IDEAS AND EMBODIED SOULS

J. M. COETZEE’S PLATONIC AND

CHRISTIAN INTERTEXTS

12th ESSE Conference – Literature Seminars

“There are but a handful stories in the world”:

J. M. Coetzee and the non-English literary traditions

Valeria Mosca, University of Genoa (Italy)

valeriamosca@alice.it

Elizabeth Costello

Is it performance art, or performance didacticism?

Is it moral philosophy? Does its generic

slipperiness constitute academic evasiveness? Is it

fiction or non-fiction? […] Does this recycling signal

a failure of imagination? Is it […] a work of

indeterminate genre? Flanery, P. D., 2004, “(Re-)marking Coetzee & Costello: The (Textual)

Lives of Animals”, English Studies in Africa, 47, 1, pp. 61-85, p. 61

The Childhood of Jesus

A confounding work of political philosophy wrapped

in a less compelling, even seemingly intentionally

flat, work of fiction, one that falls somewhere

between episodic and plotless. Bellin, R., 2013, “A strange allegory: J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus’”, Los Angeles Review of

Books, online http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/magical-child-troubled-child-on-jm-coetzees-the-childhood-

of-jesus/ (last accessed July 2014)

As much a work of philosophy as fiction. Garner:, D., 2013, “In a Subdued Land, Passion is a Heavy Burden. J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of

Jesus Dissects a World”, The New York Times, online http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/29/books/j-m-

coetzees-childhood-of-jesus-dissects-a-world.html (last accessed July 2014)

An unfathomable metafictional firecracker. Farago, J., 2013, “J. M. Coetzee’s stunning new novel shows what happens when a Nobel winner gets

really weird”, New Republic, online http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114658/jm-coetzees-childhood-

jesus-reviewed-jason-farago (last accessed July 2014)

Recently the novel of ideas has received a new

advocate in J. M. Coetzee, who has come forward,

quite unapologetically, with two novels that can

barely contain the ideas presented with such

relentless determination by their protagonists:

Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Diary of a Bad Year

(2008) Puchner, M., 2011, “J. M. Coetzee’s novels of thinking”, A Quarterly Review 30:4, pp. 1-12 (p.1).

See also Joyce Carol Oates and Leo Robson’s

reviews of The Childhood of Jesus (The New York

Times and New Statesmen respectively): both

define The Childhood of Jesus as “a novel of ideas”.

Hermogenes: What do you mean by that?

Socrates: Heracleitus says, you know, that all things

move and nothing remains still, and he likens the

universe to the current of a river, saying that you

cannot step twice into the same stream.

Plato, Cratylus, 402a (Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 12 translated by Harold N. Fowler. Cambridge, MA, Harvard

University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1921.)

‘Listen to yourself, Álvaro,’ he says. ‘The thing itself. Do

you think the thing remains forever itself, unchanging?

No. Everything flows. Did you forget that when you

crossed the ocean to come here? The waters of the ocean

flow and in flowing they change. You cannot step twice

into the same waters.

The Childhood of Jesus, p. 114

(1) Costello as device Coetzee uses to avoid taking a

stand on controversial issues.

Not surprisingly most of the commentators felt somewhat

stymied by Coetzee’s meta-lectures, by the veils of fiction

behing which he had concealed his own position from

scrutiny. There was a feeling, shared by some reviewers of

the book, that he was putting forward an extreme, intolerant

and accusatory argument without taking full intellectual

responsibility for it. Lodge, D., 2003, “Disturbing the Peace”, The New York Review of Books, 50 (18), pp. 6-11, p. 6.

(2) Costello as a ‘mere’ character.

In the quirky format of these lectures, although Elizabeth

Costello quite literally speaks in Coetzee’s place […], she does

not speak for him. Her importance to the present

investigation is as another in a line of Coetzee’s fictional

protagonists, not as an explicator of his narrative practice. Tremaine, L., 2003, “The Embodied Soul: Animal Being in the Work of J. M. Coetzee”, Contemporary

Literature, vol. 44, n. 4, Winter, pp. 587-612.

