Still on Coetzee, after a short hiatus in which I tried to attend to the other promises I have to keep. Ah, those Frostian woods - how they call to me, call to me...
Funny how the world of literary academia seems so alluring and attractive, indeed,
comfortable, every time I experience it as an insider, yet every time I step outside to look at it objectively, it seems so removed from any kind of reality that has any relevance or usefulness to anything or anybody in any sense that matters. I wonder what the result of this tug-of-war will be. The funny thing is that I don't even know what labels to give the opposing sides, or even which side I want to ally myself with.
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The recommendation, in full, of the South African board of censors on Coetzee's novel,
Waiting for the Barbarians:
(from McDonald, Peter D. 'The Writer, the Critic, and the Censor: J.M. Coetzee and the Question of Literature'.)
"This is a somewhat Kafkaesque type of narrative, with the narrator an elderly somewhat Quixotic Magistrate, for long posted at a little frontier outpost, who has sought a modus vivendi if not operandi with the nomadic tribes (the barbarians). But the officiously overbearing Imperial police & military find in him an impediment to their plan to extend Imperial sway to subduing the barbarians. So there is tension between the ambitious authoritarians and the indulgent magistrate. He loses position & authority, & suffers severe battering. Doom, brutality and suffering suffuse this sombre book unrelieved by any lighter touches. The few across the line sex incidents are almost entirely inexplicit & in no case lust-provoking. The locale is as obscure as Erewhon, and any symbolism more so - apart from the arrogant tyranny of the State [
sic] senior ideologists - their blinkered ideological outlook and ruthlessness. [
Added as an afterthought: Further symbolism could with diligence be extracted. All is of world-wide significance, not particularised.] Thought the book has considerable literary merit, it quite lacks popular appeal. The likely readership will be limited largely to the intelligentsia, the discriminating minority. There are less than a dozen 'offensive' words and all are commonplace & functionally in context. We [
'I' crossed out] submit that there is no convincing reason for declaring the book undesirable."
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For the State:
So that's the way to keep the arts neutered even if not neutral - cosy up to artists and intellectuals in their comfortable little ivory towers, if need be, help to furnish those ivory towers with the latest designer furniture and contemporary artwork (and don't forget the fine food and wine), and flatter their sense of themselves as being
above oh-so-proletariat concerns like 'popular appeal'.
And for artists:
Keep art sacrosanct, above all, make sure that aesthetics takes priority over everything else, and well, yes, you'll have your artistic purity, you'll even be given space by the powers-that-be to speak whatever truth you want to speak - but at the risk of irrelevance.
......
