exile within the form

8/16/2019 Exile Within the Form

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Julian Murphet

Coetzee and Late Style: Exile within the Form

Julian Murphet

Let us trace a theme, but more than a theme, an enactment, of exile

as it has come to inform the recent work of J. M. Coetzee. Exile I mean

not simply in the political sense—the final decision to “shake the dust of

[South Africa] off [his] feet,” to seek a place where it is not yet properly

shameful to be alive, in Australia1 —but more intrinsically than that, insofar

as it affects the substance of his art, and the very frame of his writing body.

This is the exile from one’s body about which Paul Rayment thinks in

Slow Man: “he is running down” (53-54), unstrung in Homeric language.

So it is with the characters of Elizabeth Costello and JC, in their respec-tive books, Elizabeth Costello and Diary of a Bad Year : persons taking regret-

ful leave of their bodies. This late sequence is a literature of leave-taking,

a trilogy of novels in flight from homeland, from the body, and from the

very comforts of novelistic form. Novels against the novel. This is a kind

of aesthetic exile that implies a deliberate self-distancing from the neces-

sity of formal finishing, given that what had characterized Coetzee’s art

up to the Nobel ceremony was just this quality of laborious finishedness:

“spare prose and a spare, thrifty world” (Coetzee, Doubling 20), chiseledgauntness without any trace of flaccidity or unassimilated matter.

Not so with this last trilogy, which suddenly, as with a weary shrug

of the shoulders, shows all the seams and fissures, the failures of integra-

tion, which would hitherto have been smoothed over in a determinate

movement of formal resolution. It is a literature touched by death, and

intimately so. Its style is, to be clear, a “late style,” as Adorno memorably

described it apropos of Beethoven:

The power of subjectivity in the late works of art is the iras-cible gesture with which it takes leave of the works themselves.

b k h i b d i d i lf b i d




expressionless, to cast off the appearance of art. Of the works

themselves it leaves only fragments behind, and communicates

itself, like a cipher, only through the blank spaces from which it

has disengaged itself. Touched by death, the hand of the master

sets free the masses of material that he used to form; its tears and

fissures, witnesses to the finite powerlessness of the I confronted

with Being, are its final work. (566)

We read at the start of Elizabeth Costello, after a brief description of

the eponymous character’s attire and appearance: “the blue costume, the

greasy hair, are details, signs of a moderate realism. Supply the particulars,

allow the significations to emerge of themselves. A procedure pioneeredby Daniel Defoe” (4). That is an irascible gesture. You cannot simply call

it “metafiction” and leave it at that. Characteristic of the opening move-

ments of this book, such discourse is more aggressively disenchanting and

disappointing than that term allows. “There is a scene in the restaurant,

mainly dialogue, which we will skip” (7) we read.

It is not a good idea to interrupt the narrative too often, since

storytelling works by lulling the reader or listener into a dream-

like state in which the time and space of the real world fade away,superseded by the time and space of the fiction. Breaking into

the dream draws attention to the constructedness of the story,

and plays havoc with the realist illusion. However, unless certain

scenes are skipped over we will be here all afternoon. (16)

This passage is doing something more interesting than pacing the track

of postmodern metafiction; after all, as Coetzee has written, “Anti-illu-

sionism—displaying the tricks you are using instead of hiding them—is

a common ploy of postmodernism. But in the end there is only so muchmileage to be got out of the ploy. Anti-illusionism is, I suspect, only a

marking of time, a phase of recuperation, in the history of the novel. The

question is, what’s next?”(Doubling 27). The passage in Elizabeth Costello is

playing this postmodern game, to be sure, but it is also, and simultaneously,

drawing attention (via that deictic “all afternoon”) to the fact that these

very words on the page have a non-fictional and real-world source, the

public lecture, in the voice of John Coetzee, as which it first appeared in

1996 before then appearing in Salmagundi the next year. Is there anothernovel whose copyright page insists that it be read “in conjunction with




been, of course, and time was that one could say confidently with Teresa

Dovey that “all of Coetzee’s novels can, in some sense, be regarded as al-

legorical” (138). No reader is more aware of this temptation than Attridge,

of course, who writes that the pre-Disgrace novels’

distance . . . from the time and place in which they were written,

the often enigmatic characters . . . the scrupulous avoidance of

any sense of an authorial presence, the frequently exiguous plots:

all these encourage the reader to look for meanings beyond the

literal, in a realm of significance that the novels may be said to

imply without ever directly naming. (Waiting 63)