(3) Costello as the embodiment of otherwise-too-abstract theories.

Coetzee chose to present his lectures as fiction precisely because this is what his art allows: the embodiment of an idea – and necessarily its critique – through dramatic realization. Lynn, D. H., 2005, “Love and Death, and Animals Too”, The Kenyon Review, 27, 1, Winter, pp. 124-133, p. 130.

It has been and may continue to be, in the time that is left to me, […] more productive to live out the question than to try to answer it in abstract terms. When I say I have ‘lived out’ the question I mean I have lived it out not only in day-to-day life but in my fiction as well. Coetzee interview by David Attwell, Dagens Nyheter, 8 December 2003. Quoted in Attwell, D., 2008, “Coetzee’s Estrangements”, Novel, 41, 2/3, Spring, pp. 229-244, p. 229.

(4) Costello as a literary device used by Coetzee to provoke discussion on ethical matters.

Coetzee seems both to make ‘his’ positions more complex and nuanced and to give his readers greater freedom and greater personal responsibility to engage the ethical consequences of the issues under discussion. […] The conscious ambiguities of writing reflect the palpable ambiguities of moral life in a socially independent world, but he leaves each reader individually to recognize or apply whatever lesson there is. Shillinsburg, P., 2006, “Textual Criticism, the Humanities and J. M. Coetzee”, English Studies in Africa, 49, 2, pp. 13-27, p. 13.

Wateridge, James. Cartoon

for Herford, "Tears for Dead

Fish", TLS 5.

The character of Socrates himself poses the problem of

deciding whether Plato presents the doctrines that the

dialogues supposedly contain as those of the historical

Socrates or of himself; and the aporetical conclusion of

many dialogues might seem to finally contradict the

hypothesis of doctrinal character or intent. Hart, R. and Tejera, V. (eds.), 1997, Plato’s Dialogues – The Dialogical Approach, Lewiston-Queenston-

Lampeter, The Edwin Mellen Press (pp. 1-2)

The doctrines and arguments found in the dialogues are

interpreted as those of particular literary characters,

not Plato or Socrates in some simple, straightforward

sense. The settings, characters, speeches and plots

embody or enact the philosophy that Plato is understood

to be presenting. Hart, R. and Tejera, V. (eds.), 1997, Plato’s Dialogues – The Dialogical Approach, Lewiston-Queenston-

Lampeter, The Edwin Mellen Press (pp. 5-6)

To whom are [the dialogues] to be imputed (the

historical Socrates, Plato, or the literary

characters)? Hart, R. and Tejera, V. (eds.), 1997, Plato’s Dialogues – The Dialogical Approach, Lewiston-Queenston-

Lampeter, The Edwin Mellen Press (p. 6)

Plato has carefully maintained his anonimity. […]

Literaly [the dialogues] present a world dominated

by the figure of Socrates, who both is and is not the

dialogical Socrates, who is interrogative (not

assertive), ironic (distanced, self-affaced), and

aporetic (troubled, doubtful). Hart, R. and Tejera, V. (eds.), 1997, Plato’s Dialogues – The Dialogical Approach, Lewiston-Queenston-

Lampeter, The Edwin Mellen Press (p. 7)

THE DIALOGICAL MODE IN MODERN

PLATO STUDIES

“When one applies Bakhtin’s notion [of dialogism] to Plato it

immediately helps to resolve many of the puzzles and clarify

the refractory elements with which a non-literary and

doctrinal reading is confronted”. Hart, R. and Tejera, V. (eds.), 1997, Plato’s Dialogues – The Dialogical Approach, Lewiston-Queenston-

Lampeter, The Edwin Mellen Press (p. 6)

How to distinguish form from content – if at all possible?

Historical Socrates? Aporetical character, aporetical

conclusions.

Context-oriented (and not doctrine-oriented) mode of

interpretation.

Literary and dramatic features.

Characters as embodiments.

Responsibility: to whom are the doctrines to be imputed?

Performances.

