has shadowed his biography ever since.  What is the “model” of Neruda?  Is it a positive one?  Or is it an illustrative example of how a writer—if he is to engage in philosophy, literature, and politics—must “tread lightly,” as lightly as the reader of any Coetzee novel. 

One character in Summertime states that Coetzee was not apolitical.  Rather, he was anti-political.  Coetzee writes, “He thought that politics brought out the worst in people.  It brought out the worst in people and also brought to the surface the worst types in society.  He preferred to have nothing to do with it.[33]”  But this is not so.  The real Coetzee protested the Vietnam War, won the Jerusalem Prize at whose ceremony he called South Africa a “prison,” and Elizabeth Costello and Diary both deeply discuss politics.  Irving Howe praised Waiting for the Barbarians in 1984 as a “literary event” and a “political novel.”  But Coetzee’s writing, I would argue, is a pseudo-political fiction in a response to shame.  In JC’s chapter about Harold Pinter he writes about Pinter’s “foolhardy” point of view but writes “there comes time when the outrage and the shame are so great that all calculation, all prudence, is overwhelmed and one must act, that is to say, speak.[34]”  A pity that such an interesting thought (as well as the Nobel) was wasted on Harold Pinter.  But it illustrates the point:  that from shame there becomes a relationship with care.  Care for another person, care for justice, care for the world.  Can philosophical thought ever be divorced from political action?  Philosophy began with a political show trial and Socrates execution!  The intellectual, cannot allow things to be as they are—there is an “ethical demand” in Logstrup’s terms.  In a chapter titled “On national shame” Coetzee quotes Demosthenes:  ‘Whereas the slave fears only pain, what the free man fears most is shame.’  This poses the most important question of Coetzee’s literature.  The question of action in regard to the state oppression (torture, subverted laws, the state itself, etc.) “How, in the face of this shame to which I am subject do I behave?  How do I save my honor?[35] 

To sum up, Coetzee’s fiction does nothing if not ask questions.  This is why his work is so philosophical—he creates problems; problems of real moral tension.  And he does it in a readable and deceptively simplistic prose.  His works are a way to work out in the form of a story a new truth.  But for all of Coetzee’s careful posturing, I struggle to see any significance beyond the literary—perhaps that’s always been his goal.  He is a writer after all.  His concept of developing a method for writers to protect themselves from attack while still expressing some token of solidarity is clever, but is it serious in regards to politics?  I have my doubts.  While someone like Borges didn’t receive a prize for his political beliefs, Pinter and Carter most likely did.  Coetzee, interestingly, received his Nobel Prize in a most political year, 2003, but up until that point, had expressed no opinions about the geopolitical situation.  More recently, however, rather than silence, his words have gone beyond the evasive and inched ever closer towards relativism.  In an introduction to his protégée Patrick Allington’s first novel, Figurehead, Coetzee was typically nervous and breathy.  Yet, what was most disconcerting was not a John Gray-like pessimism, a mood which he gestures towards in several novels, but a feline dance instead of real statements.  Reading a prepared script he criticized the “incuriosity” of groups like the Taliban.  He linked such stony certainty to Figurehead, Allington’s novel about Kampuchea.  Coetzee says in his introductory remarks about incuriosity and today’s fundamentalism, “Whether the Taliban are actually ‘evil’ I wouldn’t know.[36]”  He continues that the incuriosity of fundamentalists “sends a chill up my spine,” as does any doctrinaire ideology like Maoism, fascism, National Socialism.  (That he refuses an attack on “communism” and instead insinuates that the Stalinist era was a type of socialism in one country, a National Socialism, earns him points in my book.)  But he doesn’t know if the Taliban are evil?!  For shame.  This is a waste of a sentence.  “Evil” is the word he seems to take issue with as a descriptor of a person.  “Actions” can be evil, so this logic goes, but an “evil person,” is too much.  Who determines who is evil?  etc.  Yet, if this is his logic, then in Stranger Shores he asks a rather curious question.  In a review of Alan Patton’s assessment of the Nationalist leader Verwoerd, Coetzee writes, “I would have thought it more important [for Patton] to ask the question of whether a man [Verwoerd] whose works were so unremittingly evil in their effects could escape being evil himself.[37]”  So, then it is possible for a man whose acts are evil to be evil, right?  Or else why pose the question?  If this is the case, why get ruffled about calling the Taliban evil?  These neurotic games distresses me.  For a man who writes so brilliantly about the effects of shame and the necessity of care, the nobility of the creative artist and the dangers of a fragmented present, these recent remarks about evil show none of the care and remind me only of shame.  The shame of being on today’s Left.  Perhaps I worry not because I think Coetzee is “soft.”  I think his work is new, inventive, thoughtful, and enduring.  But I fear that this “evil” comment could foreshadow a  modernist style that uses an artist’s creative energies to degenerate into elusive tricks—a playful tactic to avoid difficult choices.  Shelley’s phrase about “unacknowledged legislators” might have been elevated, but that doesn’t make it untrue.          

   

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[1] Coetzee, Doubling the Point (391-2)

[2] J.M. Coetzee, Stranger Shores Literary Essays 1986-1999 Harvill Secker, 2007 and Inner Workings 2000-2005

[3] Inner Workings, xi. 

[4] Inner Workings, 36.

[5] Inner Workings, 39.

[6] One author whose “sureness” Coetzee returns to—almost nostalgically—in Youth and Stranger Shores is the ever-didactic Leo Tolstoy.

[7] BBC interview:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCCHKXRJdMM

[8] Alain Badiou, Ethics, 84.

[9] Zygmant Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 159. 

[10] Elizabeth Costello, 9. 

[11] Elizabeth Costello, 172. 

[12] The Invisible Committee, 22. 

[13] http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=10839950&BRD=1395&PAG=461&dept_id=216620&rfi=6

[14] “The pieces (I wrote) on South African society, I think they deserve a quiet death…I slipped a little too easily into the role of commentator on South African affairs.  I have no talent for that kind of political/sociological journalism” (Doubling the Point 103,104)

[15] http://www.nytimes.com/1986/01/12/books/coetzee-chamber.html?scp=1&sq=into%20the%20dark%20chamber&st=cse

[16] EC, 207.

[17] “In a review of Whitman’s work he wrote “Whitman was often present when Lincoln passed through the streets and was convinced that over the heads of the crowd, the elected leader of the people recognized and nodded back to the unacknowledged legislator of mankind (like Shelley, Whitman had elevated ideas about his calling) (IW,176).

[18] Giving Offense, 47. 

[19] Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 126. 

[20] Adorno, Minima Morlaia, 25-26.

[21] Coetzee, Slow Man, 14. 

[22] Coetzee, Slow Man, 17. 

[23] Coetzee, Slow Man, 19.

[24][24] Coetzee, Slow Man, 132.

[25] Coetzee, Slow Man, 34. 

[26] Coetzee, Slow Man, 37. 

[27] ttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/7080509/Martin-Amis-criticises-Nobel-writer-JM-Coetzee-for-having-no-talent.html

[28] Badiou, Ethics, 71. 

[29] Coetzee, Summertime, 196.

[30] Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 67. 

[31] Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 40. 

[32] Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 91. 

[33] Coetzee, Summertime, 228. 

[34] Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 127. 

[35] Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 39. 

[36] http://www.mefeedia.com/watch/21674513 (2:30)

[37]Coetzee, Stranger Shores, 266.