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.

Life and Times of Michael K

"The stories they tell will be different from the stories I heard in the camp, because the camp was for those left behind, the women and children, the old men, the blind, the crippled, the idiots, people who have nothing to tell but stories of how they have endured. Whereas these young men have had adventures, victories and defeats and escapes. They will have stories to tell long after the war is over, stories for a lifetime, stories for their grandchildren to listen to open-mouthed."

This contrast between two types of stories, between two ways of experiencing civil war, appears in Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K. Michael K, one of "those left behind" during a civil war (a gardener who is at times reminiscent of the Peter Sellers character in Being There), contrasts himself with the militiamen who come across the abandoned farm that he has planted a few pumpkins on. The observation is fascinating, especially given that Michael K often seems to those who meet him like one of the "idiots" he imagines here. But the general point does not seem to be ironized by MK's limited perspective: a story of endurance is much different than a story of adventure, and the story of adventure has the potential to last much longer than the story of endurance. (I made a stronger version of that claim at first, but then I thought of Homer: the Iliad is a story of adventure, the Odyssey a story of endurance.)

Like the "wooden slips" in Waiting for the Barbarians, Michael K's story becomes material for interpretation by others, based on the fragments of the story that they know. When he is later interrogated, his interrogators know enough about his little pumpkin-farming operation to make a "reasonable inference" that he has been farming for the soldiers who crossed his land. The idea that, as a gardener, he was growing pumpkins for himself would be incomprehensible in the light of that inference.

Those interrogations are referred to by the anonymous narrator of part Two of the novel (parts One and Three are third-person limited narratives focused on MK himself). That narrator is a doctor at a labor-training camp where MK lives for a while. Starting from the same fragments of MK's story available to the interrogators, the doctor tries and fails (largely because of MK's silence) to come up with an alternative version of the story. The second section ends up reading as another allegory of the difficulties of the interpretation of narratives, even those (like parts One and Three as a unit) which are more complete than what the interrogators and the doctor have to work with.

A few pages before the end of the book, MK provides his own interpretation of his story:

"... the truth is that I have been a gardener, first for the Council, later for myself, and gardeners spend their time with their noses to the ground. / K tossed restlessly on the cardboard. It excited him, he found, to say recklessly, the truth, the truth about me. 'I am a gardener,' he said again, aloud. On the other hand, was it not strange for a gardener to be sleeping in a closet within sound of the beating of the waves of the sea? / I am more like an earthworm, he thought. Which is also a kind of gardener. Or a mole, also a gardener, that does not tell stories because it lives in silence. But a mole or an earthworm on a cement floor?"

Even the interpretation of MK's story that ought to be privileged (his own, of course) ends up being unstable: even as he enjoys the idea of saying "the truth about me," his train of thought disrupts the stability of that truth. It is as if he were his own interrogator, calling his own claims into question because they contradict the "reasonable inferences" one can make about his possible story, given that he is, after all, sleeping in a closet on a piece of cardboard.

Waiting for the Barbarians

"A reasonable inference is that the wooden slips contain messages passed between yourself and other parties, we do not know when. It remains for you to explain what the messages say and who the other parties were."

A secret policeman presents you with "a reasonable inference" while interrogating you. The inference is a complete misinterpretation of the matter at hand. What do you do?

Colonel Joll of the "Third Bureau" of the "Civil Guard" makes the above statement to the anonymous Magistrate who is the narrator of Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians. The "wooden slips" that he refers to were collected by the Magistrate from an archaeological site near the frontier city where the Magistrate works and lives. The Magistrate never makes any progress deciphering the writing on the slips.

Thus, Colonel Joll's "reasonable inference" is completely off base: no messages are being passed, no conspiracy is occurring. The problem for the Magistrate, of course, is that Colonel Joll may well not believe the truth, given that he finds his inference "reasonable" and has actually already concluded that the Magistrate is involved in a conspiracy with the "barbarians" of the book's title.

This situation reads like an allegory of the difficulties of artistic interpretation: the interpreter's "reasonable inferences" of various fragmentary elements of a work (especially those inferences that have to do with the artist's intention) may well be as misguided as Colonel Joll's "reading" of the "wooden slips."

What to do, if you are the one being misread? The Magistrate's response is quite surprising: he begins to translate the slips for Colonel Joll, making up complex stories to give the Colonel what he wants. Give the interrogator what he wants? Is that we should do, confronted by such interrogations? I won't pursue the implications further.