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🦋 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
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