Coetzee on Prose and Poetry

Here's one way the young J. M. Coetzee thought about the difference between prose and poetry (from his memoir Youth):

In poetry, the action can take place everywhere and nowhere: it does not matter whether the lonely wives of the fishermen live in Kalk Bay or Portugal or Maine. Prose, on the other hand, seems naggingly to demand a specific setting. (62-63)

He goes on to say that he cannot write about London (where he is living at the time) because he does not know it well enough yet—and thus implies that he can only write about South Africa, where he grew up.

This could be a commentary on Coetzee's own work, for at the time when Youth was published (2002), he had published eight novels, only one of which does not have "a specific setting": Waiting for the Barbarians is set in an imaginary, unnamed "Empire." Foe and The Master of Petersburg complicate the point, but neither fully contradicts it: Foe might even be the London novel that the younger Coetzee feared he could not write, while imagines a Petersburg that Coetzee the author fully inhabited, in a sense, in his extensive reading of and about Dostoevsky. — The rest of those previous novels are set in South Africa, and the three he has published since are very specific about setting (except perhaps for one or two sections of Elizabeth Costello).

Still, a statement like the above in a memoir is somewhat unstable (even if it is not as unstable as it might be if uttered by a character in a novel). A memoirist might be asserting this position as his own, but he might also be saying that the position is one he once held but now finds mistaken. A more straightforward memoirist than Coetzee would probably make explicit whether he agreed or disagreed with his younger self on this point, but Coetzee never says anything like "what a fool I was" or "I already knew that." He establishes distance from his younger self by writing about himself in the third person and the present tense, but it is not always clear whether that distance is ironic or not. (See my thoughts on this in Boyhood from 2007 here.)

Finally, though, it is worth considering the truth of the claim that prose demands a specific setting while poetry does not. One should be more precise: novels demand a specific setting while lyric poems don't. Put that bluntly, it's surely not true (Kafka, anyone?), but as a rule of thumb it seems accurate to me: lyric poetry can be very unspecific about setting in a way that most novels could never get away with being.

Omnivore's Dilemma 2

My response to Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma starts in out-of-the-way moments. The first is a reference to Basel: it turns out that Fritz Haber "died ... in a Basel hotel room in 1934." Haber is famous for three things: first, he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of how to synthesize nitrogen from the air (for "improving the standards of agriculture and the well-being of mankind," as the Nobel committee put it). Secondly, he was the leader of Germany's efforts to use poison gas in World War I. Thirdly, he was the inventor of Zyklon B, which was used to gas Jews and others in German concentration camps during World War II. But he himself was a converted Jew who had to leave Germany after the Nazi seizure of power, and he died in Basel in 1934.

The second out-of-the-way moment that struck me involved a reference to an author I have written extensive notes about here: J. M. Coetzee. I spent the summer last year reading and re-reading his novels and essays, in anticipation of the publication of his newest novel, Diary of a Bad Year, and I read Pollan's book afterwards, so I was surprised and pleased to find Coetzee turning up in Pollan's book, especially as I immediately thought of Coetzee at the beginning of the paragraph that ends with a reference to him. (If Pollan had not referred to Coetzee, I would have written to Pollan to tell him about Coetzee.) Pollan's reference is to Elizabeth Costello (or, more precisely, to The Lives of Animals, which was later incorporated into EC):

Is it possible that history will someday judge us as harshly as it judges the Germans who went about their lives in the shadow of Treblinka? The South African novelist J. M. Coetzee posed precisely that question in a lecture at Princeton not long ago; he answered it in the affirmative. If the animal rightists are right, then "a crime of stupendous proportions" (in Coetzee's words) is going on all around us every day, just beneath our notice.

The literary scholar in me wants to chastise Pollan for conflating Coetzee with Elizabeth Costello, the character he invented, but it would be too complicated, of course, for Pollan to observe the literary niceties here, and in fact, it was Coetzee who wrote that phrase, even if he put it into his character's mouth.

At first, Pollan surrenders, as it were, to the ideas expressed by Coetzee's character, as well as those of Peter Singer, the author of Animal Liberation (and, interestingly, a respondent when Coetzee first presented the lectures that Pollan refers to and that Coetzee later used in Elizabeth Costello). But Pollan finally concludes (referring to an organic farm he worked at for a week):

To many people even Polyface Farm is a "death camp"—a way station for doomed creatures awaiting their date with the executioner. But to look at the lives of these animals is to see this holocaust analogy for the sentimental conceit it really is ... To think of domestication as a form of slavery or even exploitation is to misconstrue that whole relationship—to project a human idea of power onto what is in fact an example of mutualism or symbiosis between species.

