Review Article

Versions of Hospitality in Recent Writing on the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee

Mike Marais

Acts of Visitation: The Narrative of J. M. Coetzee by María J. López.

Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011. ISBN: 978-90-420-3407-5

(hardcover). xxvii + 344pp.

J. M. Coetzee and the Novel: Writing and Politics after Beckett by Patrick

Hayes. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-19-958795-7 (hardcover).

275pp.

The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age by David

Palumbo-Liu. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2012. ISBN: 978-0-8223-

5269-3 (paperback). xiv + 226pp.

In one of the interviews in Summertime, Martin, a former colleague, claims

that he and the deceased John Coetzee felt their “presence” in South Africa

“was legal but illegitimate,” that it “was grounded in a crime, namely

colonial conquest,” which rendered them “sojourners, temporary residents,

and to that extent without a home, without a homeland” (209-10). With this

statement in mind, María J. López argues that a sense of unbelonging

underlies J. M. Coetzee’s entire oeuvre, including the Australian fiction, and

forms a kind of “imaginative and intellectual masterplot” (xii). It is this

“narrative” that she traces in her monograph, starting with the early fiction

English in Africa 40 No. 1 (May 2013): 161–171 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/eia.v40i1.8

and concluding with chapters on the fictionalised autobiographies and

Australian fiction.

Given the centrality of the notion of belonging to her discussion, it is

hardly surprising that López should deal with the issue of hospitality at some

length. After all, one’s sense of belonging in a certain place, no matter how

questionable it may be, always places one in relation to those who do not

belong there, who are not at home. The simple fact of belonging, this is to

say, raises the issue of hospitality to the outsider. López’s argument is that,

in Coetzee’s fiction, “the political question of who is host and who is guest

in South Africa” is “translated into the private and domestic sphere of the

farm and the house” (xv). Typically, in the novels, the house serves as “a

primordial scene [. . .] in which personal relationships may be ethically

transformed” (xv), and a place where “the ultimate ethical lesson” of

unconditional hospitality may be “learnt” (xxii).

To her credit, López is acutely aware that Coetzee’s preoccupation with

hospitality has a self-reflexive dimension. Instead of functioning

independently in his writing, “acts such as the colonization and

appropriation of the land, the unexpected arrival of the intruder, and the

ethical act of welcoming the visitor, the penetration and resistance of the

body, and the unveiling of literary, hermeneutic, and psychological

secrets [. . .] mirror each other in their rhetorical patterns and ethical

implications” (xxv). Hence, an issue to which she repeatedly returns is the

reader’s relationship to the text, the extent to which she or he is entitled “to

force the resistance of literary texts and decipher their secrets” (xix).

For the most part, López’s discussion of Coetzee’s narrative of

unbelonging proceeds through close and careful readings of the individual

novels, which are seldom less than astute. Her discussion of the

epistemology of penetration, that is, the assumption that meaning and truth

are latent in phenomena and may therefore be excavated, and its relevance to

Dusklands and Waiting for the Barbarians is highly persuasive. The same

may be said of her examination of the Magistrate’s desire to see the

barbarian girl’s body before it was marked by Empire, and of the fact that he

has no choice but to minister to her body. I found particularly compelling her

discussion of the indeterminacy of Foe, and hence its resistance to

determinate interpretation. Simply on the strength of the readings that it

offers, this is one of the better monographs on Coetzee’s fiction to appear in

recent years.

