Help me, somebody. I'm falling down the rabbit hole of the internets. First it was BDR who linked to this Levi Asher post which pointed me to @FunnyJMCoetzee on the Twooterville. That's like 20 minutes of my life I'll never get back. Not that I'd want it necessarily. I'm just sayin'...
#distractedfromdistractionbydistraction [or something]
But if there were a real FunnyJMCoetzee, he'd be the perfect person to blurb EULOGY [my as yet unpublished (but getting there) novel].
Guarantee: More people will read and comment on this post than that last Whitehead piece articulating what I felt was a fairly coherent (and fairly original iissm) Process Philosophy theory of fiction. It's making me feel like BDR when he goes into DC United mode.
Hell, more people have hit the obscure pop playlist post already than that one. And I put that shit up late last night.
Okay, then, fuck it. More Power Pop:
Showing posts with label Coetzee. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Coetzee. Show all posts
12 March 2013
11 February 2013
Being v. Becoming, Pt. 3
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Finally.
Nearly a year ago I posted my excitement upon hearing that Michael Apted was releasing another documentary in the "Up" film series, this time "56 Up". It is playing for one week only here in the ATL, and I got to opening night on Friday. It did not disappoint.
The series comprises footage of about a dozen British men and women at the ages of 7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 42, 49, and now 56. There are interviews with people who are currently lawyers, teachers, a taxi driver, a forklift operator, a scientist, librarians, a local politician, a musician, and homemakers. Some have dropped out over the years. Each film brings the viewer up to date with each subject, showing highlights of the interviews from each of the past films.
We can follow these British members of m-m-m-m-my generation discussing their hopes and dreams, their feelings about love and family, work and play, and sense of self and society at each step along the way. In this most recent film, we catch up with them where they are today, reflecting on the persons they had been—their beliefs about what the future held for them at the time—and the realities of their lives today. There are stories of divorce, estrangement, love, fulfillment, disappointment, happiness, madness. The list goes on. It is the ultimate 'Reality' show.
What struck me as I watched the film: It felt like a reunion—in a good way. I felt like I was reaquainting with old friends, catching up on the stories of their lives, as well as contemplating my own life's journey.
It's an unparalleled filmic document. It shows us what film can be, even though there's really no plot. Not even a car chase. Just interviews and B-roll of about a dozen middle-aged British men and women. [One cool thing about the series is watching the development of film technology over the last 49 years, from grainy black-and-white to shitty color to hi-def.]
It made me ask myself what were my own hopes and dreams when I was 7, 14, 21, ... etc. Who was that callow tad? Where are the insightful interviews of him? Why isn't there B-roll footage of his life?
Oh, I can tell you where I was living and with whom at each of those points in my life. And what I was doing (school-wise, work-wise, play-wise, etc.). But I simply cannot recall what it was like to be in my skin at any of those ages, to think the thoughts I was thinking at those times, to feel what I must have been feeling despite my own predilection for acute self-awareness.
How, I wonder, am I (or any of us, for that matter) the same person I was (we were) at any of those staging points along my (our) life's way. I certainly have the same name as he did. And I bear a remarkable facial and physical resemblance to him, though, admittedly, the proportions have changed. I am not so young-seeming as he, either. Less hair, grayer hair, a bit slacker around the mid-section. Maybe wiser.
I'm reminded of J.M. Coetzee's novel Summertime. Here's the blurb:
"A young English biographer is researching a book about the late South African writer John Coetzee, focusing on Coetzee in his thirties, at a time when he was living in a run-down cottage in the Cape Towm suburbs with his widowed father—a time, the biographer is convinced, when Coetzee was finding himself as a writer. ...Summertime is an inventive and inspired work of fiction that allows J. M. Coetzee to imagine his own life with a critical and unsparing eye..."
Perhaps I'll write a personal essay of my own or even a fictionalized account of myself at each of these random-year points in my own life focusing on what has changed and what has remained the same, what can be known and what only imagined. Maybe even as part of this Being v. Becoming serial post.