As Milan Kundera put it in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: man is a "cow parasite."

Pollan hence finally sees Singer, Coetzee, and others who might criticize even a humanely run farm like Polyface Farm for its exploitation of animals as "sentimental" (something Coetzee has surely never before been accused of being!). Still, Pollan himself succumbs to the seductiveness of holocaust analogies when he comments that Haber's biography "recalls the dubious links between modern warfare and industrial agriculture."

While preparing these comments, I took a break and chanced to be reading "On a Weekend Break in a Political Vacuum," a poem by Alan Gillis, from his book Hawks and Doves, which includes the following stanza:

She accuses herself, as it is with the food
that awaits her, served with speed in a bright
labelled box (always that first bite's stomach-
melting dream chews to cardboard and carcass,
like a drunken one-night stand's aftermath
rising to a seasickness which empties,
utterly empties, so that she winds up
seeking the comfort of warm, easy things—
the chilled blues and brightly-boxed food
that awaits her), so it is with her mind.

How perfectly Gillis captures the seductiveness of fast food: the "melting dream" that produces a dissatisfaction that, through twists and turns, leads one back to the "brightly-boxed food" even when (or perhaps precisely because) it "chews to cardboard and carcass." "She accuses herself," writes Gillis, as many of us perhaps accuse ourselves, but without changing, even if, with Pollan, we remind ourselves what "unsustainable" means: "Sooner or later it must collapse."

When I finished The Omnivore's Dilemma, I began to shop differently. Did I go vegan? No. Did I go vegetarian? No. Did I start buying only organic food? No. Did I start buying only local food? No. But I began to compare things more carefully: is it organic? If so, where is it from? How much does it cost compared to the non-organic product? (It is surprising how many organic products are not more expensive than their non-organic counterparts, and how many more are only slightly more so.) I began to try to apply Pollan's conclusion:

But imagine for a moment if we once again knew, simply as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost.

Age of Iron

"He heard me out civilly. I was entitled to my opinion, he said. I did not change his mind.

"But now I ask myself: what right do I have to opinions about comradeship or anything else? ... To have opinions in a vacuum, opinions that touch no one, is, it seems to me, nothing. Opinions must be heard by others, heard and weighed, not just listened to out of politeness. And to be weighed they must have weight."

(J. M. Coetzee, Age of Iron)

1. The speaker, Mrs. Curren, is the narrator of the book, a white South African woman, around 70, dying of cancer, in the mid-to-late 1980s. A black man, Mr. Thabane, responded to her remarks earlier in the book by saying, "You are entitled to your opinion." It struck me how nasty that statement is. It means something like this: "Your opinion is utter and complete nonsense, but it is beneath me to argue with you about it."

2. Mrs. Curren argues that opinions have to be put on the line in order to be at all valid. In fact, she ends up implying that, as long as she is not willing to get out into the world and argue with people about her opinions, she is not entitled to her opinions.

3. This moment is important in Coetzee's work as a whole. In Elizabeth Costello, the title character argues that realism in fiction requires ideas to be embodied in characters. Mrs. Curren makes the same point in a more indirect way: ideas by themselves are nothing; there must be a person to back them up.

4. In Diary of a Bad Year, the narrator presents his "strong opinions," because he has been asked to do so by a German publishing house that is going to publish a collection of the "strong opinions" of various writers. The interactions between the narrator, his typist, and the typist's boyfriend provide the context of resistance to those strong opinions that entitle the narrator to them, in Mrs. Curren's sense.

Youth

"The question of what should be permitted to go into his diary and what kept forever shrouded goes to the heart of all his writing."

Coetzee's Youth is the second volume of his memoirs. Like Boyhood, it is written in the third person and in the present tense.

There is a gap between the two books, of several years. There is also a gap in the implicit relationship between the author and the main character of each book, if you will: Coetzee seems to ironize his youthful self (about 19 to 24 years old) more than he does his childhood self (up to about 15 years old?).

Even so, this being a memoir, there are still moments, as in Boyhood, in which the adult author seems to be commenting on his development as a writer. Here, near the beginning of Youth, the main character (only later identified as "John") has written about his affair with an older woman in his diary—specifically, about how discouraging he finds the whole relationship to be. When his lover reads his diary, she leaves him, of course, and he wonders about what one should write and what one should not write.

