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

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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.

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

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    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.

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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.

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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.

On Purpose or At Random: The Engineering of Fiction in Tim Parks's "Goodness"

Independent Life
Technologies

In Tim Parks's novel Goodness, the narrator, George, designs an electronic game for his severely handicapped daughter Hilary, with pedals for her feet to press that turn on music and colored lights. Though she does activate the pedals and apparently enjoy the lights, he cannot tell if she is doing it "on purpose or at random." When given such a toy (nowadays commercially available, but not in the 1980s, when the novel takes place), children without developmental difficulties may begin with random button pushing, but they will quickly figure out which buttons produce which effects. It is not clear to George and his wife Shirley whether Hilary is engaging in this kind of trial and error, so purposefulness and randomness remain indistinguishable.

When George decides to try to burn down his house in such a way that Hilary cannot be rescued and will thus die in the fire without his being blamed for her death, he learns something about arson: "The most elementary secret to a successfully designed arson is that the fire must have only one focal point." The arsonist's goal is not to make intention and accident indistinguishable. He wants to disguise intention so that it looks like accident. Something done "on purpose" should look like it happened "at random." This is surely not the case with the serial arsonist who sets fires because he is mentally ill; usually, such an arsonist wants his intentions to be clear. But the one-time arsonist like George does not want to have his creation recognized as something created; it should look like it just happened.

Later, when George has set the fire after long and careful preparation, he finds himself upstairs in his burning house, where he contemplates the position he has put himself in: "This is the moment of truth I have so expensively engineered." The moment is "expensive" not because he has spent money on the act of arson but because of his "sacrifice" of his expensive house to his desire for a life without his handicapped child.

The "engineering" of a "moment of truth" is an excellent description of the writing of fiction. And the novelist's goal is the same as that of the arsonist who does not want to get caught: the "engineering" of that "moment of truth" in the story that leads up to it should not be detectable. For a work of fiction to be credible, it should look not purposeful but random, or its "moment of truth" will not be worth the "expensive engineering" of the writing process.

This is the implicit poetics of Goodness: fiction as an elaborate construction that tries to conceal its own constructedness. There are other types of novels, of course: the long-standing tradition of novels like Tristram Shandy that revel in their fictionality. But they share something with novels like Goodness: they, too, involve the elaborate engineering of "moments of truth," such as the epiphanies in James Joyce's novels. In fiction, a game that we play in order to have intense experiences, the writer may conceal it or flaunt it, or do a little bit of both, but no matter what, the fix is always on.

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My previous post on Goodness is "Ruthless Realism and Cloying Sentimentality." Anyone interested in even more posts about Goodness (and soon other novels by Parks) should check out the blog for my current seminar on Parks's novels, which I am giving at the University of Basel English Department this term.

Christ's middle finger

Back in graduate school, I took a three-hour philosophy seminar on Wednesday afternoons one semester. There was always a break after two hours or so, and one afternoon, my friend David and I went to the bathroom. We stood next to each other at the urinals, and then David said, "Look up." I looked up. And he said, "Now you're pissing on your shoes." I looked down. I wasn't pissing on my shoes. I turned to David, and he pointed at the wall, where someone had written "Look up" with an arrow pointing up, and up there it said the bit about the shoes.

I would probably have forgotten the whole thing, but soon after (and I like to think it was the next day), David and I sat next to each other at a lecture on Ulysses, in the middle of which the lecturer referred to the scene in which Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom step out into the night to take a pee. When the lecturer mentioned how they both looked up at the stars, David leaned over to me and said, "Now they're pissing on their shoes." We struggled to contain ourselves, and after the lecture and the Q&A, we explained to the lecturer why we had been choking back laughter during his talk. He said that he would probably never read the passage the same way again!

A few weeks ago, then, I went to the Kunstmuseum in Basel with a visiting friend, and I showed him Holbein's Christ, one of the major paintings here:
I had seen the painting quite a few times (I often show it to visitors to Basel), but I had never noticed Christ's middle finger before: look closely, yes, he is giving you the finger.

Just as that lecturer can't read the passage of Ulysses anymore without thinking of "pissing on their shoes," I will never be able to look at this painting again without a pleasant anachronistic chuckle.

Fritz Senn and Klaus Reichert in Basel

In collaboration with the Theater Basel, the English Seminar of the University of Basel has organised a James Joyce double bill:

Thursday, February 21, Theater Basel, Literatursalon, Klosterberg 6, 8:00 p.m.: Fritz Senn, the Joyce expert and director of the Joyce Archive in Zurich, will give a talk about Ulysses combined with a reading of a passage of the novel by Bastian Semm.

Friday, February 22, English Seminar, Nadelberg 6, Basel, in the room called the Cave, 10.15 - 11.45 a.m.: Fritz Senn and Klaus Reichert, also an eminent Joyce scholar and editor, will have a public conversation and will also be available for questions from the audience and prepared to give students advice on a first approach to Ulysses.

In honor of the day

And she saw a long Roman candle going up over the trees up, up, and they were all breathless with excitement as it went higher and higher and she had to lean back more and more to look up after it, high, high, almost out of sight, and her face was suffused with a divine, an entrancing blush from straining back and he could see her other things too, nainsook knickers, four and eleven, on account of being white and she let him and she saw that he saw and then it went so high it went out of sight a moment and she was trembling in every limb from being bent so far back that he could see high up above her knee where no-one ever and she wasn’t ashamed and he wasn’t either to look in that immodest way like that because he couldn’t resist the sight like those skirtdancers behaving so immodest before gentlemen looking and he kept on looking, looking. She would fain have cried to him chokingly, held out her snowy slender arms to him to come, to feel his lips laid on her white brow, the cry of a young girl’s love, a little strangled cry, wrung from her, that cry that has rung through the ages. And then a rocket sprang and bang shot blind blank and O! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lovely, O, soft, sweet, soft!

(Ulysses)

Mora or less

For German speakers, an interesting article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung by Terezia Mora, "Die Dichterin in ihrer Zeit."

Mora begins by saying that when she worked on a novel for four years, almost none of what she wrote during the first three years actually ended up in the final book!

She also mentions reading Ulysses when she needs perspective on her work, because a) it is hilariously funny and b) she enjoys the freedom and courage and poetic power of the book. Joyce as an antidote to one's own limitations?

Finally, she also says that before she wrote her first story (which ended up in her first book), she was not sure whether she would ever write a successful sentence. But before she wrote her second book, she already had a definite and rather rigorous image of a) what literature should be like, b) what, within literature, her own literature should and could be like, and c) what, correspondingly, her second book should be, both as a whole and in the details.

That says a lot about how writers have "systems" even if they do not want to define them, but also about how such systems derive from one's own experience of writing. Writers best define their own worlds through the work they produce, not through their theoretical statements about that work.