speculation

So, my theory about Coetzee's writing after looking at his two earliest novels, Dusklands and In the Heart of the Country, which are about as rich and lushly lyrical (or, the way I see it, wanky, self-indulgent) as those of any number of other gifted prose stylists: later Coetzee's stripped-bare language is his response to loss and suffering. He's lost so much - a wife (first to divorce, then cancer), a son (to possible suicide), and a native country (even though that particular loss was chosen). In the midst of such losses, what can one do, but retreat into silence? Or, if one must speak, surely all but the barest of words must seem superfluous? Remember Lear ("Never, never, never, never, never"), and the way his rotund eloquence finally turns to what would be child-like simplicity if the words were not so heart-rendingly painful.

Reading earlier Coetzee, I've realised that the reason I've stopped reading novels for so long is that I can no longer take the way most fiction, simply by way of its prose style, imposes such rich other-worlds on its readers. Too much, too much. It's sensory overload. And emotional, psychological overload as well - in any good novel, the characters' burdens become one's own and one starts to share a little of their lives. Perhaps sometimes one has enough burdens of one's own - there is no need to take on more.

Early Coetzee reads like a completely different writer from the Coetzee I've come to know. I'm glad I started with his later work.
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obsession

The Coetzee fandom continues unabated. Actually, it's running rabid. Now that I'm done with his latest books, I'm going backwards to the less-known, not-quite-so-prizewinning earlier works, and oh, how I love them all, every single one. This is the first time in my life I've been this way about any writer. Most of the time, I find something to dislike or to be disappointed by fairly quickly. Not with Coetzee. I think this is becoming an obsession. And I don't mean that in the flippant way I usually use that word, either.

Here's something taken from the back cover of Boyhood, which I think captures the essence of Coetzee's writing for me.

'As funny, cruel and terrifying as life itself. It is also intense and elegant, clearly the product of (a) complex, subtle imagination... Austerely beautiful... (with an) aloof, edgy grace and seething passion...' (Irish Times)

Ok, I dunno about 'seething' - sounds too drama-mama for Coetzee, but the rest of that, yeah, just about gets it. Here's an example of that passionate intensity combined with the sparest of prose (or, what P called 'baby English' - said the great P, "It's not easy to write in baby English."):

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'There is another first memory, one that he trusts more fully but would never repeat, certainly not to Greenberg and Goldstein, who would trumpet it around the school and turn him into a laughing-stock.

He is sitting beside his mother in a bus. It must be cold, for he is wearing red woollen leggings and a woollen cap with a bobble. The engine of the bus labours; they are ascending the wild and desolate Swartberg Pass.

In his hand is a sweet-wrapper. He holds the wrapper out of the window, which is open a crack. It flaps and trembles in the wind.

"Shall I let it go?" he asks his mother.

She nods. He lets it go.

The scrap of paper flies up into the sky. Below there is nothing but the grim abyss of the pass, ringed with cold mountainpeaks. Craning backwards, he catches a last glimpse of the paper, still bravely flying.

"What will happen to it?" he asks his mother; but she does not comprehend.

That is the other first memory, the secret one. He thinks all the time of the scrap of paper, alone in all that vastness, that he abandoned when he should not have abandoned it. One day he must go back to the Swatberg Pass and find it and rescue it. That is his duty: he may not die until he has done it.'

(from Boyhood)

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I think the other thing that so attracts me to his writing is that it's really survivor's writing. Maybe that's the link with the holocaust writing that I'm so drawn to as well. As Frost put it in 'The Oven Bird',

The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.
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on Dostoevsky

'I read again last night the fifth chapter of the second part of The Brothers Karamazov, the chapter in which Ivan hands back his ticket of admission to the universe God has created, and found myself sobbing uncontrollaby.

These are pages I have read innumerable times before, yet instead of becoming inured to their force I find myself more and more vulnerable before them. Why? It is not as if I am in sympathy with Ivan's rather vengeful views. Contrary to him, I believe that the greatest of all contributions to political ethics was made by Jesus when he urged the injured and offended among us to turn the other cheek, thereby breaking the cycle of revenge and reprisal. So why does Ivan make me cry in spite of myself?

The answer has nothing to do with ethics or politics, everything to do with rhetoric. In his tirade against forgiveness Ivan shamelessly uses sentiment (martyred children) and caricature (cruel landowners) to advance his ends. Far more powerful than the substance of his argument, which is not strong, are the accents of anguish, the personal anguish of a soul unable to bear the horrors of this world. It is the voice of Ivan, as realised by Dostoevsky, not his reasoning, that sweeps me along.

