J.M. Coetzee: Fictions of the Real

Anthony Uhlmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351759984
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

J.M. Coetzee has new things to say about this relation between the 'real' and 'fictions of the real', and while much has already been written about him, these questions need to be more fully explored. The contributions to this volume are drawn together by the idea of the hinge between the world (whether understood in ontological, bio-ethical, personal and interpersonal, or socio-political terms) and fictional representations of it (whether understood in epistemological, ficto-biographical, formal, or stylistic terms).

In this collection, the question of understanding itself — how we understand or imagine our place in the world — is shown to be central to our conception of that world. That is, rather than beginning with forms developed in socio-political understandings, Coetzee's works ask us to consider what role fiction might play in relation to politics, in relation to history, in relation to ethics and our understanding of human agency and responsibility. Coetzee has a profound interest in the methods through which we make sense of the contemporary world and our place in it, and his approach appeals to readers of fiction, critics and philosophers alike. The central problems he deals with in his fiction are of the kind that confront people everywhere and so involve a "translatability" that allow the works to maintain relevance across cultures. Added to this, though, his fiction makes us question the nature of understanding itself. This book was originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice.

Yoshiki Tajiri

In quest of ‘other modes of being’: J.M. Coetzee’s ontological inquiries

J.M. Coetzee’s work is characterised by profound meditations on the question of being, though this aspect tends to be obscured by his ethical and political concerns. The characters of his novels are often faced with the fundamental question of why they (have to) exist in the way they do. Typically, Elizabeth Costello wonders, ‘Are there other modes of being besides what we call the human into which we can enter; and if there are not, what does that say about us and our limitations?’ This sense of the contingency of being human – the feeling that one could have been non-human – underlies Elizabeth Costello’s (and Coetzee’s) deep commitment to the lives of animals. This essay aims to illuminate such an ontological theme in Coetzee’s work by offering a revaluation of In the Heart of the Country, in which it first substantially emerges, and then by outlining its developments in the recent works such as Elizabeth Costello, the 2006 lecture ‘Eight Ways of Looking at Samuel Beckett’, Here and Now and The Childhood of Jesus. In all these works, the human mode of being is questioned in relation to animals and relativised as something accidental. I will try to shed a new light on Coetzee’s work by presenting him as a philosophical author concerned with the ontological questions regarding the mode of being.

Towards the end of Here and Now, J.M. Coetzee’s correspondence with Paul Auster, we find a striking and puzzling passage that seems to hint at Coetzee’s fundamental sense of his own existence. It is one of the most unforgettable parts of the volume and therefore worth quoting at length. On 19 January 2011, Coetzee wrote to Auster:

I stumbled on a little thought experiment the other day that has alternately been troubling and amusing me.

I was reflecting on my situation in life, on how I got to be where I am (namely in the suburbs of a small city in Australia), and on the various accidents, including the accident of my birth – being born to particular parents on a particular day – that led to my being not only where I am but who I am. It occurred to me that it was all too easy to contemplate a world in which this fellow John Maxwell Coetzee, born February 9, 1940, was not present and had never been present, or else had lived a completely different life, perhaps not even a human life; but at the next instant it also occurred to me that it was impossible to contemplate a world in which I was not present and had never been present.¹

Making a distinction between ‘John Maxwell Coetzee’ and ‘I’ in this manner, Coetzee goes on, ‘The simple logical conclusion would seem to be that the equation “I = JMC” is false. And indeed one’s intuitions support this conclusion.’² This passage throws us into a kind of metaphysical delirium. To be sure, the sense of inner division here immediately reminds us of Coetzee’s notion of autobiography as ‘autrebiography’³ and his related practice of writing about himself with the use of the third person as in the trilogy Scenes from Provincial Life. But then what is the ‘I’ which is feeling detached from ‘JMC’? Is this a kind of a Cartesian ego that doubts everything except its own existence so that all the accidental facts of the life of ‘JMC’, including his birth, name and career, would seem to be totally unreliable illusions? Instead of launching a professionally philosophical argument, I want to focus on one important element implied in this passage; that is, the sense of contingency which the ‘I’ has about the whole life of ‘JMC’. The remark that ‘JMC’ could have been absent from the world indicates the sheer contingency of ‘JMC’’s existence. Moreover the idea that ‘JMC’ could have ‘lived a completely different life, perhaps not even a human life’ (emphasis added) implies, in the way reflecting Coetzee’s recent concerns, that ‘JMC’ could have been an animal. In other words, the contingency of the human mode of being is also an implicit motif here. ‘JMC’ happened to be present in the world and ‘JMC’ happened to be a human being.

