READIN

Saturday, February 14th, 2009

🦋 Branching rapidly outward...

How beautiful it is, this world, even if it is only a simulacrum. At least there is that to fall back on.

'What are you saying in your confession?'

'What I said before: that I cannot afford to believe. That in my line of work one has to suspend belief. [Ooh, lovely! -- ed.] That belief is an indulgence, a luxury. That it gets in the way.'

'Really. Some of us would say the luxury that we cannot afford is unbelief.'

She waits for more.

'Unbelief -- entertaining all possibilities, floating between opposites -- is the mark of a leisurely existence, a leisured existence,' the woman goes on. 'Most of us have to choose. Only the light soul hangs in the air.' She leans closer. 'For the light soul, let me offer a word of advice. They may say they demand belief, but in practice they will be satisfied with passion. Show them passion and they will let you through.'

'Passion?' she replies. 'Passion the dark horse? I would have though that passion leads one away from the light, not towards it. Yet in this place, you say, passion is good enough.'

I am liking the juxtaposition of belief and passion a lot. Costello thinks the line "Only the light soul hangs in the air" must be a quotation; I am not finding anything to back this up.

posted afternoon of February 14th, 2009: Respond
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🦋 Final ten pages

Well: the end of Elizabeth Costello did not, as I was vaguely hoping, tie things together; if anything it further unravelled them. I'm not sure right now what to think this book is about -- the longing Costello feels for union with the Other, variously expressed as Animal Nature or as Divine Nature; her role as an author in making that union possible for the reader (? -- I just put these words together now -- are they in the story?) How expressing arguments mediates with belief in the principles she is arguing for. Her relationship with colonial history. Her aging, of course. And other tangents... I am dividing the novel into four quite distinct parts: Chapters 1 through 6, about public speaking and argument (the plot of the novel, as far as it can be said to have a plot, is confined to this part); Chapter 7, about union with God; Chapter 8, a fable about justifying one's beliefs; and the afterword (with its epigraph), which seems to be about union with God and insanity. (And just now I noticed that Coetzee calls them not "Chapters" but "Lessons".) Let's look at the ending of each of these sections:

Final paragraph of Lesson 6: There ought to be a third alternative, some way of rounding off the morning and giving it shape and meaning: some confrontation leading to some final word. There ought to be an arrangement such that she bumps into someone in the orridor, perhaps Paul West himself; something should pass between them, sudden as lightning, that will illuminate the landscape for her, even if afterwards it returns to its native darkness. But the corridor, it seems, is empty.

Final paragraph of Lesson 7: A vision, an opening up, as the heavens are opened up by a rainbow when the rain stops falling. Does it suffice, for old folk, to have these visions now and again, these rainbows, as a comfort, before the rain starts pelting down again? Must one be too creaky to join the dance before one can see the pattern?

Final paragraph of Lesson 8: The man behind the desk has evidently had enough of questions. He lays down his pen, folds his hands, regards her levelly. 'All the time,' he says. 'We see people like you all the time.'

Final sentences of Afterword: Drowning, we write out of our separate fates. Save us.

The afterword is Coetzee writing in the voice of Lord Philip Chandos' wife Elizabeth. (Wheels within wheels: Elizabeth Chandos ~ Elizabeth Costello; Costello wrote a book from the point of view of Leopold Bloom's wife Molly...) Lesson 7 might be the most interesting part of the whole book, with the most to think about. Possibly the final paragraph of Lesson 7 above is meant to represent Costello's death.

posted afternoon of February 14th, 2009: 5 responses
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Sunday, February 15th, 2009

🦋 Wheels within wheels

Yesterday I was talking with Ellen about Elizabeth Costello, how Elizabeth is herself a novelist and there is a lot of discussion of reading and writing in the book; Sylvia interjected, "It would be cool if there was a book that had someone reading the book that had someone reading the book that had..." Nice! We talked about mirrors for a little while. And then, this morning we were looking at xkcd's Sierpinski Valentine, and checked out Wikipædia's article about Sierpinski Triangles (which has a nice animation) -- I asked Sylvia if she knew what infinity meant, she said "Yeah, like something that never ends." And she made reference back to the book she had been talking about yesterday -- I found it pretty exciting that she would make this connection.

And this is funny: apparently David Foster Wallace made the claim that Infinite Jest is structured like a Sierpinski triangle.

posted morning of February 15th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, June 20th, 2009

🦋 Historical Background

I started reading Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K this morning. It is a dark, fascinating book, drawing me in to its violent, damaged world immediately from page 1 onward. I'm wondering a bit about the precise historical setting of the novel -- it was published in 1983 and I'm assuming without any confirmation, that it is set in the present, i.e. the late 70's or early 80's. (And Michael is 31, so would have been born around 1950.)

I realize suddenly how limited my knowledge of South African history is -- I remember as a young teenager reading in the paper and in magazines about apartheid, and thinking it was important that it should end, and self-identifying as an opponent of apartheid; but it was all pretty abstract. I did not realize that a hot civil war was being fought -- and I would not have thought of it that way prior to reading this book. But it seems from the book like at the point where the narrative starts, war is an established, ongoing state of affairs -- people are used to living in wartime.