Are those tones of anguish real? Does Ivan "really" feel as he claims to feel, and does the reader in consequence "really" share Ivan's feelings? The answer to the latter question is troubling. The answer is Yes. What one recognises, even as one hears Ivan's words, even as one asks whether one wants to rise up and follow him and give back one's ticket too, even as one asks whether it is not mere rhetoric ("mere" rhetoric) that one is reading, even as one asks, shocked, how a Christian, Dostoevsky, a follower of Christ, could allow Ivan such powerful words - even in the midst of all this there is space enough to think too, Glory be! At last I see it before me, the battle pitched on the highest ground! If to anyone (Alyosha, for instance) it shall be given to vanquish Ivan, by word or by example, then indeed the word of Christ will be forever vindicated! And therefore one thinks, Slava, Fyodor Michailovich! May your name resound for ever in the halls of fame!

And one is thankful to Russia too, Mother Russia, for setting before us with such indisputable certainty the standards toward which any serious novelist must toil, even if without the faintest chance of getting there: the standard of the master Tolstoy on the one hand and of the master Dostoevsky on the other. By their example one becomes a better artist; and by better I do not mean more skilful but ethically better. They annihilate one's impurer pretensions; they clear one's eyesight; they fortify one's arm.'


(from the closing chapter of J.M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year)

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Edit: 9 Sept 2008

It's so characteristic of Coetzee that even this is not allowed to be the final word in the novel. I've just checked out The Brothers Karamazov from the library, and lo and behold, the chapter reference given by 'Coetzee' in the text is... well, not exactly wrong, but certainly rather unusual and confusing. One would expect a writer and an academic like Coetzee to follow the usual referencing conventions more closely. So it looks like even this apparently rousing call to an ethical aesthetics cannot be taken at face value.

And therefore one thinks, Slava, John Maxwell Coetzee, for once again refusing to allow us to take easy refuge in easy answers! May your name resound forever in the halls of fame!
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smitten

Smitten is when you can forgive anything. So I've been reading Coetzee's latest, Diary of a Bad Year, and despite all my initial misgivings, all my objections against self-indulgent, self-advertising writing, I'm starting to really enjoy it.

I wonder how many such fans he has. What a strange thing loyalty is.


Edit: 19 Aug 08

Evidence that I'm really and truly losing it: I'm almost done with the book, and I don't want it to end!!! I just want to keep on and on reading this stuff - Coetzee's little essaylets on politics and power and just about anything under the sun, including magpies, love and Bach.

Coetzee should keep a blog. I'd be his biggest fan.
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lately

"...most late Beethoven pieces take surprising courses. His earlier works tend to have a tone (which sometimes he names for us, as in the "Pathetique" and "Eroica") that propels a dramatic unfolding: We hear what happens to the pathos and the heroism. In his late works Beethoven turned away from such clear dramatic curves to more elusive and evocative trains of ideas whose effect he and his time called poetic. And in keeping with the turn from drama to poetry, he left the heroics behind."

(from Slate)


Hmm. Interesting distinction between the 'dramatic' and the 'poetic'. I'm not sure if I agree.

Whatever. I'm only just starting to discover late Beethoven. Methinks it's time to go listen to those last string quartets again.
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where i can be free

With even more thanks to XW for all this mind-food. Lunch is on me next time, ok?

An interview with Gao Xingjian.

'According to Gao, a writer's only responsibility is "to the language he writes in". Determined to rid himself of others' ideologies, to live, as he says, "without isms", he advocates a "cold literature", detached from both political agendas and consumerist pressures, whose purpose is to bear witness...

Without Isms is neither nihilism nor eclecticism; nor is it egotism or solipsism. It opposes totalitarian dictatorship but also opposes the inflation of the self to God or Superman. It hates seeing other people trampled on like dog shit. Without Isms detests politics and does not take part in politics, but is not opposed to other people who do. If people want to get involved in politics, let them go right ahead. What Without Isms opposes is the foisting of a particular brand of politics on to the individual by means of abstract collective names such as 'the people', 'the race' or 'the nation'.'

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Besides the fact that any mention of Gao Xingjian immediately reminds me of V (and P and XW), and of the cheese-and-crackers-and-Paul-Auster-in-the-canteen days now so long gone (halcyon days - oh nostalgia!), this just strikes at the heart of what literature is for me. Gao's in good Nobel Prizewinning company here - birds of a feather etc - Coetzee takes much the same view, which has gotten him into all sorts of trouble with South African anti-apartheid activists who wanted him to commit himself to their cause.