P.S. It looks as if all of the films are findable on the YouTubes, in discrete 15 minute segments. Do yourself a favor.
05 March 2010
Ur-story: Second Story Pt. 3
Summertime, J.M. Coetzee's latest work of fiction, presents the reader with a portrait of the absent character 'John Coetzee' (deceased) from a "range of independent perspectives"—none of which can lay claim to perfect reliability. J.M. Coetzee, the author, dispenses with the elements of traditional dramatic structure in favor of pastiche. Though he is able to achieve a coherent portrayal of this fictional 'John Coetzee'—who resembles in many ways, but not every way, the writer—it comes at the cost of plot.
For this maneuver to be more than mere gimmickry or the gamesmanship of a Nobel laureate who is entitled to publish whatever the hell he pleases because of who he is, something must be gained. What, if any, benefits does the work gain as a result of this trade-off?
[Side Note: In the Comments, long-time blogger and lit blog-friend Richard [Yo! la Crary {Tengo?}] of The Existence Machine, one of WoW's most influential reads, chides WoW for use of the term "metafictional games" w/r/t Summertime. He makes a good point, but not necessarily the one, I believe, he intends. I think there can be no question that J.M. Coetzee is engaging in some sort of gamesmanship here. Upon reflection, the games may not be precisely 'metafictional'; rather, they are metabiographical or metacritical games. Every other review I've seen, to the best of my memory, focuses on how J.M. Coetzee is commenting on the nature of how people read his books and how they look for episodes from his book in incidents from his biographical life and how he is attempting to set up his legacy. This is certainly a form of gamesmanship, and that stuff is all in Summertime. But I believe it is peripheral to the core of the book. [See infra]
Summertime never takes us into the emotional interior of John Coetzee; we always see him as others see him—except, presumably, in his notebook fragments. And they clue us into the emotional core of the book.
A quick recap:
The first entry shows us John Coetzee's father's disdain for the brutality of African politics: "He resolves the problem by immersing himself in the cricket scores. As a response to a moral dilemma it is feeble; yet is his own [John's] response—fits of rage and despair—any better?" p.5
The second deals with John's conflict over his own mortality: does one seek immortality by constructing a perfect concrete slab around "[t]he house that he shares with his father ... [though] [t]o insulate them from the damp is an impossible task" [p. 6] or "persist[-ing] in inscribing marks on paper, in the faint hope that people not yet born will take the trouble to decipher them?" [p. 7]
The third deals with a different type of patrimony: "Zoom lenses capture every intimate moment as they [Breytan Breytanbach, the ex-pat S.African writer back to visit his ailing parents, and his Vietnamese (that is to say 'colored' in the parlance of the times) wife] picnic with friends ... . Breyten calls Afrikaners a bastard people." [p.8-9]
The fourth is a response to a "stodgy bureaucrat's" pathetic plea in an early Kurosawa film. John [?] Coetzee wonders "[h]ow would he react if his father were to grip his arm like this." [p.9]
The fifth fragment deals with John Coetzee's refusal to provide expert testimony on behalf of a widow who seeks to lodge a ridiculous challenge her husband's clearly expressed last will and testament.
The sixth fragment contemplates the politics of the day: "The old rallying cries—Uphold white Christian civilization! Honour the sacrifices of the forefathers!—lack all force. ... How to live one's life outside politics, and one's death too: that was the example he [Jesus] set for his followers." [p.12]
In the seventh fragment, an old school chum, Truscott, moves into the house across from John. Though Truscott was a bit of an mediocre student, he now is a successful marketing executive while John is somewhat of a schlub. The irony is palpable. Truscott asks John: "'Do you have children?' 'I am a child. I mean, I live with my father. My father is getting on in years. He needs looking after. ...'" [p.14]
In the last fragment in the introductory section of the book, John points out the irony that the white suburbs of Capetown where he lives have grown out and swallowed up the land around the notorious Pollsmoor Prison, eventual home of Nelson Mandela.
