Susan Mitchell, Robert Duncan, J. M. Coetzee

The seventh chapter of Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello is called "Eros"; in it, Elizabeth reflects on two texts, one she just read and one she remembers having read long ago: Susan Mitchell's "Erotikon (A Commentary on 'Amor and Psyche')" and Robert Duncan's "A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar." As part of my course on "Elizabeth Costello" and its sources, the students and I each chose a passage from Mitchell, Duncan, and Coetzee this morning and wrote a sentence about it. Here are the passages I chose, and the sentences I wrote.

Mitchell

To see the darkness lifting its skirts. To see the darkness
undressing to deeper and deeper shades, the hiddenness
pleated, folded over on itself, clavichorded and enrinded
into recesses retiring inward —

Here, darkness can both be exposed to the light (when it "lifts its skirts") and still be a source of "hiddenness" in the "pleats" and "folds" of those "skirts."

*

Duncan

In Goya's canvas Cupid and Psyche
have a hurt voluptuous grace
bruised by redemption. The copper light
falling upon the brown boy's slight body
is carnal fate that sends the soul wailing
up from blind innocence, ensnared
    by dimness
into the deprivations of desiring sight.

Here, light, as the end of "blind innocence", reveals "the brown boy's slight body," but it also creates the "snare" of "dimness", making light into a trap for those who would see by it.

*

Coetzee

Are there other modes of being besides what we call the human into which we can enter; and if there are not, what does that say about us and our limitations?

In her discussion of Thomas Nagel, Elizabeth insists that we can "enter into other modes of being" — bats, literary characters, corpses — but here, she seems to have forgotten her insistence on (or lost her belief in) the power of literature to go where philosophy cannot go.

Fragments of Notes on JM Coetzee

Fragments from my notes to "The Humanities in Africa," chapter five of Elizabeth Costello, by J.M. Coetzee

When the work keeps anticipating possible interpretive trains of thought

*

One can see why the Church would want to oppose evolution, beyond the specific details of its stories: evolution/genealogy make it not only impossible but unnecessary to return to an origin that is seen as the truth.

*

The return to the origin is an intellectual effort to overcome the traces of earlier intellectual efforts.

*

    Hostility in an essayistic text generates unease. Since it is inappropriate to express hostility in such a context (especially hostility by the honoree toward those doing the honoring), it demands an explanation. And since hostility is an emotion, and emotion in general is inappropriate (only reason should speak in this space), as is getting emotional about the kind of material that she is talking about—given all that, one turns to the personal for an explanation.
    When the personal intrudes into the space of ideas, it must be contained. And the way to contain it? An ad hominem attack. Those who speak personally will be condemned on personal grounds.

*

The way a story can ruin an idea. One tells a story to exemplify an idea, but then one has to tell the story in such a way that it serves the idea. The excess or surplus in the story can ruin the idea, the point that the storyteller is trying to make.

*

The novel as a type of storytelling that drops the idea of making a point in favor of ... obscenity. — Look at the great novels: what are they condemned for? Obscenity. Flaubert, Joyce. — Look at Plato's condemnation of Homer: what does Plato condemn Homer for? For taking liberties with the story, liberties that are just part of making it a great story, rather than of using the story as a tool of teaching, of philosophy.

Ruthless Realism and Cloying Sentimentality

The following is the first paragraph of the chapter "The Good Samaritan" in Tim Parks's novel Goodness. It appears about two-thirds of the way through the novel. George (the narrator) and his wife Shirley have a seriously handicapped daughter, Hilary, who cannot speak and has hardly developed beyond infancy:

January 1988. Hilary is five. Feeding her this morning, I thought: 'We get less change out of her than one would out of a three-week-old puppy.' I alternate between this ruthless realism and cloying sentimentality. The girl is so constipated that sometimes we have to hook a finger into her anus and lever the turds out. Shirley does this. I simply can't.

Like many a novel's narrator, George does not always have a very accurate vision of himself, but here he is right on target: he does swing between a "ruthless realism" that asserts his clear understanding of the world's difficulties and a "cloying sentimentality" that would conceal those difficulties in favor of an easier perspective.

