Personal Blogs

I have read every Coetzee novel as it appeared but I cannot find, as recent reviewers definitively have, an enormous change in his method. There was however a rift after Coetzee left South Africa I feel. South African oppression was then the hook of ‘life’ on which his original subject matter hung,  offering him elements of the expected in novel genre – like character and motivated plot  - that reviewers appear to now mourn in him ( I think particularly of the review in The Guardian).

In my reading, very few of Coetzee’s early novels had true origin in psychological realism, although their high philosophical fantasy moments did then seem to interact with South African reality and protest against it. The one that did that most was post-Apartheid, Disgrace: but that novel is not the usual fare of Coetzee. However, it accounts for it being the novel that people who otherwise dislike Coetzee’s work still like.

Coetzee remains a giant, whose aim has been absorbed in his ‘new life’ (a palpable theme of TSOJ) by issues of identity over time and space – the stuff of biography and autobiography, intersecting with other issues discriminating ontology from epistemology (things and their names for instance), and within the latter notions of ‘knowing’ that swing inconclusively between transcendental ideals (like numbers in the world of the School of Dancing in this novel) and bottom-up direct perception, championed by Inés.  There is a moment where this pre-occupation is itself mocked: Simon goes to a teacher to find out who Davίd (whose name is NOT Davίd (44) and who tells his father that he is not his father) is:

‘… and now you want me to tell you who he’ (Davίd) ‘is, this child … If I were a philosopher I would reply by saying: It depends on what you mean by who, depends on what you mean by he, depends on what you mean by is. Who is he? Who are you? Indeed, who am I? …. (197)

It is not surprising that the literary work loved by Davίd and referred to most in the novel is the ‘original’ novel-cum-fictional-autobiography about perceptual deception (even self-perception), Don Quixote (53, 227). Of course The Brothers Karamazov is also there as you might suspect.

TSOJ queries and questions every word that makes us what we are or think we are: passion (237), ‘loving care’ (180), family (81f), life - birth (18) and death (11). In line with Coetzee’s tangential questioning approach to Freud, it rehearses the questions that Freud claims to be the origin of Leonardo’s, and other artists’, genius. It is a riff too on the bildungsroman – especially Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister - whilst invoking the spiritual autobiography of Christ himself, such that it can query the value of terms like soul and ‘Why is staying alive important’ (51).

My fantasy is to believe that Coetzee has mourned the purpose that, for some, made his writing, important – the fact that he cared about bringing the end of apartheid (with André Brink and Brendan Breytenbach as the nearest to colleagues he got) and now, in the next life – and the life after that – is reduced to looking eternally on self in relation to a passion and purpose that eludes him as he, like Daedalus, walks around within the labyrinth of his own carelessly named creations. Davίd’s old soul muses:

“‘I found a way of coming back from the new life. Shall I tell you? You tie a rope to a tree, then when you want to come back from the next life you just hold onto the rope. Like the man in the larebinto.’

‘Laberinto. … That is a very clever plan. … The flaw is that while you are swimming back to this life, …, the waves will reach up and wash you clean of your memories. …’ “

I’m curious to look up the potential meanings of those words in Spanish – should they have any. It is a game I’m resisting, precisely because that again forces me as the book constantly does to question the meaning of my own education – of my ‘schooldays’ and their potential value as intrinsic meaning or, if not that, value as pragmatically usable.

Perhaps no learning or schooling is of value? See this, for instance, when (invoking the labyrinth again but as thought projected into him by a narrator) ‘he, Simón’ is overwhelmed by questions not only from his ‘child’ but his progenitor, his author:

He is about to answer, about to produce the correct, patient, educative words, when something wells up inside him. Anger? No. Irritation? No: more than that. Despair? Perhaps: despair in one of its minor forms. Why? Because he would like to believe he is guiding the child through the maze of moral life when, correctly, patiently, he answers his unceasing Why questions.

 This is one of the key passages about ‘education’ in the book and it begins to query whether guidance is of any value at all. Beyond that are systems of ‘training the soul’ (43) that are incomprehensible other than to their authors – and perhaps not even comprehensible by them. We know for instance that Arroyo’s reputation as the writer of a book has no evidence to substantiate it – but why do we know that?

Similarly, TSOJ like the Gospels contains parables of which it is possible to ask;” ‘What do you think we can learn from it’, as Ana Magdalena (the Magdalene?) does (108f). Amidst so many pedagogues, ‘schooldays’ take on all importance or NONE and one wonders, what can we learn from Coetzee regarding their patient and passionless elucidation? In a key passage – and I end with that - ‘He, Simón’ (why that collocation so persistently):

…. thinks of himself as a sane, rational person who offers the boy a sane, rational elucidation of why things are as they are. But are the needs of a child’s soul better served by his dry little homilies than by the fantastic fare offered at the Academy?

Will we ever know? And, will, in all this the purpose or function of novelists as purveyors of narrative truths be elucidated? Perhaps this is – and always was – Coetzee’s true preoccupation. Of course, once there was an Evil as large as Apartheid that could absorb a writer’s passion. What now? What then? The Neoplatonic question. The book begins and ends on a star (Estrella). Has it made progress? I love that open question. Not everyone will!

All the best

Steve