In the series of undated fragments at the end of the book, he takes his father to a rugby game. His father is aging and has no friends, and "[c]lub rugby is on its last legs." [p. 246] John seeks his father's forgiveness for his emotional coldnesses of the past, but his father, a deeply unhappy man, does not recognize the effort—nor the need for it. "Theme to carry further: his father and why he lives with him. The reaction of the women in his life (bafflement)." He locates his sense of resistance to the world in his mother (one of the few times she is mentioned) and his Montessori education. Theme to be developed: "His attested incompetence in matters of the heart; transference in the classroom and his repeated failures to manage it." [p.255]. [Sounds vaguely like the set-up to Disgrace, no?] John helps his father, a disbarred lawyer, in a menial bookkeeping job. He imagines ways of committing suicide to escape the misery of his life. And he confronts the decision that has hovered over the entire book: his father contracts cancer of the larynx and John, finally, comes to this:
"It used to be that he, John had too little employment. Now that is about to change. Now he will have as much employment as he can handle, as much and more. He is going to have to abandon some of his personal projects and be a nurse. Alternatively, if he will not be a nurse, he must announce to his father: I cannot face the prospect of ministering to you day and night. I am going to abandon you. Goodbye. One or the other: there is no third way." [p.266]John once abandoned his country and his father and went to America and is now returned. At the end of Summertime, John is facing a crisis: he has an ethical decision to make, a decision that goes to the heart of the theme of patrimony that threads through nearly every page of this book. It is a decision with such overwhelming impact, it is enshrined as one-tenth of the Laws that JHWH JHWH's Self actually enscribed on Moshe's stone tablets: "Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you." Indeed, as I pointed out in my first post in this series: this is the first relationship. It is the first of the Ten Commandments having to do with interpersonal relationships, coming after those having to do with honoring god himself (god, of course, being the great 'I am', the subject of the Ur-story).
It would be facile to state that John's father is, of course, a symbol, thus taking interpretation of Summertime down a sociological or political or ethnocentric alley. And J.M. Coetzee brilliantly controls all the symbolic meaning by means of the episodes he chooses to include in this book. But, because the relationship between an adult child and an aging parent is so fraught with emotional significance it is sufficient to indicate that this is the emotional, humanitarian heart of the book which all the various episodes serve to elaborate.
Thus, in answer to my question at the top of this post, J.M. Coetzee is able to achieve a certain systematic ramification of the theme of patrimony by focusing strictly on the relationship between John Coetzee and his father.
The five 'witnesses' to this relationship are not necessarily aware that this is the reality they are testifying to; they believe they are commenting on the writer John Coetzee they knew peripherally during the 1970s. But John's father is integral to all their accounts; they just don't know it. And neither, apparently, does Vincent.
From a technical, writerly standpoint, J.M. Coetzee, then, is also able to achieve a remarkable six unreliable narrators in one very post-modern pastiche. It is up to the individual reader to say whether it was worth the cost of the plot, and that would, most likely, depend on how hard the reader cares to work to mine the text. If the reader wants to be spoonfed meaning, then probably not.
One last point: Summertime finds J.M. Coetzee impersonating five different interviewees and one interviewer (plus John). This gives rise to another question, more nebulous and more difficult to answer: Is J.M. Coetzee dramatizing his own personal search for an authentic 'voice' in Summertime? This is a question I cannot answer. It entails a precise, systematic understanding of the nature of fictional 'voice'. It requires a fairly comprehensive knowledge of J.M.'s actual writing at the time—published and unpublished. And, most importantly, it demands a knowledge of what J.M. himself thought about his own writing and his sense of his own development as a writer, something I simply do not have access to. However, as you (I) (re-)read Summertime, it might pay to keep this thought in mind.
25 February 2010
Ur-story: Second Story Pt. 2
Now, if you're one of those people who doesn't like to read critical reviews of books you haven't yet read because you don't like 'spoilers', rest easy; J.M. Coetzee's Summertime has no plot. There are no spoilers to give away. Please read on.