The "change" he would like to "get out of" Hilary refers to childhood development: a puppy would develop faster than Hilary would. Since George had not wanted to have children, the reference to a puppy also recalls couples who stereotypically get a dog when they are "not ready for children." But what he and Shirley actually have to "get out of her" is her constipated shit, and it is in terms of shit that the contrast between realism and sentimentality is most fully realized here.

In a sense, "realism" appears here in the very fact that shit is mentioned at all, and it becomes "ruthless" in the explicitness with which George describes the "levering out" of the "turds." In contrast, George's "sentimentality" is somewhat concealed, only becoming clear in the final contrast between Shirley and himself: it is not both of them ("we") who do the dirty work but just Shirley. George wants to be a "ruthless realist," but when it comes to shit, he "simply can't" handle it.

The "realist," then, is beaten by the sentimentality his demonstrative "ruthlessness" is meant to combat. In his memoir Youth, J. M. Coetzee writes that "ruthless honesty is not a hard trick to learn." (See also this post.) Here, in Parks's novel, "ruthless realism" also ends up looking like a trick, and a relatively easy one at that: if you make a nasty joke and talk about your handicapped daughter's shit, then you are being "ruthless," even if it is your wife who actually cleans up the mess.

The "realistic" and the "sentimental" are also literary categories. Chronologically, the "sentimental" novel came first, in the eighteenth century, while literary "realism" emerged in the nineteenth century. In a simplified version of literary history, "realism" trumped the "sentimental" precisely by being "ruthless" rather than "cloying," and that is precisely the tendency of the "trick" of "ruthless honesty": it aims to produce a "realism" that trumps feelings.

But the slippery nature of this "hard trick" is clear in this passage. George plays tough, but is not really tough enough to face up to the challenge posed by his handicapped daughter. From the perspective of Parks's novel, the history of the genre is not the replacement of the sentimental by the realistic; rather, fiction "alternates" between the realistic and the sentimental. "Realism" would like to be "ruthless" enough to defeat "sentimentalism," but its tricks are never-ending attempts to conceal its own sentimental side. Let's talk tough about shit, but someone else has to actually dispose of it -- and the people who have to do so are those otherwise dismissed as "sentimental."

Summertime

I was surprised to see J. M. Coetzee's Summertime shortlisted for the Booker Prize—not because I did not enjoy the book, but because I did not read it as a novel. The book's subtitle is "Scenes from Provincial Life," which is also the subtitle of Coetzee's memoir Boyhood, so I read Summertime as a memoir. (Note that the Wikipedia page on Coetzee lists it under his memoirs.)

Granted, as a memoir, Summertime is even more singular than Boyhood (and than the similar Youth, Coetzee's second memoir). As I have noted before, in Boyhood and Youth, Coetzee takes an unusual approach to autobiographical writing: the books are in the third person and the present tense.

Summertime begins with a section called "Notebooks 1972-1975," and at first it appears to be a memoir like the other two: third person and present tense are used again. A small difference is that these selections from "Notebooks" are dated, whereas Boyhood and Youth are both largely vague about dates (and about how old the protagonist actually is at any given time).

In addition, these notebook entries are followed by italicized comments on them, like this one (the first): "To be expanded on: his father's response to the times as compared to his own; their differences, their (overriding) similarities" (6). To all appearances, then, Summertime is like Boyhood and Youth, but with a few little twists.

What follows, though, is utterly different. The next section is called "Julia," and it is an interview with a woman who had an affair with one John Coetzee in the early 1970s in South Africa. The interviewer (at first anonymous, but later identified by the interviewee, Julia Frankl, as "Mr. Vincent" [43]) begins by referring to "the pages I sent you from John Coetzee's notebooks for the years 1972-1975," and on the next page a question from Frankl to Vincent leads to the clarification that the italicized passages after the entries were by Coetzee, "notes to himself, written in 1999 or 2000, when he was thinking of adapting these particular entries for a book" (20).

Julia then tells Mr. Vincent about her affair with Coetzee. At one point, she says, "And John was not a great talker, as you know" (34). If this implies that this John Coetzee is dead (which J. M. Coetzee is emphatically not), then Mr. Vincent's reply confirms it: "I don't know. I never met him in the flesh" (34). Not "I have never met him," but "I never met him": so this interview is about the late John Coetzee.