While her argument is entirely coherent, it should be noted that López’s

conception of unconditional hospitality as a possibility that is open to a

subject departs from the Levinasian and Derridean understanding of this

162 MIKE MARAIS

notion. For them, if one ‘welcomes’ a guest, one names and therefore

identifies him or her in advance. In other words, as the root of this word,

wilcuma, suggests, one wills his or her coming. If hospitality is to be

unconditional, this cannot happen. As Derrida puts it, this absolute form of

hospitality involves saying “yes” to the stranger, “to who or what turns up,

before any determination, before any anticipation, before any

identification” (77). In Levinas’s description, the visitor arrives without

“knocking” and so “assigns me before I designate him [or her]” (87), and

this assignation “is entry into me by burglary” (145). One of the implications

of the uninvited visit in unconditional hospitality is that the visitor, through

visiting himself or herself on the unsuspecting host, unsettles and unhomes

him or her. Since the host is unable to name, to grasp in language, this

stranger, he or she loses his or her sovereignty over and distance from him or

her. In effect, the host is opened up to and invaded by the visitor’s difference

or otherness. It follows that the host, in unconditional hospitality, is never

present as a subject to receive the visitor. Indeed, he or she is not able to

make of the guest an intentional object of consciousness precisely because

he or she is deprived of subjectivity. It is for this reason that this unlimited

form of hospitality can never be a possibility that is open to an agent who

exercises choice in a realm of action. Unconditional hospitality is not

something that one does, an action in which one engages, a task that may be

completed. Because the guest cannot be identified, she or he is always yet to

come, which in turn means that hospitality, thus conceived, is an endless

form of waiting without object.

In López’s reading of Age of Iron, Mrs Curren’s “act of welcoming

Vercueil and John in her house is ethically exemplary” (149). By

implication, the mode of hospitality that is here at issue is the willed action

of a subject, and therefore something that may be achieved or “learnt” (xxii).

When read from a Levinasian or Derridean perspective, Mrs Curren’s

hospitality signifies differently. In the novel, she wants to “see” Vercueil as

he “really” is (165), the implication being that the person she sees and

knows, who is present to her consciousness, is not the real Vercueil. Who

Vercueil really is – and his name puns on the Afrikaans verskuil, meaning

‘hidden’ (see 34) – is invisible to her. By further implication, she cannot

invite the Vercueil she wishes to see. It is not in her power to do so. As

much is intimated by the detail that he enters Mrs Curren’s home uninvited

(74), a point that is later emphasised by her reference to him as “a man who

came without being invited” (165). The corollary would seem to be that

Vercueil’s arrival is something that has happened to her rather than

something that she has made happen.

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This tension between conditional hospitality – what one wills and makes

happen – and unconditional hospitality – what happens to one – complicates

the search for secrets, truth, or meaning which, as López quite rightly

contends, is a staple of Coetzee’s fiction. In her argument, this search, which

is characterised by the processes of penetration and invasion, is

irresponsible. So, for instance, she maintains that, in Waiting for the

Barbarians, the Magistrate’s attempt to decipher the mystery of the

barbarian girl, that is, his search for her truth, is “ethically dubious” (86).

What is actually required of him is a form of blindness. Although López ’s

argument is nuanced and strong, if read in terms of the aporetic ethic of

unconditional hospitality, there can be nothing wrong with the Magistrate’s

desire to see the girl as she was before she was tortured and disfigured by

Empire. The equation of the scars on her body with signs implies that

Empire has written itself on her body, inscribed her with an identity. When

the Magistrate massages the girl, he is trying to see what the identity of

‘barbarian,’ which Empire has assigned her, occludes. To appropriate Mrs

Curren’s words, he wants to see her as she really is. The problem, though, is

that this search becomes “ethically dubious” because it proceeds from his

position within the language and culture of Empire. In the novel, this is

signalled by the fact that he knows her only as the “barbarian girl,” that is,

from the perspective of Empire. His location, and the forms of understanding

that it installs, render the girl invisible to him. In a sense, he is blind. This is

why the novel questions the difference between the Magistrate and the girl’s

violators. If he is to find that which he seeks, he has to transcend his cultural

location. To see her in the absence of the identity she possesses in his

culture, he has to see her in the absence of his own identity, which, of

course, has been constructed in opposition to the construct ‘barbarian.’

Quite ironically, then, the Magistrate is looking for that of which he

himself is the negation, and, it therefore follows, must forfeit himself if he is

to find it. Significantly, in this regard, his search constantly lapses into a

form of non-intentional waiting, which is quite self-consciously juxtaposed

with Empire’s waiting for the “barbarians,” that is, for the guest that it has

named and known in advance. When the Magistrate massages the girl’s feet

and body, he slips into a reverie and effectively loses himself: “I lose myself

in the rhythm of what I am doing. I lose awareness of the girl herself. There

is a space of time which is blank to me: perhaps I am not even present.

