The READIN Family Album
Me and Ellen and a horse (July 20, 2007)

READIN

Jeremy's journal

It must have been a long time before men thought of giving a common name to the manifold objects of their senses, and of placing themselves in opposition to them.

Novalis


(This is a page from my archives)
Front page
More recent posts
Older posts
More posts about:
Elizabeth Costello
J.M. Coetzee
Readings
Cat and Girl
Comic Books
Comix

Archives index
Subscribe to RSS

This page renders best in Firefox (or Safari, or Chrome)

🦋 Without beliefs we are not human

Seated at one of the pavement tables she briskly composes what is to be her statement. I am a writer, a trader in fictions, it says. I maintain beliefs only provisionally: fixed beliefs would stand in my way. I change beliefs as I change my habitation or my clothes, according to my needs. On these grounds -- professional, vocational -- I reqest exemption from a rule of which I now hear for the first time, namely that every petitioner at the gate should hold one or more beliefs.

She takes her statement back to the guardhouse. As she half expected, it is rejected.

And we are getting down, here, to the heart of the matter -- this is what I think. As Chapter 8 opens, Coetzee manages to startle me once again, changing his narrative style completely (while continuing to narrate in the same voice), veering into Kafkaesque allegory -- he acknowledges as much a few pages later but calls it "Kafka reduced and flattened to a parody."

Costello is speaking to my concerns earlier about how nobody in this novel seems to be attached to the arguments they are making; she is a writer, a vessel for words and beliefs (like Mary or Leda is a vessel for God's seed -- I'm not sure yet what to make of this parallel but it is definitely front and center). I have got the feeling that Coetzee is writing in his own voice here -- should be wary of this given the repeated cautioning against it earlier in the book -- I was wondering, when Elizabeth defends herself against the charge that she has ignored the genocide of the Tasmanians (and implicitly, that she as a white Australian is not sensitive to issues of imperialism and oppression), whether Coetzee faces similar charges as a white South African. Perhaps the student in Chapter 1 was meaning to launch an attack on these grounds?

posted morning of Saturday, February 14th, 2009
➳ More posts about Elizabeth Costello
➳ More posts about J.M. Coetzee
➳ More posts about Readings
➳ More posts about Cat and Girl
➳ More posts about Comic Books
➳ More posts about Comix

Respond:

Name:
E-mail:
(will not be displayed)
Link:
Remember info

Drop me a line! or, sign my Guestbook.
    •
Check out Ellen's writing at Patch.com.

What's of interest:

(Other links of interest at my Google+ page. It's recommended!)

Where to go from here...

Friends and Family
Programming
Texts
Music
Woodworking
Comix
Blogs
South Orange
readinsinglepost