At this point, I could have stopped for a moment and thought, "Okay, this is not a memoir!" But this is Coetzee we're talking about, and Boyhood and Youth had already rewritten the rules about memoirs, so I just took this as a much more extreme variation on the memoir: Coetzee writing as if he were dead and a biographer, Mr. Vincent, was working on a book by interviewing people for it.

Five interviews appear in the book, followed by a last section called "Notebooks: undated fragments." In the fourth interview, with Martin, an academic colleague of Coetzee's in the 1970s, Mr. Vincent begins by reading "an account of his [Coetzee's] first meeting with you" (with Martin, that is), which Coetzee had written "in one of his late notebooks." Mr. Vincent goes on to add that he suspects "it was intended to fit into the third memoir, the one that never saw the light of day. As you will hear, he follows the same convention as in Boyhood and Youth, where the subject is called 'he' rather than 'I'" (205). A few pages later, Mr. Vincent then asks a question about what Coetzee might have said "if he had gone on with the memoir, if he had not stopped writing" (210).

Within the world of Summertime, then, John Coetzee worked on a third memoir after Boyhood and Youth, but he did not finish it—not because he died, but because he had stopped writing before he died. In the real world, J. M. Coetzee has continued writing, of course—but he has not published the third memoir. Instead, he has published Summertime.

One can speculate about what this might mean. Coetzee might have started writing a third memoir and decided that it would be boring to just write a third book like the first two. Then the form of Summertime would be an experiment by a writer who does not like to repeat himself. But it's also possible that Coetzee began the third memoir and stopped writing it—not because he stopped writing entirely, like Summertime's John Coetzee, but because he failed to pull it off for one reason or another. Somewhere between failure and experimentation lies the somewhat more down-to-earth alternative that J. M. Coetzee (not John Coetzee) simply decided that this material called for a different approach, an entirely new form, neither memoir nor novel, but a mixture of the two.

But what of these interviews? The strangest possibility of all is that Coetzee conducted the interviews himself! A slightly less strange variation would be that he had somebody else conduct them. A third possibility, odd in an entirely different way, would be that he imagined interviews with these people he had once known. A fourth possibility is that he invented the interviewees, and then I would finally have to admit that the book is an unusual novel, and not a memoir.

But that third alternative is intriguing: if Coetzee conducted imaginary interviews with five people he knew from the 1970s, then one has to grant him a capacity that he ahs not generally been seen as having (either by critics or even by himself—although perhaps his self-criticism in this respect is an ironic mocking of his critics): empathy. Even though the interviews are about John Coetzee, they are as much or even more about the interviewees themselves, and as musings about how others might have seen him, they demonstrate that Coetzee does have a good feel for his own weaknesses and their effects on others.

In the end, then, I find Summertime most interesting when I read it as an experimental memoir, as it were, much more then when I read it as a novel. As a novel, it fits nicely with his last two, Slow Man and Diary of a Bad Year (though I would then say the latter is a much better book), while as a memoir, it is a unique and compelling book.

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.

Wanting to be normal

Rereading Coetzee's Boyhood, I was struck by the issue of being "normal." The issue is raised in a disturbing way, in a discussion of the beating of children in school: if John, the third-person Coetzee in this memoir, is finally beaten by a teacher, then "he will be able to come out on the other side a normal boy" (7). A few pages later, then, it is no longer just a matter of beatings at school: "He wants his father to beat him and turn him into a normal boy" (13).

What would be beaten out of him so that he would be normal?

Once, during their early months in Worcester, a boy from his class had wandered in through the open front door and found him lying on his back under a chair. 'What are you doing there?' he had asked. 'Thinking,' he had replied unthinkingly: 'I like thinking.' Soon everyone in his class knew about it: the new boy was odd, he wasn't normal. (29)

Thinking, then, is not normal, and the irony is brutal: when he speaks "unthinkingly," his inner world of thinking is exposed. Implicitly, then, "thinking" is what needs to be beaten out of him for him to become "normal."