This is the second book of Coetzee's I am reading that is not Disgrace... I went to the library this morning thinking (among other things) of checking out Disgrace; but looked at the first couple of pages and it did not really seem like what I wanted to be reading right now. (Also checked out Saramago's History of the Seige of Lisbon.)

posted afternoon of June 20th, 2009: 2 responses
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🦋 I am falling, he thought.

I could live here forever, he thought, or till I die. Nothing would happen, every day would be the same as the day before, there would be nothing to say. The anxiety that belonged to the time on the road began to leave him. Sometimes, as he walked, he did not know whether he was awake or asleep. He could understand that people should have retreated here and fenced themselves in with miles and miles of silence; he could understand that they should have wanted to bequeath the privilege of so much silence to their children and grandchildren in perpetuity (though by what right he was not sure); he wondered whether there were not forgotten corners and angles and corridors between the fences, land that belonged to no one yet. Perhaps if one flew high enough, he thought, one would be able to see.

Two aircraft streaked across the sky from south to north leaving vapour trails that slowly faded, and a noise like waves.

Coetzee's epigraph for the book sounds oddly familiar, I'm sure I've heard it quoted elsewhere: "War is the father of all and king of all. Some he shows as gods, others as men. Some he makes slaves, and others free." -- Or possibly I am thinking of some other similar quotation; I think this aphorism is composed in the style of some classical writer, but I'm not sure who...

Update: the epigraph is from a fragmentary writing of Heraclitus, quoted by Hippolytus in Refutatio â…¨.

posted afternoon of June 20th, 2009: Respond
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🦋 Reasons

Between this reason and the truth that he would never announce himself, however, lay a gap wider than the distance separating him from the firelight. Always, when he tried to explain himself to himself, there remained a gap, a hole, a darkness before which his understanding baulked, into which it was useless to pour words. The words were eaten up, the gap remained. His was always a story with a hole in it: a wrong story, always wrong.

One thing that is puzzling me a bit about this novel (halfway through) is the complete absense of race. I would have thought race and racial tension would be important factors in South Africa of the mid-to-late 20th Century; but so far there has been absolutely no mention of it, everything is class tension among characters whose race is not mentioned but I don't see how it could be other than white. I'm not quite sure what to make of this; one idea is that apartheid means the white characters have no interaction with blacks -- though my understanding was that blacks were transported from the "homelands" into white areas to work -- another possibility is that I'm reading this wrong, and the setting is not historical South Africa but a hypothetical, allegorical location.

posted evening of June 20th, 2009: Respond

Sunday, June 21st, 2009

🦋 Pitch-perfect

My initial reaction to part 2 of Life and Times of Michael K was to feel kind of let down at the change in narrative perspective -- it seemed kind of like if the the next section after Benjy's narrative in The Sound and the Fury had been told a clinician attempting to diagnose Benjy... But I warmed to it pretty quickly. It is not Michael's story, this section of the novel is the doctor's story; I could express it as a criticism of Coetzee, that he is only telling one person's story at a time, not allowing his characters to interact -- but I think this sort of solitude is part of the fabric of the universe he has built here.

As the section goes on, Coetzee seems more and more comfortable in the doctor's consciousness. This passage, from just after they've found that Michael has absconded, is full of rigor and insight and beauty:

It occurred to me that if I followed after him, proceeding down the avenue in a straight line, I could be at the beach by two o'clock. Was there any reason, I asked myself, why order and discipline should not crumble today rather than tomorrow or next month or next year? What would yield the greater benefit to mankind: if I spent the afternoon taking stock in my dispensary, or if I went to the beach and took off my clothes and lay in my underpants absorbing the benign spring sun, watching the children frolic in the water, later buying an ice-cream from the kiosk on the parking lot, if the kiosk is still there? What did Noël ultimately achieve labouring at his desk to balance the bodies out against the bodies in? Would he not be better off taking a nap? Maybe the universal sum of happiness would be increased if we declared this afternoon a holiday and went down to the beach, commandant, doctor, chaplain, PT instructors, guards, dog-handlers all together with the six hard cases from the detention block, leaving behind the concussion case to look after things. Perhaps we might meet some girls. For what reason were we waging the war, after all, but to augment the sum of happiness in the universe? Or was I misremembering, was that another war I was thinking of?

Also in this section we get (from Noël) the first mention of any concrete dates -- he is 60 years old, and he was a child "in the 1930's" -- this seems to confirm my idea that the novel is set around 1980. And again from Noël, the first mention of race in the novel, in a context that I am having a lot of trouble making any sense of: In response to the doctor's question of why they are fighting the war, he says "We are fighting this war so that minorities will have a say in their destinies." So first off, does "minorities" mean "non-white people" in South African usage? I had figured that was an American idiom -- it certainly doesn't make sense in South Africa where Boers are less than 10% of the population. And what would it mean for someone working for the South African army in 1980 to say that? I'm just confused here.

posted afternoon of June 21st, 2009: 5 responses

Tuesday, February second, 2010

🦋 Political essays

I started reading Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year last night and am already ready to recommend it -- a bit like Elizabeth Costello but I think much more engaging and immediate; and the funny structure of the book is a real treat to read. A couple of different stories are being interwoven/superimposed on the page -- the top half of the page is the book of political essays that the main character is writing (under the title "Strong Opinions"), the bottom half is his first-person narrative of his life at the time he is writing the book; in some chapters the page is divided into thirds, with the bottom third being the first-person narrative of his neighbor, whom he has hired to type up the manuscript and on whom he has vain designs of seduction. This sounds kind of strange I guess, and like it would be really difficult to maintain; but Coetzee does a fantastic job of keeping the multiple threads running.