To recap from my previous post: Summertime is a fictional pastiche consisting of four transcripts and one narrative summary of interviews with acquaintances of as well as some fragments from the presumably authentic journal of one 'John Coetzee', deceased, all filtered through the prism of someone named Vincent who is compiling research for a biography of this same Nobel laureate 'John Coetzee' he hopes to write.
I've said here that J.M. Coetzee's novel "Disgrace is the most important and best novel I have read in the last quarter century." One of the reasons I so admire that novel has to do with J.M. Coetzee's masterful use of classical dramatic structure (reversal, rising action, climax, denouement) to achieve a profound thematic unity. It is formally perfect and thematically relevant and, thus, very satisfying both intellectually and emotionally.
J.M. Coetzee has eschewed these structural dramatic elements in Summertime in favor of this pastiche approach. There is no drama here. No plot.
Fine. What then of thematic coherence?
As I said before, Summertime is a series of voice exercises. By this I mean, we have J.M. Coetzee writing in the distinct voices of five different characters (six if you count the John Coetzee of the journals, and seven if you count Vincent the collator), each of whom illuminates some facet of the life of the fictional John Coetzee from 1971/2 until his first public recognition in 1977. The portrait of this character that emerges is fairly consistent: an awkward, introverted, private person; a failure of a son; a wan, ineffectual lover; a mediocre to competent academic; a stubborn Afrikaner wrestling with his patrimony; in short, a great writer who is not necessarily such a great man. All this amid the background of political unrest and social injustice in 1970s South Africa.
These incidents are told from the points of view of a liberal, female, middle-class South African therapist with whom John Coetzee had an affair; a female cousin whom John Coetzee once felt he loved; a Brazilian woman who suspects John Coetzee's interest in her is only because he has designs on her daughter; the male friend and colleague who beat John Coetzee out for a university teaching job; the Francophone lover and colleague with whom John Coetzee once taught a course on African literature; and finally (and most importantly) from the point of view of the biographer who wants to search for the sources of particular incidents in the novels of John Coetzee in his actual life even though he finds the personal writings of John Coetzee wholly unreliable.
In these various voices, we see a determined John Coetzee building a concrete apron around his modest home, so-called "Kaffir" labor considered unbefitting white Afrikaners of the time. We see a stubborn John Coetzee refusing to have a professional mechanic fix his car, so he and his cousin get stuck out in the middle of the veldt and have to spend the night in his car. We see an ineffectual John Coetzee pursuing the sensual Latina mother of one of his tutorial students staging a picnic which turns disastrous. We see John Coetzee botching a university teaching job interview. We see an idealistic John Coetzee looking down on politics and failing to engage in the cultural battles of the war against Apartheid taking umbrage and then freezing up like Billy Budd at an interview with a literary magazine. And we see John Coetzee as a bit of an unreliable self-narrator:
"[Vincent:] Mme Denoel, I have been through the letters and diaries. What Coetzee writes there cannot be trusted, not as a factual record—not because he was a liar but because he was a fictioneer. In his letters he is making up a fiction of himself for his correspondents; in his diaries he is doing much the same for his own eyes, or perhaps for posterity. As documents they are valuable, of course, but if you want the truth you have to go behind the fictions they elaborate and hear from people who knew him directly in the flesh.The themes of John Coetzee's unhappiness and, frankly, his incompetence at the two essential Freudian categories of work and love recur throughout Summertime, giving us a unified portrait of a man who seems ill-at-ease in the world and who, in effect and by nature, resists the world.
"[Sophie:] But what if we are all fictioneers, as you call Coetzee? What if we all continually make up the stories of our lives? Why should what I tell you about Coetzee be any worthier of credence than what he tells you himself?
"[Vincent:] Of course we are all fictioneers. I do not deny that. But which would you rather have: a set of independent reports from a range of independent perspectives, from which you can then try to synthesize a whole; or the massive, unitary self-projection comprised by his oeuvre? I know which I would prefer." 225-26
This world is not my home, I'm just a passing through...
