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.

Youth 2

"... artists do not have to be morally admirable people. All that matters is that they create great art. If his own art is to come out of the more contemptible side of himself, so be it."

In both Boyhood and Youth, Coetzee's decision to write in the third person repeatedly proves useful. Imagine the last sentence above in the first person: "If my own art is to come out of the more contemptible side of myself, so be it." Instead of a claim that is both distanced and ironized by the third person, it becomes a pathetic attempt at self-justification, the kind of claim one would expect from someone implicated in fascism, say.

The distance and irony are, as I suggested in my first post on Youth, stronger in this book than in Boyhood. Without ever actually criticizing his twenty-year-old self, JMC manages to make him seem ridiculous over and over again, as happens here with the young man's grandiose claims about himself and his ambition.

But suddenly I see a different way of looking at this. There are two different issues here: being immoral (that is, not "morally admirable") and having a "contemptible side" that one creates with. "John" (that is, Coetzee's self as a young man) has conflated the creation of art from one's darkest impulses with the acting out of those impulses. Surely one can see an artist as creating from "a dark side" while also expecting the artist to not follow through on the impulses that come from that dark side. Artistic works about contemptible acts are one thing (the torture scenes in Waiting for the Barbarians, say); such contemptible acts themselves are another. We do not expect writers to have committed the crimes they write about!

Or to go back to The Master of Petersburg: "... reading is being the arm and being the axe and being the skull." Writing is also a matter of being all those things—but one does not have to have murdered someone with an axe in order to imagine murdering someone with an axe.

In the end, then, the point about art and morality is another comment in JMC's memoirs that one might be tempted to turn into a general statement about his work (that is, JMC commenting on his own work). But such claims in his memoirs are as unstable as markers of how he works as similar claims are in his fiction.

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.

The Master of Petersburg 3

As I mentioned in the comments to my first post on Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg, JMC's Dostoevsky is not as forgiving of his stepson's story as he suggests in the passage I quoted in that post. Here's what comes up later in the book:

"There was more real life in the filthy, waddling old bear in his story — what was his name? Karamzin? — than in the priggish hero he so painfully constructed."

Here, JMC's Dostoevsky is clearly "at a distance and jeering" rather than "giving himself up" to the story at hand.

Later, he argues with Pavel's anarchist friend Nechaev, who appeals to the writer's own work to make a point:

"'We are on the brink of a new age where we are free to think any thought. There is nothing we can't think! Surely you know that. You must know it — it's what Raskolnikov said in your own book before he fell ill!' / 'You are mad, you don't know how to read,' he mutters."

Again, JMC's Dostoevsky claims that another character does not "know how to read," but the combination of these two passages with his own "reading" of his stepson's story make clear that these statements about "how to read" are ironized by the complete context of JMC's book.

So as so often in his work, ideas are argued about, but it becomes nearly impossible to pin them down as having any validity as generalizations. As in Kundera, the ideas are as much "thought experiments" as anything else: what kind of person would have such ideas? And how would that person use these ideas in argument to persuade others? What kind of life might be connected to those ideas?

For the ultimate example of such a book, I just reread Notes from Underground for the first time since the spring of 1983 (freshman year at Stanford). I thought about posting some comments, but everything in the book is so unstable because of the narrator's claim to extreme unreliability that the only way to comment on it is to write a long essay about it! Little tidbit observations like my JMC comments over the past few weeks just don't feel right.

So here's one last tidbit from The Master of Petersburg:

"He sits with the pen in his hand, holding himself back from a descent into representations that have no place in the world, on the point of toppling, enclosed within a moment in which all creation lies open at his feet, the moment he loosens his grip and begins to fall. / It is a moment of which he is becoming a connoisseur, a voluptuary. For which he will be damned."

One last moment of "holding himself back", here not as reader but as writer, only to then "give himself up" to the writing, as he asked Maximov to do when reading. What comes out, in JMC's version of Petersburg, is Dostoevsky's Demons, but what strikes me here is the sensuality and physicality of the act of writing itself, of becoming lost in it, of being able to write what "has no place in the world" not because it is something transgressive but because you are creating the place for it through what you write.

The Master of Petersburg 2

"So many seeking justice, each with a story to tell."

As Coetzee's Dostoevsky leaves the police building after his talk with Maximov (see my previous post on this novel), he notices all the people waiting in "the crowded ante-room" and makes the above observation (actually, the narrator makes it for him, but it reads as free indirect discourse, D's thoughts paraphrased by the narrator). There's something about this observation that does not seem to me to be subject to the irony of generalization in fiction that I discussed in that previous post. But I cannot put my finger on why. Perhaps it seems less "contextualized" because the idea is not part of a dialogue in which, as Elizabeth Bowen once put it, a novel's characters are trying to do things to each other. It seems more "disinterested" than the comment I quoted before. Does that mean that it is more "at a distance and jeering"?

It is a very fascinating statement in the context of JMC's corpus: those who seek justice, it suggests, do so by telling stories. To be more precise, it is the victims who want to tell stories: perpetrators do not want to do so. So when David Lurie, in Disgrace, is confronted by his committee of inquiry (see my post here), he simply wants to enter a plea and be sentenced, while the committee members want him (the perpetrator who has been accused of sexual harassment, by a young woman who, of course, told a story) to tell them a story, the story of his crime, his remorse, and his willingness to atone for his crime.

The Master of Petersburg

In The Master of Petersburg, J. M. Coetzee's main character is Dostoevsky; in a dialogue with a policeman named Maximov, this fictional Dostoevsky comments on the story of a landowner being murdered with an axe:

"... reading is being the arm and being the axe and being the skull: reading is giving yourself up, not holding yourself at a distance and jeering."

I could leave that as a statement unto itself, as a truth to be kept in mind when reading. But of course, with Coetzee, nothing is that easy. This is not Coetzee speaking, after all, in his own essayistic voice. Nor is it his narrator, or his fictional character making a statement in an essayistic context. It is a particular character, with particular interests, making a statement in a specific context (dueling with a policeman about his late stepson's papers). If one wants to try to make a generally applicable statement out of this passage, one has to be ready to sort out the possible ironies of how the passage is framed.

JMC's Dostoevsky presents the point, in his argument with Maximov, as a general truth, but he does not use it as a general truth, as it were, but as a means to the end he is arguing for (having his stepson's papers returned). By extension, JMC is not using it as a general truth, but as a means to the end of developing the character of his Dostoevsky. If JMC himself perceives it as a general truth, he is not saying so here. He always seems interested less in the truth-value of the statements like this that appear in his fiction than in how people use such "truth-like" statements to attain their particular ends (even, or perhaps especially, when their ends are not at all clear, or at least not as clear as in this particular context).

So it's not a matter of whether reading is about giving oneself up or distancing oneself, it's a matter of what purpose the presentation of a particular idea as a general truth serves, not only within fiction but also in conversation and discourse in general. (Are these comments themselves subject to these ironies?)