It seems pretty clear that the essays are Coetzee's voice; does this make the main character (who is after all the author of the essays) Coetzee? It kind of should, but I think he is intended rather as a fictional character. I'm not sure if this is as complicated semantically as it is seeming right now.* Anyway, the essays frequently tread dangerously close to cynicism; but (so far) they are not falling into the chasm.

As during the time of kings it would have been naïve to think that the king's firstborn son would be the fittest to rule, so in our time it is naïve to think that the democratically elected ruler will be the fittest. The rule of succession is not a formula for identifying the best ruler, it is a formula for conferring legitimacy on someone or other and thus forestalling civil conflict. The electorate -- the demos -- believes that its task is to choose the best man, but in truth its task is much simpler: to anoint a man (vox populi vox dei), it does not matter whom. Counting ballots may seem to be a means of finding which is the true (that is, the loudest) vox populi; but the power of the ballot-count formula, like the power of the formula of the firstborn male, lies in the fact that it is objective, unambiguous, outside the field of political contestation. The toss of a coin would be equally objective, equally unambiguous, equally incontestable, and could therefore equally well be claimed (as it has been claimed) to represent vox dei. We do not choose our rulers by the toss of a coin -- tossing coins is associated with the low-status activity of gambling -- but who would dare to claim that the world would be in a worse state than it is if rulers had from the beginning of time been chosen by the method of the coin?

* As of Chapter 10, it is becoming more clear that the main character is indeed intended to be Coetzee -- the country he is living in is identified as Australia, he refers to himself as a white South African, the neighbor calls him "Señor C."

posted evening of February second, 2010: Respond
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Wednesday, February third, 2010

🦋 Political essays again

I'm spending a lot of time going back and forth, as I read Diary of a Bad Year, trying to figure out what Coetzee gains and what he loses, in presenting his essays as part of a novel. The thoughts are being presented as the thoughts of a fictional character -- though the fictional character is clearly the same person as Coetzee the author -- does that give the author less of a stake in the "Strong Opinions"? One of the essays (Chapter 26) makes mention of Harold Pinter's Nobel lecture, and says,

When one speaks in one's own person -- that is, not through one's art -- to denounce some politician or other, using the rhetoric of the agora, one embarks on a contest which one is likely to lose because it takes place on ground where one's opponent is far more practised and adept. "Of course Mr Pinter is entitled to his point of view," it will be replied. "After all, he enjoys the freedoms of a democratic society, freedoms which we are this moment endeavouring to protect against extremists."

Clearly Coetzee is thinking about what he's doing in this book as he writes this paragraph. Speaking as Pinter did "takes some gumption," he says -- does it take less gumption to put such words in the mouth of your main character? I sort of think it must not -- at least not in this case, where everything is so clearly delineated to point out that this is Coetzee speaking out against violations of decency by Western (and specifically American) governments. There comes a time, he says, "when the outrage and the shame are so great that all calculation, all prudence, is overwhelmed and one must act" -- and possibly he is couching that action in the form of a novel just because that is what he does well, that is how he knows to get his message across.

posted evening of February third, 2010: 4 responses

Saturday, February 6th, 2010

🦋 Pilgrimage

A couple of passages from Diary of a Bad Year, having to do with the relationship between reader and writer. From Chapter 28, "On Tourism":

A decade ago, following in the tracks of Pound and his poets, I cycled some of those same roads, in particular (several times) the road between Foix and Lavelanet past Roquefixade. What I achieved by doing so I am not sure. I am not even sure what my illustrious predecessor expected to achieve. Both of us set out on the basis that writers who were important to us (to Pound, the troubadours; to me, Pound) had actually been where we were , in flesh and blood; but neither of us seemed or seem able to demonstrate in our writing why or how that mattered.

During his later years, Tolstoy was treated not only as a great author but as an authority on life, a wise man, a sage. His contemporary Walt Whitman endured a similar fate. But neither had much wisdom to offer: wisdom was not what they dealt in. They were poets above all; otherwise they were ordinary men with ordinary fallible opinions. The disciples who swarmed to them in quest of enlightenment look sadly foolish in retrospect.

Usually the writers... claim that they write to me because my books speak directly to them; but it soon emerges that the books speak only in the way that strangers whispering together might seem to be whispering about one. That is to say, there is an element of the delusional in the claim, and of the paranoid in the mode of reading.

posted morning of February 6th, 2010: Respond

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