Added to this, and operating as an unavoidable referent, is the fact of theauthor’s “South Africanness” and the circumambient political pestilence

of apartheid: an irresistible hermeneutic key in which to resolve the un-

derstated prose. Attridge’s counter-interpretive caution, his effort to push

back against this openly coercive allegorical equation, is no doubt advised,

not least by the discomfort these purported allegories often betray towards

allegory as such; but the long climb back down to the sheerly literal level

involves a significant cost. When Attridge writes of the need to take these

fictions “at their word . . . without looking for allegorical meanings” (Eth-ics 35), the paradox is perfectly obvious: allegory only works, after all, with

styles that withdraw into immanence.

Let’s examine this paradox more closely. The formal alchemy of a

successful allegory is that, in the very leanness of its literal saying—its

limitation to bare utterances of doing and being—it nevertheless manages

to make the highest and most imponderable of universal claims. Allegory

says without saying, disavowal is part of its very apparatus. As Adorno liked

to say of Kafka, every word is meant literally.

2

And this is the preconditionof all genuine allegory, whose model is the Christian transcoding of the

Old Testament, every word of which is to be preserved as literal historical

truth at the same time that it is projected upward on a Christological and

salvational screen. This allegorical alchemy, however—which had con-

ferred such remarkable unity upon the sequence of works that ran from

Dusklands to Disgrace —has, I want to propose, effectively been subtracted

from the three major works to have appeared since Coetzee’s move to

Australia (not necessarily including the recent third installment in the

trilogy of fictional memoirs, “Scenes from Provincial Life,” though heretoo the dismantlement of the narrative discourse into a range of compet-



Julian Murphet

ing stances and voices further complicates the relative “closure” of the

previous two works in that series). Whatever their merits, these works do

not function as allegories in that older sense: they do not simultaneously

speak of their circumscribed fictional worlds and the global space of their

consumption, mediated by a national space we spontaneously adduce as

“South African.” To push things still further in a DeManian direction, I

am tempted to say that after all these three novels are allegories, but what

they are allegories of is their own failure to amount to allegories. Broken

allegories. Allegory dead allegorise .

Of course, the novels know this all too well. In her closing moments

“before the gate,” Elizabeth Costello is forced to account for herself and

her art. She is first of all concerned to exonerate her work from thecharge of allegorical weightiness. “Her books teach nothing, preach noth-

ing: they merely spell out, as clearly as they can, how people lived in a

certain time and place” (207). It is more or less Attridge’s anti-allegorical

argument about Coetzee’s texts in a purpose-built paraphrase. Immanence,

rather than transcendence, is offered as a justification for being, all one’s

life, a secretary of the invisible. But before the panel of judges, this persis-

tent aesthetic alibi of disinterest will not wash; its very defensiveness reeks

of mauvaise foi . Pushed still further to stand by some overarching belief,she comes up with the memorable frogs of the Dulgannon River, a river

that cannot be found on any map since it doesn’t exist, despite the author-

character’s asseverations to the contrary. In other words, at the limit, what

Costello affirms is the power of language to invoke realities that do not

and wouldn’t otherwise exist. It is an exemplary case of Marianne Moore’s

“imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” “I cannot afford to believe,”

she effectively states, in anything but this sheer productivity of discourse,

which as she knows, requires a disclaimer to wash off the stain of ponder-ous over-significance: “the life cycle of the frog may sound allegorical,

but to the frogs themselves it is no allegory, it is the thing itself, the only

thing” (Elizabeth 217). Here she strays explicitly into bad faith. We, the

actual judges of such pleading, who have access to an atlas, know that the

frogs are the “thing itself ” only because saying makes them so—they are

in truth allegories of “the thing itself,” stranded in the absent-presence of

language. Costello pursues the realist hypothesis to its inner limit of self-

deceit: “the frogs are real. They exist whether or not I tell you about them,

whether or not I believe in them.” Not at all: they exist only because shetells us she believes them—or, only because Coetzee tells us that.




how. By this last section of the book, the narrative discourse has changed

almost beyond recognition from the surly snarls and brittle asides of the

opening chapters. Now it has relaxed into a very comfortable zone of free

indirect discourse, identifying openly with a character who, two hundred

pages earlier, we would have been forgiven for thinking half-baked, flimsy

and artificial. The scientist son John has disappeared as our focalizer, and

we are abandoned to the rarefied atmosphere of his mother’s scrupulous

but disintegrating mind. On the other hand, we have ceased to be situ-

ated in any sort of a space and time that can be perceived independent

of literary clichés and the potent allegory of Kafka’s “Before the Law.”