One way of approaching this question of contingency may be bringing in the topic of memory because memory is normally the basis of the knowledge we have of our own past. In The Good Story, his e-mail exchanges with an English psychotherapist Arabella Kurtz, Coetzee emphasises that ‘[his] sense of the malleability of memory is simply too strong’.⁴ He says for example:

Why can’t I install a new set of memories that suit me better than the old ones? Or, to rephrase the question: Even if I have to accept that trying to install a set of new memories – a new past – doesn’t work in practice, why can it not work?⁵

It is clear that the uncertainty of memory here is linked to the doubt about the certainty of the self or the truth about the self. In The Good Story, Coetzee repeats his long-standing conviction that the truth about the self cannot but be fiction. ‘Are all autobiographies, all life-narratives, not fictions, at least in the sense that they are constructions[ … ]?’, says he.⁶ With the fundamental idea, explored in many of his works, that the self (or memory that is its important constituent) is fictitious, the facts about ‘JMC’ might well appear arbitrary. What is notable in Coetzee’s case is that this postmodern scepticism is ultimately rooted in the political context of South Africa. In The Good Story he candidly admits at one point that his strong concern with ‘the ethical dimension of truth versus fiction comes out of [his] experience of being a white South African’ (who also lived in the States and Australia):

That is to say, I have lived as a member of a conquering group which for a long while thought of itself in explicitly racial terms and believed that what it was achieving in settling (‘civilising’) a foreign land was something to be proud of, but which then, during my lifetime, for reasons of a world-historical nature, had to sharply revise its way of thinking about itself and its achievements, and therefore to revise the story it told itself about itself, that is, its history.⁷

The arbitrariness of story-telling at the collective level induces doubts about the truth of the self at the individual level.⁸ And when everything concerning the self becomes fictitious, the sense of contingency of being might also be sharpened. This nexus of key motifs of Coetzee’s work is in fact deeply explored in Coetzee’s second novel In the Heart of the Country (1977). In this essay, therefore, I will first analyse this rather neglected early novel in order to show that it prefigures Coetzee’s later development in persistently questioning the human mode of being and thereby broaching the ontological theme of contingency of being. Then I will move on to consider the more recent manifestations of the same theme in his work.⁹

In the Heart of the Country consists of 266 fragments written by a white woman Magda who lives in a South African farm. They narrate her solitary inner life and violent incidents that seem to happen: her father brings a bride; Magda kills the couple with an axe; their black servant Hendrik brings a bride called Klein-Anna; Magda’s father sleeps with Klein-Anna; Magda shoots him and disposes of the body; Magda is raped by Hendrik; she lives with him and Klein-Anna in her house, until they leave, fearing they may be accused of killing their master and transgressing the colour bar; left alone, Magda tries to communicate with her imagined gods in the sky. But the descriptions of these events in fact tend to be drowned by Magda’s meandering hallucinations rooted in her existential, sexual and racial anxiety. The truth value of those events is seriously called in doubt because the reader is made conscious throughout that everything may after all be Magda’s inventions. Her father is killed twice in different ways, and in fact at the end he seems to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. In quest of ‘other modes of being’: J.M. Coetzee’s ontological inquiries
• 2. Dusklands and the meaning of method
• 3. The violence of forgetting: trauma and transnationalism in Coetzee’s Dusklands
• 4. Reading between life and work: reflections on ‘J.M. Coetzee’
• 5. Coetzee & co: failure, lies and autobiography
• 6. The trial of David Lurie: Kafka’s courtroom in Coetzee’s Disgrace
• 7. Insects, worlds, and the poetic in Coetzee’s writing
• 8. On (not) giving up: animals, biopolitics, and the impersonal in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace
• Index