If this is a comment on Coetzee's own fiction, it's hard to say exactly what claim is being made about that fiction; after all, when we read his books, all we have is what they contain and not what he has "forever shrouded." In his books about novelists (The Master of Petersburg and Elizabeth Costello), though, this point might be touched on (as in the passage quoted at the end of my third post on The Master of Petersburg).

Perhaps what I am slowly getting at as I comment on JMC's memoirs is how the two books undermine one's hope that they will provide a reliable "portrait of the artist as a young man." In fact, my edition of Boyhood has a quotation from Michiko Kakutani on the cover: "Fiercely revealing, bluntly unsentimental ... a telling portrait of the artist as a young man that illuminates the hidden source of his art." Every time I read that, it seems like she could have written it without even having read the book: it's such a cliché about memoir writing.

Revelation and unsentimentality are themes in JMC's memoirs; that is, the idea of revelation and the idea of an unsentimental approach to oneself are circled around, but revelation and a "bluntly unsentimental" approach are not the tools JMC is simply "using" here.

Disgrace 3

"When did a sheep last die of old age? Sheep do not own themselves, do not own their lives. They exist to be used, every last ounce of them, their flesh to be eaten, their bones to be crushed and fed to poultry. Nothing escapes, except perhaps the gall bladder, which no one will eat. Descartes should have thought of that. The soul, suspended in the dark, bitter gall, hiding."

One of the more subtly developed issues in Coetzee's Disgrace is that of animal rights. In Elizabeth Costello, JMC takes on animal rights head-on (and it is fascinating to picture him writing the two "Lives of Animals" sections of that book, fully aware that he would have Martha Nussbaum and Peter Singer in the audience), but in Disgrace, though the theme is on the surface of the book, it is fully embedded in the story, as David Lurie moves from complete indifference to the issue to his involvement in the euthanasia of dogs at the end of the book (sick dogs, but also simply those that cannot find a home, excess dogs).

Here, I am struck by JMC's wonderful little barb against Descartes: the animal's soul in an organ that one can live without, the organ that nobody wants to eat. This passage is one to give serious consideration to in any complete analysis of "The Lives of Animals" from EC.

The Lives of Animals has appeared as a book, but I have never gotten around to reading it separately. The book also includes Nussbaum and Singer's responses to JMC's "lessons"; they must be fascinating.

Foe 4

"How like a savage to master a strange instrument — to the extent that he is able without a tongue — and then be content forever to play one tune upon it!"

Here, Susan Barton in Coetzee's Foe is again writing to Daniel Foe (Defoe), this time commenting upon Friday's music: he learns to play the recorder, but all he ever plays is the same tune that he had played on a little whistle-like instrument that he had had on the island.

The image reminds me of the black master carver in Elizabeth Costello who carves the same figure of Jesus over and over again, sometimes very small, sometimes very large (even a gigantic altar piece), but without the slightest variation. Elizabeth Costello complains to her sister (a nun in Africa) that he ought to try to do something else, so as to be fully expressive as an artist, and her sister defends the carver's choice of doing the same figure over and over.

I'm not sure how to paraphrase what these two images say about Coetzee's own perspective art that "westerners" (here, Susan Barton and Elizabeth Costello) deem "primitive," but the nun's defense of such art in EC flashes back into Foe as a defense of Friday's music (a defense that is not heard in Foe, and perhaps could not be, given Friday's lack of a tongue).

"... we cannot forever play the same tune and be content. Or so at least it is with civilized people."

*

"I recall an author reflecting that after death we may find ourselves not among choirs of angels but in some quite ordinary place, as for instant a bath-house on a hot afternoon, with spiders dozing in the corners; at the time it will seem like any Sunday in the country; only later will it come home to us that we are in eternity."

This is now Susan Barton speaking to Daniel Foe; again, the image returns in another form in Elizabeth Costello, in the final "lesson" where E. C. is waiting in a purgatory-like place that is actually a lot like a small town in the hot season in a dry, tropical country.

It's also reminiscent of the last chapter of Julian Barnes's A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, in which the afterlife is what you expected it to be.