Costello’s plea on behalf of a colony of frogs she has, after all, made up

on the spot in this twilight kingdom of tawdry allegorical trappings; herstatement of unbelief in anything but the insentient real which cares

nothing for language or belief itself—all this is the beating heart of a great

evasion immanent to the alibi of immanence, of a realism so simple and

complete that in it “ideas have no autonomous existence” (Elizabeth 9).

“No ideas but in things!,” as William Carlos Williams once insisted, but

that too was wishful thinking, an act of ideological fiat. The female judge

throws the statement on belief in the frogs back in Costello’s face: “you

choose to tell us . . . about frogs, to which you attribute a life story thatis, as you concede, highly allegorical” (218); and the bailiff also demurs,

reading the appeal against itself, for its inner disavowal: “you testify to a

belief in frogs, or more accurately in the allegorical meaning of a frog’s

life, if I understand your drift” (220). Surely he does. The so-called things

turn out to be ideas after all; the “real toads” are exposed as imaginary.

The more the writer insists on the material concretion of her created

worlds, and the more she repudiates our schooled effort to import large

meanings and values into the brute facts of frogs, mud and rain, the morethe allegorical temptation flares up. There is an aptly Freudian economy

about this denial of unspoken meanings; and Elizabeth Costello surely

doth protest too much for the better part of this her eponymous fiction.

The dynamic is an ineluctable one within the great genealogical arc of re-

alism itself—that topic about which we find Costello unusually animated

in her first “lesson,” both explicitly and in the free indirect discourse

that hovers uncomfortably about her head. The passage already cited on

Costello’s appearance, allying itself with Defoe’s thriftiness of realism, its

ability to function only through particulars, mere things, continues:



Julian Murphet

Robinson Crusoe, cast up on the beach, looks around for his

shipmates. But there are none. “I never saw them afterwards, or

any sign of them,” says he, “except three of their hats, one cap,

and two shoes that were not fellows.” Two shoes, not fellows:

by not being fellows, the shoes have ceased to be footwear and

become proofs of death, torn by the foaming seas off the feet of

drowning men and tossed ashore. No large words, no despair,

just hats and caps and shoes. (Elizabeth 4)

Her lecture, on the other hand, wonders about the final destination of

this novelistic confidence about implicit meanings in the fabular prose

of Kafka, and specifically his “Report to an Academy,” in which RedPeter the ape delivers a lecture to a learned society about his purported

humanity. Insofar as the tale appears to be an allegory of Costello’s own

performance before the audience at Altona College, and simultaneously

an allegory about the very function of reason in telling man from beast,

it appears to short-circuit—and this is her initial point: “the word-mirror

is broken irreparably. . . .The words on the page will no longer stand up

and be counted, each proclaiming ‘I mean what I mean!’” Foesque realism

is defunct, since the “bottom has dropped out” (Elizabeth 19). And yet, as

she insists to her incredulous son later on, who wonders why Kafka has

anything to do with realism, “Kafka’s ape is embedded in life. It is the

embeddedness that is important, not the life itself. . . .That ape is followed

through to the end, to the bitter, unsayable end, whether or not there

are traces left on the page” (32). Here is the problem of realism pitched

at its most extreme: even Kafka’s elusive allegories are so consistently

concrete as to insist at every point on their own impeccable immanence.

Conversely, Elizabeth Costello’s novel, while developing from sketchy

metafictional perfunctoriness into its own highly charged “embedded-ness” in her being, is ultimately sifted through the sieve of “an elaborate

set of dovetailing commonplaces,” “a purgatory of clichés” redacted from

an infinite number of intertexts, some of them by Kafka (206). Realism is

a thoroughgoing spirit of immanence; and that, I am arguing, is what has

been subtracted from Coetzee’s Australian trilogy, with a deliberateness

that borders on perversity, but which might well contain serious lessons

for us about the knowledge of contemporary literature.