This is connected to lying:

If he stopped lying he would have to polish his shoes and talk politely and do everything that normal boys do. In that case he would no longer be himself. If he were no longer himself, what point would there be in living? (35)

This reveals the other perspective on normalcy: John wants to be normal, but he also wants to be himself, the thinker and, here, the liar. If thinking and lying make him feel guilty, they still make him who he is: the boy who is different.

His mother is also responsible for his difference: "He wishes she would be normal. If she were normal, he could be normal" (38). Does she create the thinker and liar? Perhaps in part, John thinks, because she does not let his father beat him.

One odd effect of Boyhood is that it is in the present tense, so everything seems to happen at the same time. The boy's development is thus obscured. But his perspectives do change, as do his ability to articulate them:

He is just a boy walking beside his mother: from the outside he probably looks quite normal. But he thinks of himself as scuttling around her like a beetle, scuttling in fussy circles with his nose to the ground and his legs and arms pumping. In fact he can think of nothing about himself that is still. His mind in particular darts about here and there all the time, with an impatient will of its own. (59)

Here, his external perspective on himself grants an apparent normalcy that could not be articulated earlier in the book, and the internal depiction of thinking is much more complex.

And a while later, he rejects normalcy entirely—at least temporarily:

'Can't you just be normal?' asks his mother.
'I hate normal people,' he replies hotly. (78)

His mother, previously seen as partially responsible for his failure to be normal, now wants him to be normal, but now he rejects what, as a younger boy, he so vehemently desired. Still, it is better to be on his mother's side:

He is chilled by the thought of the life he would face if his father ran the household, a life of dull, stupid formulas, of being like everyone else. His mother is the only who stands between him and an existence he could not endure. (79)

Once, his father's failure to beat him was a lack that contributed to his difference; now, the father is a representation of the normalcy he rejects.

John's sense of his difference, then, gradually turns positive, until he can finally feel "convinced that he is different, special" (108). But this cannot be a stable, positive feeling, as this frightening passage makes all too clear:

... if all the stories that have been built up around him, built by himself, built by years of normal behavior, at least in public, were to collapse, and the ugly, black, crying, babyish core of him were to emerge for all to see and laugh at, would there be any way to go on living? Would he not have become as bad as one of those deformed, stunted, mongol children with hoarse voices and slavering lips that might as well be given sleeping pills or strangled? (112)

His outward appearance, as when he was walking with his mother, is "normal," but the restless "thinker" disappears here in a maelstrom of feelings. The move toward a positive sense of "abnormality" can never be permanent and ends in the horrifying image of the strangling of children with Down's Syndrome. (An image that deserves lengthy discussion in the context of Coetzee's work as a whole!)

So a dialectic remains (inevitably?), between normalcy and difference: "Though he blames his parents because they have not brought him up as a normal child, he is proud of their education" (124). Education (thinking?) is something to be proud of even if it does not make one "normal"—and one's "normalcy" remains, always, it seems, the responsibility of one's parents. (Is this a theme in the life of many writers? — Educated parents who have come down in the world? Certainly, mothers who gave up a "creative" side to raise children are a theme in artists' lives.)

"Thinking," as the source of difference, is expressed through education, and most of all, through examinations:

He is good at examinations; if there were no examinations for him to be good at there would be little special about him. Examinations create in him a heady, trembling state of excitement during which he writes quickly and confidently. He does not like the state in itself but it is reassuring to know it is there to be tapped. (131)

Here, his difference from others, what makes him special, is reduced to his good performance in school. The problem with this does not appear in Boyhood, but only in Youth: what do you do when you stop doing well in examinations, or when there are no more examinations to take? ["Never in his life has he been forced to call on his utmost powers. Less than his best has always been good enough"—Youth, 13]

Near the end of the book, a new claim is made about John:

Once upon a time he used to be full of ideas, ideas for places to go, things to talk about, things to do. He was always a step ahead of everyone: he was the leader, the others followed. Now the energy that he used to feel streaming out of him is gone. At the age of thirteen he is becoming surly, scowling, dark. (151)

This is quite surprising, given that the book contains no evidence at all of John, the leader. His energy has only appeared as the energy of thinking about himself and normalcy, and he has largely seemed "surly, scowling, dark." Has Coetzee's older self colored his sense of his younger self? As he says in Youth, "ruthless honesty is not a hard trick to learn" (Youth, 164). Perhaps Coetzee's desire to be "ruthlessly honest" has led him to avoid depicting himself as a leader, for fear of glamorizing himself. In any case, Boyhood is not self-aggrandizing—and Youth, with its scathingly ironic self-portrait of the artist as a young man, is even less so.

