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 19th century’s train of progress—its
Enlightenment ideals of History, imperialism, and the use of reason—ran off the
rails as the 20th 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 19th 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.
[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.
[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.
[37]Coetzee,
Stranger Shores, 266.
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