Recently, Fredric Jameson has also returned to the subject of realism,to derive from its contradictory complexion a combinatoire of permuta-

i h “i ” “ d ” id R li i fi d b




its paradoxical attachment to a dream of absolute stylistic immanence that

is continuously upset by detours through ideological transcendence. Let

us consider briefly a chart that I have abstracted from his argument:

Epistemology

Realism

Immanence Transcendence

Immanence “Immanentimmanence”

“Transcendentimmanence”

Transcendence

“Immanenttranscendence”

“Transcendenttranscendence”

One axis describes the opposition between a posited transcendence and

a posited immanence at the level of the textual world itself (either there

is, or there isn’t, “another world” against which to measure this one); and

the other axis concerns the epistemological frame, in which either things

are just things, knowable in themselves, or they are shadows of PlatonicForms, Ideas poorly bodied forth in their material shells. Logically, four

permutations of narrative prose result from a coordination of the two axes.

As for the possibility of immanent immanence, “no ideas but in things,”

the notion of some pure epic text where form coincides with content

so perfectly that to separate one from the other would amount to a blas-

phemy, let us leave it to one side as the Homeric Holy Grail of realism. We

can say of the next, complex category, “transcendent immanence,” that it is

the affliction that inevitably bests narrative here in the sublunary world offacts cut adrift from values; it is not only the voice of the intrusive narra-

tor who comments morally on her characters, or otherwise constructs her

narrative so that just desserts are ultimately parceled out. No, it is the very

condition of possibility of allegory itself, according to which the simple

past tense in the indicative mood can never be left to itself, but must leap

its bounds into some transcendent plane or other. Refusing to take the

word of the text at face value, “transcendent immanence” imbues its literal

substance with an ethics that is not stricto sensu immanent at all, since none

but the most die-hard deist would want to say that moral categories insistin things as they are. Meanwhile, we can pass quickly through the last two

Ontology



Julian Murphet

leap in the imagination beyond our real-world situations: utopian fictions

and their satire in the form of dystopia. Finally, “immanent transcendence”

is a category Jameson reserves for miraculous nineteenth-century texts

such as Bleak House and Middlemarch, in which something like genuine

providence can be felt flickering like a vast collective impulse through the

individual fates of characters.3

Returning to Coetzee, I want to say that the sequence of works

culminating in Disgrace is one of the great cycles of uneasily reconciled

“transcendent immanence” in our time: characterized by a dogged sty-

listic “degree zero” alongside which it is impossible to deny a powerful

ethical charge and allegorical overtone, thanks to the electric power of

the plotting mechanisms and the sheer economy of the prose, its preci-sion, coldness, and reserve. But this is what now, in the recent trilogy of

exile, lies broken. For here, in this late movement of decay and fissure, the

“transcendent” is felt to be quite incompatible with the realm of imma-

nence, which latter is thereby abandoned to itself, exposed as reactionary,

a failed dream and a shattered mirror of words, that cannot withstand the

immensity of the existent. Consider that with the transcendent dimension

of ideas actively withheld from it, the realist novel is, and must be, conser-

vative in its empirical commitment to the “density and solidity of whatis.” As Jameson puts it, “the very choice of the form itself is a professional

endorsement of the status quo, a loyalty oath in the very apprenticeship

to this aesthetic” (112-13). Elizabeth Costello’s plea for immanence, her

justification “beyond good and evil” of a life of letters, is ultimately a

plea for what is, for “things as they are”—things which care not if you

acknowledge them at all; it is a plea for Flaubertian indifference and the

aesthetic avoidance of politics. As such it is perfectly adapted to a “status

quo [that] has become naturalized and made into the way ‘things reallyare,’” being a quiet apologia in the guise of simple description (Mouffe

5). And yet, for the greater part of this novel, we have caught this Flau-

bertian persona in various postures of passionate, often political, belief: in

lesson after lesson, she is presented believing, and justifying her belief, in

humanism, in animal suffering, in sexual expression, in evil. It is just that

there can be no traffic between these passionate intensities and the parallel

intensity of her novels’ avowed artistic immanence. On the one hand, we

have her opinions, beliefs, and passions; on the other, her art (which we

are not given to read—we take its quality on faith, through the reportsof others). Sent their separate ways by the strictures of realist immanence