The Philosopher and the Wolf

I'm reading The Philosopher and the Wolf, by Mark Rowlands. A truly exhilarating book, sort of a cross between J. M. Coetzee on animals and Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. I'll probably say something more explicit about it later, but right now I am reading it with the Cartesian approach: read it first like a novel, then read it again and start really thinking about it. (For the full description of his reading method, see the end of my post from February about Descartes.)

Eloquent Thinking about Torture

Here are some elqouent things I just read about torture:

My friend Don Brown, in response to his reading of J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year.

Two posts (first and second) by Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo.

Mark Danner's second article in the New York Review of Books. (Here's the first one.)

As for me, my line remains the same: put the guys on trial (guys = people you arrest for terrorist crimes AND the people who ordered that they be tortured).

[Still waiting to get my new computer fully operational. Once I do, I'll get the Daily Poem Project back up to date!]

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.

Review of Diary of a Bad Year

Here's the first review I have seen of J. M. Coetzee's new book, Diary of a Bad Year. Warning: spoiler! But of course Coetzee is not really about the plot.

The reviewer, Christopher Tayler, is right on target about two things: the book is more openly funny than anything JMC has written before, and it ends up being moving in a surprisingly new way for JMC. By which I mean that it is not moving because it is harrowing (as Disgrace so brilliantly is), but because it is touching.

Diary of a Bad Year

I started my project of reading and re-reading books by J. M. Coetzee (see all the recent posts with "J. M. Coetzee" as a label) in anticipation of the publication of his new book, Diary of a Bad Year. Now I have the book, and I have read it. But I intentionally read it without taking any notes—I wanted to just read it for the sheer pleasure of it. Well, since I am one of only two people I know who liked his previous novel, Slow Man (which I cannot reread because my copy is somewhere in a still unpacked box of books, almost one year after we moved), you should take this with a grain of salt: Diary of a Bad Year is a fascinating book. I'll be re-reading it soon, and will post comments on it when I do so. (Before then, I'll be posting a comment on Age of Iron that I have not had time to type up.)

Ruefle, footnotes, Sebald

Thanks to Karin, who sent me the link in the comments to one of my posts on Coetzee's Youth, I read Mary Ruefle's short essay "Someone Reading a Book is a Sign of Order in the World."

Here's the bit about footnotes that I liked:

'For years I planned a theoretical course called "Footnotes." In it, the students would read a footnoted edition of a definitive text--I thought it might as well be The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge--and proceed diligently to read every book mentioned in the footnotes (or the books by those authors mentioned) and in turn all those mentioned in the footnotes of the footnoted books, and so on and so on, stopping only when one was led back, by a footnote, to The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.'

Now that is a beautiful idea for a course!

And here's the bit about Sebald that I liked:

'I had recently one of the most astonishing experiences of my reading life. On page 248 in The Rings of Saturn, W. G. Sebald is recounting his interviews with one Thomas Abrams, an English farmer who has been working on a model of the temple of Jerusalem--you know, gluing little bits of wood together--for twenty years, including the painstaking research required for historical accuracy. There are ducks on the farm and at one point Abrams says to Sebald, "I have always kept ducks, even as a child, and the colors of their plumage, in particular the dark green and snow white, seemed to me the only possible answer to the questions that are on my mind." It is an odd thing to say, but Sebald's book is a long walk of oddities. I did not remember this passage in particular until later the same day when I was reading the dictionary, where I came upon the meaning of the word speculum: 1) an instrument inserted into a body passage for inspection; 2) an ancient mirror; 3) a medieval compendium of all knowledge; 4) a drawing showing the relative position of all the planets; and 5) a patch of color on the secondary wings of most ducks and some other birds. Did Sebald know that a compendium of all knowledge and the ducks' plumage were one and the same? Did Abrams? Or was I the only one for whom the duck passage made perfect, original sense? I sat in my chair, shocked. I am not a scholar, but for the imaginative reader there can be discoveries, connections between books, that explode the day and one's heart and the long years that have led to the moment. I am a writer, and the next step is inevitable: I used what had been revealed to me in my own writing.'