[Elizabeth Costello] leaves us strongly aware that what has mattered, for Elizabeth Costello and for the reader, is the event – literary and ethical at the same time – of storytelling, of testing, of self-questioning, and not the outcome. Attridge, D., 2004, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, 205

The bulk of the story is taken up not with

psychology or plot, but with Simón’s dialogues with

the Novillans. These are a series of frustrating

encounters, riddled by mutual misunderstanding,

perhaps Socratic in form but not in outcome. Bellin, R., 2013, “A strange allegory: J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus’”, Los Angeles Review of

Books, online http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/magical-child-troubled-child-on-jm-coetzees-the-

childhood-of-jesus/ (last accessed July 2014)

‘You find me attractive, I can see that. Perhaps you even find

me beautiful. And because you find me beautiful, your

appetite, your impulse, is to embrace me. […] The more

beautiful you find me, the more urgent becomes your

appetite. […] Now reflect. What – pray tell me – has beauty to

do with the embrace you want me to submit to? What is the

connection between the one and the other? Explain.’

Between a man and a woman there sometimes springs up a

natural attraction […]. The two find each other attractive or

even, to use the other word, beautiful. […] Why the one

should follow the other, the attraction and the desire to

embrace from the beauty, is a mystery which I cannot explain

except to say that being drawn to a woman is the only tribute

that I, my physical self, know how to pay to the woman

beauty. I call it a tribute because I feel it to be an offering, not

an insult.’ […]

‘And as a tribute to me – an offering, not an insult – you want

to grip me tight and push part of your body into me. […] I am

baffled. To me the whole business seems absurd […].’

‘[…] It cannot be absurd, since it is a natural desire of the

natural body. It is nature speaking in us. It is the way things

are. The way things are cannot be absurd.’

‘Really? What if I were to say that to me it seems not just

absurd but ugly too? […] Nature can partake of the beautiful

but nature can partake of the ugly too. Those parts of our

bodies that you modestly do not name […]: do you find them

beautiful?’

‘In themselves? No, in themselves they are not beautiful. It is

the whole that is beautiful, not the parts.’

‘And these parts that are not beautiful – you want to push

them inside me! […] If you found me to be an incarnation of

the good, you would not want to perform such an act on me.

So why wish to do so if I am an incarnation of the beautiful?

Is the beautiful inferior to the good? Explain’.

(CoJ, 27-32)

‘If you will simply say yes, without forethought,

without afterthought, all will become clear to you,

as clear as day, or so I believe.’

CoJ, 75.

RELIGIOUS TERMINOLOGY in ELIZABETH COSTELLO

SOUL: instead of ‘person’ (p. 158); ‘the darker territories of the soul’ (p. 160); the state of Paul West’s soul (p. 161).

‘THE COMMITTEE OF ANGELS THAT WATCHES IMPASSIVELY OVER ALL THAT PASSES’: p. 158, p. 166.

BROTHERS AND SISTERS: p. 178-179

“The twentieth century of Our Lord, Satan’s century, is over and done with. […] In these unfamiliar times Satan is feeling his way, trying out new contrivances, making new accomodations”. (180)

It [Elizabeth Costello] is progressively permeated by the language of religion, by a dread of evil, and by a desire for personal salvation. Its key words are “belief” and “soul.” (Lodge 2003: 10).

‘What do you think would become of us all, Simòn, if the

grain were pumped en masse as you propose? What

would become of the horses?’ […]

‘There would no longer be work for us here at the docks.

That I concede. […] We would all have work, just as

before, only it would be a different kind of work,

requiring intelligence, not just brute strength.’

‘So you would like to liberate us from a life of bestial

labour. You want us to find some other kind of work,

[…] where we would lose touch with the thing itself –

with the food that feeds us and gives us life. We are you

so sure we need to be saved, Simon? […] If we had

needed to be saved, we would have saved ourselves by

now. No, it is not we who are stupid, it is the clever

reasoning that you rely on that is stupid. […] There is

no place for cleverness here, only for the thing itself’.

(CoJ, 113-114).