Julian Murphet

No dog is simply a dog, and it is precisely a vision of a dog, lying in

sunlight, that has raised the resistant hackles of Costello herself: “it is her

first vision in a long while, and she does not trust it, does not trust in

particular the anagram GOD-DOG” (224-25). The mutual interpenetra-

tion of each by all is, indeed, impossible to trust or endure for minds set

to the standards of immanence. “We are not made for revelation, I want to

cry out, nor I nor you, my Philip, revelation that sears the eye like staring

into the sun” (229). The choice between Costello’s myopic immanence

and this shattering allegorical transcendence is an impossible one; but it

is one that we are asked to make in the novel’s disturbing and vertiginous

final words, penned to the great grandfather of empiricism and the anti-

allegorical impulse, Lord Bacon: “Drowning, we write out of our separatefates. Save us. / Your obedient servant / Elizabeth C. / This 11 September,

AD 1603” (230). With exactness, Coetzee subscribes his authorial initial

to one fictional Elizabeth, writing in the shadow of another fictional

Elizabeth, four hundred years prior to the actual date of his writing in the

name of both, as a way of commemorating the date of 9/11, and all the

evil unleashed on the world in its name: as if to say, here lies the corpse of a

novel of ideas. Drowning in our separate fates, it is only through allegory,

the unified field in which every atom of our solitude is torn asunder bythe “contagion [of] saying one thing always for another” (228), that we

can touch the totality of our shared human horror in which Lady Chan-

dos’s 9/11, the 9/11 of Chile in 1973, and the 9/11 that took the USA

to Afghanistan and Iraq, all communicate their similitude in allegory’s

paradoxical immanence, “where words give way beneath your feet like

rotting boards” (228).

Now we can resume our opening question about “late style.” Inter-

viewed about the relevance of Beckett’s late style to his work, Coetzee

once said:

I should add that Beckett’s later short fictions have never really

held my attention. They are, quite literally, disembodied. Molloy

was still a very embodied work. Beckett’s first after-death book

was The Unnameable . But the after-death voice there still has

body. . . .The late pieces speak in post-mortem voices. I am not

there yet. I am still interested in how the voice moves the body,

moves in the body. (Doubling 23) Also sprach Coetzee, 1990. The question is, is he there yet ? Is the voice of




from the immanent, properly post-mortem? Evidently not, as in instance

after instance it is a voice giving melancholy valediction to a dying body it

has not yet left, still unhappily enmeshed and embodied.

Coetzee continues to harness the body as an allegorical vessel on which

to string the tale of the falling apart of allegory itself. As JC is forced to relate

in Diary of a Bad Year, “my handwriting is deteriorating. I am losing motor

control. That is part of my condition. That is part of what is happening to

me” (27-28) The author’s lack of motor control, his being forced to speak

his commissioned “strong opinions” into a cassette recorder, is what obliges

him to seek material aid from a Filipina amanuensis who will type up his

musings in fair copy. But this is also what triggers the necessity of keeping

a separate track in the text, precisely a narrative track, where the footnotesought to go, dealing with his reflections on desire and the body and the

complication of opinion with sexual difference, the division of labor, and the

generational divide. So the ideas themselves float to the top of the page, and

the pedestrian layer of comical interrelation is subdivided into two incom-

mensurable voices, his and hers, that vindicate the lack of any sexual relation.

It is the same baleful separation we recognize from Elizabeth Costello, here

physically enshrined on the stratified pages of Diary of a Bad Year, narrative

and ideas sequestered on either side of an allegorical borderline: mind float-ing uselessly above the banal appetites of body. This is how you write an

allegory of the death of allegory, how you embody the dehiscence of form

in the falling apart of a body. And it is simultaneously an allegory of what is

going on as regards “ideas” in the house of fiction today, since here just as in

Elizabeth Costello, it is not that ideas have perished, it is just that they cannot

merge in any sustainable manner with the substance of narrative fiction. In

both novels, for the central protagonists, there is something in me “more than

me ” that forces them to persist in being despite falling apart as bodies andcreators. And that thing in these late texts is a stubborn attachment to an idea

(vegetarianism, anarchism, what have you) that refuses to let the body die

around it. For both JC and Elizabeth Costello, it is not the art of storytell-

ing, but the necessity of speaking out, the social responsibility of holding

fast to an unfashionable notion, that keeps their mortal frames together.