This perfectly captures one element of the magic of Sebald's work: his particular gift for spinning out associations leads the reader to spin out associations as well. The most uncanny feature of the Sebald reader's free association on his works is how often the process leads back to his work again, as if he had anticipated the reader's personal response to the book. For a memorable example, see Tim Parks's essay "The Hunter," in his collection Hell and Back.

Youth 10

Last one from Coetzee's Youth:

"What more is required than a kind of stupid, insensitive doggedness, as lover, as writer, together with a readiness to fail again and again?"

Coetzee continues: "What is wrong with him is that he is not prepared to fail." At twenty-four, then, perhaps JMC did arrive at a moment of insight about his attempts at being a writer.

It's certainly a moment of insight that is useful for any aspiring writer: if you are not ready to write something bad, then you have little chance of writing anything good. Of course, the main thing is to write something.

I'm not sure about the value of the insight for the lover, although perhaps it is a version of this.

Youth 9

Later in the same passage as in my previous post on Youth, there is another moment that is quite thrilling for this reading of Coetzee:

"As for ruthless honesty, ruthless honesty is not a hard trick to learn. On the contrary, it is the easiest thing in the world."

Coetzee is often praised for his "ruthless honesty," but as he points out here, that should not be such a big deal: it's not something "hard won," as many might imply, but a trick—a technique, as it were, to generate literary effects. I would add that such praise is surely of the "damning-with-faint" variety, because "ruthless honesty" is also a bit of a code for "a hard read."

This goes back to my first post on Boyhood, where I cited the young John's understanding of himself: "His only excuse is that he is merciless to himself too. He lies but he does not lie to himself." There, the mercilessness is not seen as a trick or a technique, but rather as a move in his relationship with his mother.

Alarm bells are going off: I'm getting close to saying that here we can see the development of that technique in Coetzee's biography. The argument would be that the "ruthless honesty" of his literary work is a technique that derives not from his understanding of literature and art but from his early relationship to his mother. I sure hope that is not what JMC himself would argue, because that's all too close to Freud for my taste.

Youth 8

In my second post on Youth, I cited a passage about the morality of artists. Near the end of the book, Coetzee returns to the theme:

"The artist must taste all experience, from the noblest to the most degraded. Just as it is the artist's destiny to experience the most supreme creative joy, so he must be prepared to take upon himself all in life that is miserable, squalid, ignominious. ... It is a justification that does not for a moment convince him. It is sophistry, that is all, contemptible sophistry."

The context? His work at Aldermaston with the programming of the Atlas computer (see also the previous post on Youth), which he feels puts him on the wrong side of the Cold War (supporting the British military).

Here, the book's "youth" finds himself unable to justify his own behavior in terms of his position as an artist. His arguments in favor of the artist's position above morality (a position justified by "the artist's destiny") now seem like "sophistry."

It is worth keeping this in mind when considering Boyhood and Youth as "portraits of the artist as a young man": even within the two books, statements that may appear to be definitive comments about JMC's understanding of the artist and his role as a novelist end up getting called into question.

One could say that this is a sign of the "youth's" development, that we are reading a memoir as Bildungsroman. I'm almost convinced, but Youth does not arrive at the point where JMC is sitting down to write his first book (as one might hope on the model of Proust, say), so his memoirs do not present the complete artist, as it were.

As I pointed out before, Kakutani's reading of Boyhood as a book "that illuminates the hidden source of his art" is just not convincing. Boyhood and Youth are both fascinating books, but they do not illuminate something hidden. Instead, they add further dimensions to the house of mirrors that is Coetzee's oeuvre.