[to be continued]
23 February 2010
Ur-story: Second Story
I rarely find myself reading, or having read, much less being in a position to comment on a novel that is au courant, but having just finished reading Summertime and seeing this reference to it on one of my favorite websites (h/t), I decided to pen a comment. There are plenty of reads on this enigmatic book out there (e.g., here, here, here, here, here, and here), and I'll try not to repeat any of them here. But none of them, to my mind, captures what I take to be the central theme of Summertime: one man's struggle to decide whether it is his duty to take care of his aging, ailing father and whether, if he cannot escape that duty, he is capable of doing so.
It is by no means an obvious theme because it is embedded in a pastiche of let us call them post-modern or metafictional literary techniques—the focus of most of the reviews I've seen. To understand how to read this book, it might be instructive to re-read my post here about William Gillespie's short book The Story That Teaches You How To Write It. The key is to pay attention to all the elements on the pages before you.
Thus, the American first edition of Summertime, the version I have, calls itself "Fiction" on its title page. We can, I think, safely take that at face value. Many of the reviewers spend valuable column space speculating on how much of the work is actually fictional and how much reliably autobiographical. As for me, I don't think it matters to an understanding of the book and, ultimately, am uninterested.
The confusion comes because the book—I'm not sure whether it can rightly be called a novel—is ostensibly about one "John Coetzee" who is said to be dead. For purposes of this post's clarity, I shall refer to the (dead) character in this fictional work as "John Coetzee" and the writer of this book as "J.M. Coetzee".
In my earlier Ur-story series of critical readings, I proposed a theory for understanding works of literature in terms of the essence of the story they sought to dramatize, that is to say the ways in which they dealt with the theme of confronting the human predicament of mortality and the accompanying sense of loss. On this theory, the story is a model of coming-to-consciousness emotionally. Summertime takes this essential understanding as its jumping-off place and goes on from there. J.M. Coetzee is using his own namesake, John Coetzee, as a character (though absent) in this book. John, like J.M., was a South African writer with a major literary reputation. Yet, in this book John Coetzee is dead.
Now one of the more difficult exercises for the writer of fiction is to give the reader a sense of a character through the eyes of the point-of-view character, the latter of whom is self-centered. Nick Carraway, for instance, is not what you might call self-centered. He is curious about and observant of his cousin Daisy and, of course, Gatsby. It is difficult to do because, as I've pointed out, much contemporary writing takes its cue from the 'method acting' school of drama; the writer doesn't merely impersonate, s/he takes on the aspect of the point of view character. And everything is about the self-discovery of the self-centered POV character; other characters tend to come across as stage props or furniture in the main character's world. James Wood, among others, famously calls this the free indirect style. I've called it 'method writing' (others have as well, e.g., see here, here, and here).
That is what J.M. Coetzee is attempting to do here, i.e., to give readers a sense of the fictional John Coetzee (and, importantly, his father) through the eyes of not one (arguably) but several point-of-view characters. Summertime consists of some notebook/journal fragments from John Coetzee and some transcripts of interviews and a narrative summary of another interview by one "Vincent", who is researching a biography of the late John Coetzee. Vincent apparently has taken some liberties with his transcriptions and summaries, and his interviewees often call him out on this. Thus Vincent's editorial control and thus his reliability are put at issue from the get-go.
So, let's call Vincent the Nick Carraway of Summertime and John Coetzee the not-so-great Gatsby.
Summertime is a compilation of Vincent's raw materials: interviews with five characters who knew John Coetzee (as presumably revealed in his journals) during the 1970s in South Africa and several of John's own notebook entries. Like the aforementioned Gillespie book, Summertime is thus a pastiche.
At first read it feels like J.M. Coetzee (the real life writer and Nobel laureate who has a world-wide following) has tried to pawn off a book written on the cheap (perhaps to fulfill a contractual obligation) by simply drawing on a few fragments from his own notebooks and some writerly exercises—to wit trying to imagine what some people (presumably with fictionalized identities) from his past might have thought about him—and cast the whole as a sort of po-mo, meta-fictional game by using the persona John Coetzee, having him be dead, and interjecting the fictional biographer. And that may very well be what this book is. But if it is merely gamesmanship, it is a sophisticated game and keeps the reader guessing. It does not readily betray its secrets.