(Ok, let me admit now that I haven't read any Gao Xingjian, but this interview is making me think that I should go look up his work.)

I was asked the other day why I don't like women's writing. (By that, I don't mean writing that happens to be by women - there are lots of female writers that I like; I mean, writing that advertises / labels itself as 'women's writing', writing that serves the feminist cause.) And as usual in the case of the things that I feel really deeply about, I found myself struggling to articulate what I think. I have vaguely embarrassing memories of repeating the word 'Hysterical' several times, and not getting much further than that. But I think what bothers me about women's writing - and by extension, most if not all writing that serves a cause - is that the aesthetics tends to get lost in the politics. Of course, there are exceptions, perhaps even many exceptions, I really don't know; but commitment to a political ideology does seem to get in the way, very often, of a clear-eyed objectivity regarding the quality of the work as art.

Perhaps there is a side of me that desperately needs to believe that literature can be a space where Politics and Ideology do not have to matter. And I know how naive this sounds - every writer writes for a cause, even if the cause is anti-political, like in Gao and Coetzee - but maybe it's because I need to think that literature is a place where one can still be free. A place 'away from all camps', as Coetzee puts it in Life & Times of Michael K, where the only measure of worth is that of aesthetic quality.

Ah well. Even this belief in an autonomous literature is an ideology in itself, I guess. So there's no getting away from it and we all might as well go, oh I dunno, sing National Day songs or something, for all that this is gonna get us.

Happy National Day.
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interbloggeral incest (2)

From XW's blog. Thanks much, for poetry and other things.

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The Beautiful Lie

He was about four I think... it was so long ago.
In a garden; he'd done some damage
behind a bright screen of sweet-peas -
snapped a stalk, a stake, I don't recall,
but the grandmother came and saw, and asked him:
"Did you do that?"

Now, if she'd said why did you do that,
he'd never have denied it. She showed him
he had a choice. I could see, in his face,
the new sense, the possible. That word and deed
need not match, that you could say the world
different, to suit you.

When he said "No", I swear it was as moving
as the first time a baby's fist clenches
on a finger, as momentous as the first
taste of fruit. I could feel his eyes looking
through a new window, at a world whose form
and colour weren't fixed

but fluid, that poured like a snake, trembled
around the edges like northern lights, shape-shifted
at the spell of a voice. I could sense him filling
like a glass, hear the unreal sea in his ears.
This is how to make songs, create men, paint pictures,
tell a story.

I think I made up the screen of sweet peas.
Maybe they were beans; maybe there was no screen,
it just felt as if there should be, somehow.
And he was my - no, I don't need to tell that.
I know I made up the screen. And I recall very well
what he had done.


(Sheenagh Pugh)
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acquainted with the night

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain - and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.


(Robert Frost)

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This book by poet Christoher Dewdney just arrived in the mail today, and I'm much looking forward to reading it.

From the back cover:

'Weaving together science and storytelling, art and anthropology, award-winning poet Christopher Dewdney takes readers on a fascinating journey through the nocturnal realm. In twelve chapters corresponding to the twelve hours of night, he illuminates night's central themes, including sunsets, nocturnal animals, bedtime stories, festivals of the night, fireworks, astronomy, nightclubs, sleep and dreams, the graveyard shift, the art of darkness, and endless nights. With infectious curiosity, a lyrical intimate tone, and an eye for nighttime beauties both natural and man-made, Dewdney paints a captivating portrait of our hours in darkness.'

Ok, some of the things on that list sounded kinda weird - 'the art of darkness'? 'endless nights'??? Sounds like a Sandman comic. Actually (*checks Amazon*), it is a Sandman comic. Nevertheless, I'm sure the book is better-written than the blurb. And anyways, any book that begins with "I love night." cannot but resonate with me.

I'm so looking forward to this - I'll stop this blog entry now and start reading pronto!
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dream dream dream

At the end of this year, what I'd like more than anything in the world is to take a holiday to some place like Tasmania, with beautiful scenery and not too many people, and drive around exploring the place with my uni friends (sans kids and hubbies). I want to feel free. (Cue I Want To Break Free by Queen - I've always associated that song with images of people in cool convertibles, driving along the coast with hair flying in the wind - I think there may have been a car advert at some point that was made along those lines.)

Tasmania in December 2008? Hmm. Time to start planning...
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