The problematic here is one of an irreducible humanism, an urge

despite every redoubled intimation of futility and every knowing assault

on textual immanence it makes, to “speak out in one’s own voice,” as

per the instance of fellow Nobel laureate, the now late Harold Pinter, of

whom JC writes in Diary of a BadYear:




futile, absurd, a “waste of shame.” Where form lies bleeding and broken,

it is not so that “content” can miraculously shine forth as such. To the

contrary, it is so that “content” learns the overwhelming odds against

which it must wager itself today. Chantal Mouffe clarifies those larger

stakes, and also specifies the allegorical content of every “big idea” in

our global space: “nowadays . . . the very idea of a possible alternative

to the existing order has been discredited” (5). It is that discrediting, the

great victory of the “reality principle” as such, that afflicts all ideas with

an implicit hollowness that no amount of soap-boxing, “speaking out,”

essay-writing, speech-giving, can overcome. As allegories of the end of

allegory, Coetzee’s last novels are working with this ideological despair

at their foundation—in them, nothing works, and by not working, byfailing to integrate what will not hold fast, they allow their heteroclite

elements to swarm in a cloud of what is not yet resignation, but “the finite

powerlessness of the I confronted with Being.” It is the social totality that

will not yield its form to allegorical capture, nor will it permit itself to

be subject to critique; and these books cower between that rock, and this

hard place, with a powerlessness that rouses itself to a kind of ecstasy.

Whence has this negative humanism come? In his well-known speech

accepting the Jerusalem prize, Coetzee complained that in “South Africathere is now too much truth for art to hold, truth by the bucketful, truth

that overwhelms and swamps every act of the imagination” (Doubling 99).

This excess of truth in the national situation, the ineluctable swamping

of each and every imaginative and symbolic act there by an automatic

hermeneutic subsumption, is precisely what made his reticent art so po-

tent in the first place. It was this sense of exception and national circum-

scription, this sense that elsewhere, “willed acts of the imagination” are not

stymied by “pathological attachments and abstract forces,” that endowedhis South African novels with such redoubtable allegorical power. For by

the power of such forced containment, he nonetheless managed to have

his cake and eat it too; to capitulate to national realities within an ethic

of realism that nevertheless just managed to wrestle them into place for

the brief duration of his texts. Such were the conditions of his allegory,

and they are, as Jameson once controversially stipulated, the conditions of

all “Third World” allegory as such. My sense is that, with the departure to

a country where an act of political suicide would seem a little “comical”

(Diary 39), just as Bush’s “War on Terror” was getting into full swing, ithas come home with redoubtable force that there is not a single scrap of



Julian Murphet

land on the face of the earth undominated by those “passionate attach-

ments and abstract forces” that batter down the powers of imagination and

creation. Allegory founders on the rock of globalization and the world

system, where national straitjackets on the imagination are burst open. The

minimal utopian quality of the nation being a felt sense of collectivity,

to abandon that last imaginary fig-leaf (even its negative) is to abandon

whatever it is that holds the formal fabric of the allegorical text together.

The terrible implications of our contemporary reality principle (that of

late capitalism) for the machinery of allegory are spelled out most brutally

by JC’s nemesis, the trader Alan:

There are no big issues in any modern state, not any more. Thatis what defines modernity. The big issues, the issues that count,

have been settled. . . .And your man ought to be grateful for that,

not dour and disapproving like he is. If he wants old-fashioned

politics, where people stage coups and murder each other and

there is no security and everyone keeps their money under their

pillow, he should go back to Africa. He will be completely at

home there. (82)

It is the larger purpose of the dehiscent formal mechanisms of the latefiction to agree with the underlying logic of these awful pronouncements.

It is their project to defy Alan’s withering suspicion that “this is your guy’s

problem: Africa. That is where he came from, that is where he is stuck,

mentally. In his mind he can’t get away from Africa” (78). But in pulling

away from the “comfortable” allegorical constraints of South Africa, the

writer enters into an imaginative maelstrom only thinly papered over by

the “issueless” veneer of the “modern state.”