But let's not cast aspersions on the writer's motivations. Let's take the text at face value, and examine it critically in terms of the sorts of things we look for in works of fiction. That is to say, let's treat it as the new form which, in the spirit of the game, it cries out to be.
(to be continued)
18 August 2009
A Slumgullion
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Heal or No Heal - Medicine Brawl | ||||
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Is it me, or does this segment from last night's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart bear a strong resemblance (in POV and substance, at least) to my previous post? With the obvious exception that theirs is funny. I've been a fan of TDS since the Craig Kilborn days. In fact, I remember thinking when JS replaced him that it would no longer be any good. I was wrong. TDS, in the tradition of such political comedians/satirists as Pat Paulsen, early Al Franken, and many others, is a tremendous program which cuts through all the political bullshit. If I were to find out (hint, hint) that one of the writers of the show had actually read my blog and used an idea or was inspired by what I wrote, I would be thrilled!
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Here's another idea: let's put all those who tote guns to Congressional or Presidential town halls in "Second Amendment zones" modeled on the "free speech zones" the Secret Service used for protesters against the former president and his party. As a matter of law, I don't believe the Second is any more sacrosanct than the First. There, they can talk amongst themselves, compare their signage, and brandish or whatever it is they do with their firearms.
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In other news, you can find a podcast of J.M. Coetzee reading from his forthcoming work—Summertime—here.
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If you're into old-fashioned reading, Hunger Mountain has reprinted George Saunders's first short-story, "A Lack of Order in the Floating Object Room" here.
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The diving in Harbour Island was, on average, about a B/B-; though, one day, the last, it was A- when we swam through a coral arch at 110ft alongside a six-foot barracuda into an outcropping of elkhorn and staghorn corals and giant barrel sponges at about 75ft where huge schools (100s each) of amberjacks and large mahogany snappers and several varieties of parrotfish (including the rare midnight) were feeding, spotting large specimens of all four varieties of Caribbean angel fish(!) (the Queen being my favorite)—85ft visibility, 83 degree water temp. Brilliant! On several dives, we swam across coral 'nurseries' like the one in Finding Nemo with tons of tiny baby fish of many varieties feeding on the coral and hiding out from predators and the currents. The reefs were vibrant, no visible bleaching or damage in the 12 spots we hit. Best sighting: a pair of large eagle rays during a 10 knot (that's fast, by the way) drift dive through the appropriately named "Current Island" cut. I swam right between them!
In my spare moments, I continued my trek through the addictions and obsessive athletics of Infinite Jest; but, on my return, I discovered I was nevertheless behind the Infinite Summer pace. I'm a slow reader (a good man), and thorough, which is a problem when dealing with an encyclopedic text by a polymathic mind. IJ is so chock-full of information, it was making me nauseous (see J.P. Sartre). It's so easy to get lost in all the details, to get bogged down, to lose motivation. Yet, there are some moments of absolutely fine writing that make it worthwhile. Still, I was getting discouraged, knowing full well that if I set it down I would probably never be able to pick it up again.
This article by Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading, however, has persuaded me to keep at it. Thanks, Scott, for pointing out the forest.
I can't go on, I'll go on—though at my own pace.