*

"I am not a story, Mr. Foe. I may impress you as a story because I began my account of myself without preamble, slipping overboard into the water and striking out for the shore. But my life did not begin in the waves. There was a life before the water which stretched back to my desolate searchings in Brazil, thence to the years when my daughter was still with me, and so on back to the day I was born. All of which makes up a story I do not choose to tell. I choose not to tell it because to no one, not even to you, do I owe proof that I am a substantial being with a substantial history in the world. I choose rather to tell of the island, of myself and Cruso and Friday and what we three did there: for I am a free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story according to her own desire."

I began my account of myself without preamble—and thus her account is like a story. By implication, the stories real people tell of themselves in real life always have preambles, in which the raconteur justifies the telling of this particular story at this particular time. In fiction, by contrast, stories are told without preamble and without occasion—for the sheer pleasure of storytelling?

Foe 3

"... the history you write ... must not only tell the truth about us but please its readers too. Will you not bear it in mind, however, that my life is drearily suspended till your writing is done?"

Here, Susan Barton in Coetzee's Foe is writing to Daniel Foe (Defoe), asking him how much longer it will take him to turn the story of Barton, Crusoe, and Friday as castaways into a book.

To me, in my recent re-reading of Foe, it read like an anachronistic reference to Coetzee's most recent novel, Slow Man, in which the main character, Paul Rayment, turns out to be a character in a novel by Coetzee's figure Elizabeth Costello. In Slow Man, Costello finds her own life "drearily suspended" while she waits for the "slow man" to decide what to do with his life. In Foe, it is the character who finds her life "suspended" while she waits for the novelist to finish writing her story.

"He has turned his mind from us, I told myself, as easily as if we were two of his grenadiers in Flanders, forgetting that while his grenadiers falls into an enchanted sleep whenever he absents himself, Friday and I continue to eat and drink and fret."

Depths

"Charlatans and hydrographic engineers stand irrevocably on different sides of the crucial dividing line. Not the date line or the prime meridian line, but the line that separates the measurable from what cannot be measured and hence doesn't exist."

These are the thoughts of Lars Tobiasson-Svartman, a hydrographic engineer, the main character of Henning Mankell's Depths. The novel is full of this man's ideas, which are often quite pithy and charged with implications, both for the novel and as quotable quotes, as it were.

But as the novel wore on, I began to grow increasingly suspicious of anything Tobiasson-Svartman said or thought; you see, it turns out he is steadily going crazy through the course of the book. Slowly but surely, the reliability of his perspective is undermined. So what am I to make of the quotable bits?

In Elizabeth Costello, J. M. Coetzee begins with a "lesson" on "realism," in which Costello gives a lecture on realism. Ideas in novels, she claims, always have to be embodied by the individual to whom they are attributed or connected. She, the woman full of ideas in a novel of ideas, implies that all ideas become subjective perspectives. And Depths is certainly not the first novel in history to have a main character whose subjective perspective calls his ideas into question.

"He worked out distances, lived by checking where he was in relation to others. His wife looked for irregularities, in order to put them right."

One knows from the beginning that his wife is going to go insane, but not that he is going to become increasingly erratic and bizarre. But the two generalizations I have just quoted are not descriptions of the mad: "checking where you are in relation to others" or "working to put irregularities right"—these are not necessarily insane perspectives. The ideas are reasonable, but the characters lose their reason.

"No war can be won without a moment of improvisation. Just as no significant work of art can be created without that element of irrationality that is in fact the artist's talent."

This is Captain Rake, Tobiasson-Svartman's commanding officer. A reasonable pair of claims, a reasonable simile. The irrationality that creeps into Depths seeks its justification here—but from a man who says of himself that he talks too much. Even this claim, which may seem to have some bearing on the novel in question, begins to break down in its immediate and larger contexts.

"Nothing is as magical as exact knowledge."

Thus Tobiasson-Svartman, later in the book. Here, he is like Derrida taking on Levi-Strauss: when Levi-Strauss distinguishes between magic and science, Derrida shows how Levi-Strauss's concept of science depends on the concept of magic that it would negate (standard deconstruction, by now nothing spectacular). But here Tobiasson-Svartman seems to be deconstructing himself. But what he is really saying is that science is the better magic: he uses his skills as a hydrographic engineer to manipulate someone who does not understand those skills. Exact knowledge becomes a tool for manipulating those who lack it. Is this what I am supposed to take from this book?

I read Depths "between the years"—to use the wonderful German phrase for the days between Christmas and New Year's Eve. It's haunted me for three months now. What more can one want from a novel?