For it is also the fact that nationality remains as the “degree zero” of

ideology today, despite this creeping uniformity and supposed issuelessness

of globalization; since (as JC writes elsewhere) behind the

justification of unceasing business lie assumptions that no longer

need to be articulated, so self-evidently true do they seem: that

each person on earth must belong to one nation or another and

operate within one or another national economy. . . .By nature

we belong to separate nations; by nature nations are in competi-

tion with other nations. We are as nature made us. (Diary 63-64)The “nature” of nations springs from the biological metaphor of which




economic identity within premodern frames, in spite of the postmodern

demographic flows and impurities that define the world today. Allegory

comes up against its limits here, in this flagrant contradiction between a

resilient nationalism at the level of Symbolic “identity” and an achieved

transnational globality at the level of the economic Real. It is as though

the sudden shift of imaginative center from an underdeveloped South

Africa to a properly globalized “modern state” like Australia has affected

the mechanics of national allegory in such a way as to debilitate them,

according to this very contradiction.

Today there can be no “universalist” vantage point for the produc-

tion of effective artworks and works of literature: that kind of abstraction

does not give rise to persuasive “novelistic” modes of immanence, whichare critical to the success of cultural artifacts. Yet nor can the increasingly

transnational and “global” level of being in the world be repressed from

any genuine work of art: it must enter the text if the latter is not to sink

to the level of stupid chronicle and myopic “nativity.” It is just that this

moment, of “ideas” as such in their universality and aspiration toward

truth, are experienced as “hard,” jagged, residual, untrue, void of existen-

tial depth, broken off the surface of things; nor really “mine” in the sense

of springing spontaneously from my being in the world, but almost asthough deposited in me by a foreign hand or by a generational position.

Perhaps what becomes truly “mine” in this frame is my “opinions about

my opinions,” and others’ opinions about them; and perhaps this is where

the drama of the contemporary, the dialogism of the present, lies. Opened

up to Anya’s breezy commonsensical criticism of his opinions by the me-

chanics of novelistic engineering, JC proposes to himself the prospect of

a ruthless self-criticism in the light of this unremitting reality principle:

I should thoroughly revise my opinions, that is what I shoulddo. I should cull the older, more decrepit ones, find newer, up-

to-date ones to replace them. But where does one go to find

up-to-date opinions? To Anya? To her lover and moral guide, the

broker-man Alan? Can one buy fresh opinions in the market-

place? Are old men with doddering intellect and poor eyesight

and arthritic hands allowed on the trading floor, or will we just

get in the way of the young? (Diary 115-18)

So speaks the ruthless common sense of a world without issues, and itis not an imperative to which the book succumbs. A little later, after JC



Julian Murphet

der the influence of his amanuensis, he tells her that “yes, you are in the

book—how could you not be when you were part of the making of it?

You are everywhere in it, everywhere and nowhere. Like God, though

not on the same scale” (144). This is an argument for a new kind of im-

manence, and a very intriguing one indeed, since it is erotically coupled

with the Yeatsian vision it also sustains, of “this shrunken old man and this

earthly incarnation of heavenly beauty” embracing for a whole minute

in an allegorical tableau of their “cooperation” (149), their parentage of

the hybrid text. Can a novel, rather than acceding to the exhausted direc-

tives of “transcendent immanence,” raise itself to such a vision, in which

the desiccated Western intellectual “subject” and the radiant Third World

subject of experience momentarily embrace and create a Two—in sucha way that “she” is “everywhere” in “his” now irradiated intellection,

“like God, though not on the same scale”? “Maybe he appreciated having a

perspective from below, so to speak, an opinion of his opinions” (154). It is this

openness of the subject to a dissonant voice “based on honesty” (172)

coming from without, relativizing all fast-frozen opinions with a dose of

reverse-engineered authority, that must serve as the basis of any human-

ism today. “The passions and prejudices out of which my opinions grew

were laid down long before I first set eyes on Anya, and were by now sostrong—that is to say, so settled, so rigid—that aside from the odd word

here and there there was no chance that reflection through her gaze could

alter their angle” (100-1) What is fixed cannot be unfixed, but “he” can

agree with “her” on one thing absolutely, and with the utmost honesty:

What had begun to change since I moved into the orbit of Anya is

not my opinions themselves so much as my opinions of my opin-

ions . . . there are flickering moments when I can see these hard

opinions of mine through her eyes—see how alien and antiquatedthey may seem to a thoroughly modern Millie, like the bones of

some odd extinct creature, half bird, half reptile, on the point of

turning into stone. Laments. Fulminations. Curses. (106-8)

This is how Coetzee’s late style contrives to have its cake and eat

it too, by recasting the ossified dialectic between ideas and “reality” as a

sexual dynamic. It is played out as well in Slow Man’s startling conscrip-

tion of Elizabeth Costello (plucked back from the allegorical purgatory

of her eponymous novel) as the agent provocateur and author-figure whoseexhortations to action should deliver the sterile characterological dead-




end of Paul Rayment over to the formal pulsions of acceptable novelistic

desire. Like JC, however, Rayment is far too recalcitrant and rigid a figure

of thought for any novelistic mechanism to pinion him altogether. Again,

it is simply a matter of forcing the glaciation of migratory intellectual

alienation, on the one hand, and the foursquare immigrant working-class

ethos of “reality,” on the other, into a sexual dyad. Through her capri-

cious, novelistic interference, Costello short-circuits the opposition and

obliges “ideas” to become embroiled in the passions and excitations of

embodiment—but not to the extent that anything satisfactorily comic

might foreclose the contradiction altogether. Slow Man, while it may be

Coetzee’s most comic novel to date, stands back from any resounding

generic closure with the reticence we recognize from the whole sequenceof his work. It is after all not the lusty cleaning woman Marijana Jokic to

whom Paul Rayment is finally delivered, but the withered metafictional

limbs of Costello herself, warmed here at last to something that resembles

tenderness. Sexualizing the opposition between ideas and things is not

in itself a novel solution; what is, is the distinctly Lacanian insistence

that this sexual relation is not, and has nowhere narratively to go other

than the interstitial zone in which an immigrant working-class woman

beats the calcified notions of the desiccated immigrant intellectual intoa valorized state. Formal integration does not result, and what remains

distinctly “late” about the style is its melancholy recognition that il n’y

a pas de rapport sexuel ; only a dim affective glow succeeds in rising above

the wreckage. Allegory dead allegorise means to take the broken halves of

a shattered allegorical whole and rub them up against each other until a

dull warmth begins to spread through the dying body of fiction. At that

task, no writer today better succeeds than J. M. Coetzee.

Notes1. See J. M. Coetzee’s “Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech,” p. 96.

2. “In Kafka . . . everything is as hard, defined, and distinct as possible. . . .No-

where in Kafka does there glimmer the aura of the infinite idea; nowhere

does the horizon open. Each sentence is literal and each signifies.” Theodor W.

Adorno, Prisms, p. 246.

3. See Fredric Jameson, pp. 95-130.



Julian Murphet

Works citedAdorno, Theodor W. “Late Style in Beethoven.” 1937. Essays on Music. Ed.

Richard Leppert and trans. Susan H. Gillespie. Berkeley and Los An-geles: U of California P, 2002. 564-68.

———. Prisms. Trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

1967.

Attridge, Derek. J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading . Chicago: Chicago UP,

2004.

———. “Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, and the Question

of Literary Reading.” Ed. Jayne Poyner. J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the

Public Intellectual. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 2006. 63-82.

Coetzee, J. M. Diary of a Bad Year . Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2007. ———. Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews. Ed. David Attwell. Cambridge,

MA: Harvard UP, 1992.

———. Elizabeth Costello. Sydney: Knopf/Random House, 2003.

———. “Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech” (1987). Doubling the Point: Essays

and Interviews. Ed. David Attwell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992.

96-99.

———. Slow Man. Sydney: Knopf/Random House, 2005.

Dovey, Teresa. “Waiting for the Barbarians: Allegory of Allegories.” Ed. Graham

Huggan and Stephen Watson. Critical Perspectives on J. M. Coetzee .London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996. 138-51.

Jameson, Fredric. “The Experiments of Time: Providence and Realism.” Ed.

Franco Moretti. The Novel, Volume 2: Forms and Themes. Princeton and

Oxford: Princeton UP, 2006. 95-130.

Mouffe, Chantal. The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso, 2005.



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