04 May 2008
Facets: Ways of looking at fiction
[D]iscursive language, say in novel writing, is artistically identified as description, which is what enables fiction to be convincing: we acquiesce in the fiction that we are being given facts. So that the difference between factual and fictive description is not that the former is true and the latter false—for something may after all be meant as factual and be false without thereby being elevated to the status of fiction, and fictional prose may in literal fact be true—but in the fact that the former is artistically identified as description and the latter literally identified as that. Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace p. 127-----
...the drive is curiosity and the aim enlightenment. Use of symbols beyond immediate need is for the sake of understanding, not practice; what compels is the urge to konw, what delights is discovery, and communication is secondary to the apprehension and formulation of what is to be communicated....Symbolization, then, is to be judged fundamentally by how well it serves the cognitive purpose: by the delicacy of its discriminations and the aptness of its allusions; by the way it works in grasping, exploring, and informing the world; by how it analyzes, sorts, orders, and organizes; by how it participates in the making, manipulation, retention, and transformation of knowledge....Not only do we discover the world through our symbols but we understand and reappraise our symbols progressively in the light of our growing experience. ...-----
The difference between art and science is not that between feeling and fact, intuition and inference, delight and deliberation, synthesis and analysis, sensation and cerebration, concreteness and abstraction, passion and action, mediacy and immediacy, or truth and beauty, but rather a difference in domination of certain specific characteristics of symbols. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art pp. 258, 260, 264
The language of fiction functions in two ways, therefore. In one, used appropriately, the sentences of a fiction "body forth" a particular imaginary world—producing Jehoshaphat [from Lagerkvist's, The Dwarf], who is referred to, as well as the dwarf, who makes reference to him; in another, the "voice" of the dwarf, collapsed into the "voice" of the fiction (since the story is told in the first person), is imagined to refer to Jehoshaphat. Hence, the referring use of language occurs in fiction only insofar as the world of the fiction is already assumed to exist; but it is then, precisely, that the distinction between fiction and reality is no longer critical. Joseph Margolis, Art & Philosophy-----
How then to posit the value of a text? How establish a basic typology of texts? The primary evaluation of all texts can come neither from science, for science does not evaluate, nor from ideology, for the ideological value of a text (moral, aesthetic, political, alethiological) is a value of representation, not of production (ideology "reflects," it does not do work). Our evaluation can be linked only to a practice, and this practice is that of writing....the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text. Roland Barthes, S/Z pp. 3-4-----
[T]he philosophical analysis of fiction has scarcely taken its first steps, Philosophers continue to interpret novels as if they were philosophies themselves, platforms to speak from, middens from which may be scratched important messages for mankind; they have predictably looked for content, not form; they have regarded fictions as ways of viewing reality and not as additions to it. There are many ways of refusing experience. This is one of them.-----
So little is known of the power of the gods in the worlds of fiction, or of the form of cause, or of the nature of soul, or of the influence of evil, or of the essence of good. No distinction is presently made between laws and rules of inference and conventions of embodiment, or their kinds. The role of chance or of assumption, the recreative power of the skillful reader, the mastery of the sense of internal life, the forms of space and time: how much is known of these? ... No search is made for first principles, none for rules, and infact all capacity for thought in the face of fiction is so regularly abandoned as to reduce it to another form of passive and mechanical amusement. The novelist has, by this ineptitude, been driven out of healthy contact with his audience, and the supreme values of fiction sentimentalized. William Gass, "Philosophy and the Form of Fiction," in Fiction and the Figures of Life, pp. 25-26
In the novel, the voice that speaks the first sentence, then the second, and so onward—call it the voice of the narrator—has, to begin with, no authority at all. Authority must be earned; on the novelist author lies the onus to build up, out of nothing, such authority. J.M. Coetzee, "On Authority in Fiction," Diary of a Bad Year p. 149-----
Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. Every great writer is a great deceiver...There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these three—storyteller, teacher, enchanter—but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer....-----
It seems to me that a good formula to test the quality of a novel is, in the long run, a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science. In order to bask in that magic a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading. Then with a pleasure which is both sensual and intellectual we shall watch the artist build his castle of cards and watch the castle of cards become a castle of beautiful steel and glass. Vladimir Nabokov, "Good Readers and Good Writers," in Lectures on Literature pp. 5-6.