Youth 7

Here's one bit of Coetzee's Youth that I will just cite without comment. Coetzee worked in the early sixties with a British supercomputer (or what then passed for a supercomputer) called "Atlas":

"Although Atlas is not a machine built to handle textual materials, he uses the dead hours of the night to get it to print out thousands of lines in the style of Pablo Neruda, using as a lexicon a list of the most powerful words in The Heights of Macchu Picchu, in Nathaniel Tarn's translation. He brings the thick wad of paper back to the Royal Hotel and pores over it. 'The nostalgia of teapots.' 'The ardour of shutters.' 'Furious horsemen.' If he cannot, for the present, write poetry that comes from the heart, if his heart is not in the right state to generate poetry of its own, can he at least string together pseudo-poems made up of phrases generated by a machine, and thus, by going through the motions of writing, learn again to write? Is it fair to be using mechanical aids to writing — fair to other poets, fair to the dead masters? The Surrealists wrote words on slips of paper and shook them up in a hat and drew words at random to make up lines. William Burroughs cuts up pages and shuffles them and puts the bits together. Is he not doing the same kind of thing? Or do his huge resources — what other poet in England, in the world, has a machine of this size at his command — turn quantity into quality? Yet might it not be argued that the invention of computers has changed the nature of art, by making the author and the condition of the author's heart irrelevant? On the Third Programme he has heard music from the studios of Radio Cologne, music spliced together from electronic whoops and crackles and street noise and snippets of old recordings and fragments of speech. Is it not time for poetry to catch up with music? / He sends a selection of his Neruda poems to a friend in Cape Town, who publishes them in a magazine he edits. A local newspaper reprints one of the computer poems with a derisive commentary. For a day or two, back in Cape Town, he is notorious as the barbarian who wants to replace Shakespeare with a machine."

Youth 6

"He has not played cricket since he left school, when he decided to renounce it on the grounds that team sports were incompatible with the life of a poet and an intellectual."

Near the end of Youth, Coetzee's "youth" makes this discovery: cricket (his sport of choice as a child) is too much fun to renounce on the grounds that it lacks intellectual seriousness.

Me, I've never been good enough at any sport to have to renounce it on intellectual grounds, but I have always been a sports fan, and being a fan has always given me aesthetic pleasures that both resemble and differ from those provided by art ("It is not beautiful, yet it speaks like beauty, imperiously"). Resemble: the beauties of drama and narrative (and sometimes of comedy) are what make sports work. You have to follow them for a while to really experience this. (One reason I only tangentially follow baseball in Basel is that I have nobody to share the drama with.) Differ from: the beauties of sport are always subject to one significant determining factor that is lacking in art: in sports, the goal is always the same. Roger Federer and J. M. Coetzee may both abide by the rule "just do it", but in Roger's case, the "it" is defined in advance; in Coetzee's, it is not.

Recently I have had two striking experiences playing sports. Since last year, my son Miles has gone crazy for soccer (I have to write "soccer" for Americans reading this!), so I have played lots of soccer with him. But that was not striking. It was playing a bit of basketball with him earlier this year, and then in the past few days ping pong, that was striking: those are sports I grew up playing, and though I make no claims to being especially good at either (my basketball skills are especially rusty), when I play them, it feels natural in a way that soccer does not (which I only played regularly for a year as a child, when my family lived in Leamington Spa in England when I was nine).

Coetzee: "Does there not also exist a poetry of ecstasy, even a poetry of lunchtime cricket as a form of ecstasy?"

Youth 5

After getting glasses for the first time (at around 20), the "youth" in Coetzee's Youth experiences a sudden revelation that moves me every time I read it, because I had the same revelation when I was 12 and got glasses for the first time:

"... looking out through the window, he is amazed to discover he can make out individual leaves on the trees. Trees have been a blur of green ever since he can remember."

I've spoken with many people who wear glasses about this moment, and almost all of them have agreed with me about it: a fascinating revelation.

Youth 4

"It is not beautiful, yet it speaks like beauty, imperiously."

In Youth, Coetzee writes this of Robert Motherwell's "Elegy for the Spanish Republic 24" (which I was unable to find on the web; this is no. 34 instead).

There's something about this statement that makes it feel different than many other statements about the tastes of the "youth" at the center of JMC's memoir; here, it does seem like something JMC would like to have his work be: not necessarily beautiful, but as imperious as beauty — as many paintings by Abstract Expressionists were and are.

But for me, the most beautiful feature of this statement is not that it points toward a way to understand the effect of art works that are not beautiful but that generate emotions that resemble those we have when do experience beautiful works. No, for me, the most beautiful thing here is the idea that beauty is imperious.