When I come to, my fingers have slackened, the foot rests in the basin, my

head droops” (28). In this state, in which he is not in possession of himself

and the girl is not an object of intentional consciousness, the Magistrate is

receptive to who or what may turn up. The seeker has become incurious and

waits without expectation and anticipation.

164 MIKE MARAIS

My argument, then, is that the Magistrate does not actively decide, as a

free agent, to cease the ethically dubious search in which he is engaged. On

the contrary, it is only through seeking that he encounters that which exceeds

his search and over which he can assert no conceptual control. If he were not

to seek, he could not lose the ability to seek. It is with the loss of this

capacity that his form of waiting, and so hospitality, becomes different from

that of Joll and his men.

Although I have drawn on Derrida’s philosophical writings in my

argument on the understanding of hospitality that emerges from Coetzee’s

fiction, the primary influence on this aspect of his work is surely Samuel

Beckett, whose fictional articulations of a non-intentional form of waiting

date back to the first half of the twentieth century. In Molloy, the eponym

describes the effect on him of his inability to identify what is only referred to

as a “little object:” “For to know nothing is nothing, not to want to know

anything likewise, but to be beyond knowing anything, that is when peace

enters in, to the soul of the incurious seeker” (58-59). Through seeking, the

“seeker” encounters that which exceeds his understanding and thereby

renders him “incurious.” At this point, his search lapses into a form of

waiting.

The paradox of the “incurious seeker” is already evident in Murphy,

Beckett’s first novel. In this text, the eponymous protagonist, who has been

divided from himself by community’s forms of identification, seeks the

“best of himself” (46), the “self whom he loved” (121). Importantly, his

search for this lost self takes him not only out of community, but also out of

himself. Tied to his rocking chair with seven scarves, Murphy enters “the

dark,” that is, the “third zone” of his mind (72), where he encounters

“nothing but commotion” and a “flux of forms” that coalesce and then

disintegrate (72). In this chaos, which is, by definition, alinguistic and,

equally significantly, described as being in “the will-lessness” (72), the

seeker loses the ability to seek and the search modulates into a non-

intentional form of waiting – which is to say waiting without a subject that

waits and an object that is awaited. In this state of waiting without

expectation, and so without advance knowledge of the guest, hospitality

cannot not be unconditional.

Given the similarities between Coetzee and Beckett’s understanding of

unconditional hospitality as a form of non-intentional waiting, it is not

surprising that Patrick Hayes’s comparative study of the fiction of these two

writers deals at some length with this aporetic ethic, despite its subtitle,

which promises an exploration of the politics of writing. For Beckett, in

Hayes’s argument, the human subject is not autonomous but situated in

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culture, which thus locates his or her values and attitudes towards both

himself or herself and others. When the subject speaks, she or he does so in

the “words of others” (Beckett, The Unnamable 308). The task of the writer

trapped in this public medium is to say that which the very act of saying

precludes him or her from saying. In undertaking this task, she or he

attempts to gain knowledge of that self that has been occluded by the “words

of others.” One of the ways in which Beckett seeks to attain this goal is

through disrupting determinate readings by inviting alternative ways of

responding to the text, and then suspending the finalising judgement that

each brings to bear on it. Crucially, Hayes maintains that this strategy opens

the reader to other ways of perceiving, and likens it to Martin Heidegger’s

notion of Gelassenheit, a mode of knowledge that tempers the sort of

calculative thinking concomitant on the Enlightenment’s privileging of

reason by altering the manner in which the knowing subject comprehends

the world of objects. Instead of dominating, and so distancing himself or

herself from the world, the subject waits for it to reveal itself. Heidegger

describes the form of waiting here involved as a state in which “we leave

open what we are waiting for” (qtd in Hayes 30), rather than approaching it

expectantly and therefore with prior knowledge. As Hayes puts it, the desire

to recognise the other is, in this state, “engaged with a potentially

transformative alertness to, or a ‘waiting for,’ the difference the other might

bring – a difference that might transform the terms upon which recognition

is extended” (30).