"Thinking, analyzing, inventing (he also wrote me) are not anomalous acts; they are the normal respiration of the intelligence. To glorify the occasional performance of that function, to hoard ancient and alien thoughts, to recall with incredulous stupor that the doctor universalis thought, is to confess our laziness or our barbarity. Every man should be capable of all ideas and I understand that in the future this will be the case." Jorge Luis Borges, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"-----
Of all that is written I love only what a man has written with his blood. Write with blood, and you will experience that blood is spirit. F. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: First Part.
28 January 2008
Civilization
The wisdom of government is best understood by thinking about its absence. Why do we need government? Why do we even put up with the political class—including the fourth estate?
The great theorist on this matter is Thomas Hobbes whose Leviathan told us that without society our lives would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." We would find ourselves living in what he called the "state of nature"—the "war of all against all."
The point of civilization, as the name implies, is to civilize us. A number of novels have explored this theme: William Golding's The Lord of the Flies, Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker, Cormac McCarthy's The Road (I know, I know—but if it's any consolation I've read all his other books and read this the day it was published, long before Oprah's legions even heard about it.), Jose Saramago's Blindness, and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow to name a few of the better ones (not to mention the aforeblogged Disgrace).
There is the flavor of pessimism about the human condition in all these works—or unflinching realism, depending on your point of view—tempered with some hope for the future. Certainly, Christianity, with its focus on 'original sin' fuels this belief in our 'fallenness' and human fallibility. On the religious view, however, our only hope for redemption lies in the afterlife. Still, these unbridled subterranean forces of our own nature—these hopeful monsters— need to be kept in check. This is the function of civilization and government is merely the regulation and maintenance of civilization.
22 January 2008
Disgrace
So, where does that leave us? Is the center falling apart? (Again? So soon?)
One writer who's addressed this question is J.M. Coetzee. In his novel Disgrace, he tells the story of a literature professor, David Lurie, who has been reduced to teaching something called Communications. Still and all, he believes he has a good life. The story is about how his life falls apart.
The overarching dramatic theme of the novel deals with his sexual, animal nature. The first part shows his predilection for a certain prostitute whom he visits regularly. One day he sees her on the street and follows her. She spots him and refuses to entertain his business any more. The chapter is cringe-inducing as he has a private detective track her down. No other prostitute suffices.
The next part finds Lurie seducing a beautiful young student. Eventually, her boyfriend and family get involved and charges are laid at the university. Against advice, he refuses to defend himself and leaves the school. Everyone, his ex-wife and the reader included, thinks he's being stubbornly stupid.
He seeks his daughter out on a farm in rural South Africa. One afternoon, they are attacked by a couple of men. He is beaten and locked in a bathroom while she is, presumably, gang-raped.
After trying to make amends with his ex-wife and the family of the student, Lurie ends up staying in the rural area near his daughter, working in a humane shelter helping to ease the euthanasia of stray dogs and dispose of their bodies and, significantly, having a romping affair with his unattractive married co-worker. His equally stubborn and now pregnant daughter winds up seeking the protection of her former farmhand.
The novel is much more complex than this little summary, but it serves to illustrate the point. Lurie's sexual nature is responsible for his disgrace (losing his job at the university) but also for his ultimate redemption. In some senses—and I know this will be controversial—the ending is comic: Lurie winds up having sex with the wife of one of the locals on the floor of the dog shelter. He also accepts the idea of mortality; he knows he cannot save all the dogs who must die, even the one he feels for. He can only make what remains of their life and their passing more humane and comfortable. In this, he finds peace and, dare I say it, grace!
Other motifs in the novel include politics and music and the ethics of animal rights (we'll blog later on Peter Singer's philosophy), but to me the overwhelming impact of the book lies in Lurie's recognition of his own humanity, i.e., his mortality, and how he comes to deal with it. The key dramatic points (reversal, rising action, climax, denouement) are all tied in with this theme of sexuality. For my money, Disgrace is the most important and best novel I have read in the last quarter century. And, quite possibly, it can serve to point us in the direction of the new center: our common human nature as mortal, sexual beings, creatures on the earth.
For more on Disgrace, check out The Complete Review's page on the book. Michael Orthofer's site is a tremendous clearinghouse for reviews on significant books.
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