In Hayes’s argument, Coetzee creatively “assimilates” Beckett’s style

(29), particularly its resistance to determinate interpretation and the form of

Gelassenheit that this resistance inspires, but does so for a very different

end. Whereas Beckett’s ultimate concern is the self’s solipsistic attempt to

know itself, Coetzee’s is with imagining the good community. For this

reason, he not only adopts Beckett’s style but also adapts it in a way that

enables his writing “to bring about a continual rupture in the patterns of

evaluation differently situated readers necessarily bring to the text” and

thereby place competing visions of community “in touch” with what they

elide (71). Through this strategy of interruption, Coetzee’s fiction offers “an

anti-foundational imagining of moral community” (71).

In detailing Coetzee’s renegotiation of Beckett’s style in his engagement

with community, Hayes’s readings of the novels provide a highly original

and persuasive account of the effect on the reader of their indeterminacy. I

found particularly astute his description of the manner in which Waiting for

the Barbarians invites different responses to the Magistrate’s relationship

with the barbarian girl, and then oscillates among them, keeping them all in

166 MIKE MARAIS

play, without resolution. In this understanding, the reader’s attempt to

engage in a determinate reading of the text is interrupted, and she or he is

opened to other ways of seeing. By implication, reading becomes a form of

Gelassenheit, in which the reader leaves open that for which she or he is

waiting.

An encounter that challenges one’s ways of seeing and knowing the

world is by definition unsettling. It has the potential to alter one, to make one

different from what one is. As such, there is always an element of danger in

such encounters. One of David Palumbo-Liu’s principal concerns in his new

study is precisely the effect of contact with difference. As its title suggests,

this book “seeks to delve into the shape, nature, and structure of systems that

deliver otherness to us – taking people from ‘different’ worlds and importing

them into ours” (xi). Throughout, the emphasis is on “what happens when

we try to imagine the genesis and consequences of seeing others through the

systems that deliver them to us” (xi).

While he may not use the word, the issue at stake in Palumbo-Liu’s study

is, once again, hospitality. The open-ended question that is repeatedly posed

may be framed as follows: how can a culture’s structures of knowledge,

being local and communal rather than universal in nature, enable an

understanding of the otherness on which they are, in fact, predicated? In a

sense, then, the problem that Palumbo-Liu explores in this monograph is a

version of the Magistrate’s in his relationship with the barbarian girl: that is,

the difficulty of responding responsibly to the other when the forms through

which we respond to him or her reduce the otherness they purport to

‘deliver.’

Palumbo-Liu examines these issues with reference to literature’s

problematic relationship with otherness. In his view, literature “engenders a

space for imagining our relation to others” (14). More specifically, the genre

of fiction has always been concerned with difference. Through the “language

of literary realism,” it seeks “to ‘bridge’ the distance between self and

other” (29). In other words, this genre is a system that attempts to deliver

otherness to us. The issue at stake in this study is whether or not “the

linguistic, and literary narrative system” can “accommodate” the “overflow”

of “excessive otherness” (42). Does it deliver what it seeks, and claims, to

deliver?

In addressing this question, Palumbo-Liu focuses on a crucial

contradiction within the system of realist narrative. Even though the

language of realism may attempt to render otherness, its alignment with

rationality inevitably invests it with a universalising drive. In this regard,

Palumbo-Liu references Lawrence Schehr’s argument that realism “tries to

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maintain the particularity of the other while making itself universal” (45). It

“invites ‘the other’ in (for variety, diversity, enrichment), while all the time

holding itself above and beyond the other as a perpetually dominant

force” (45).

This particular contradiction in the literary system is an aspect of a

problem common to all delivery systems: despite their desire for the other,

they must preserve themselves. Otherness, as Palumbo-Liu puts it, frays the

fabric of society by creating “dissonance” (45), and thus threatens constantly

to overcome the system that tries to accommodate it. Hence the question that

the other poses for any culture is how much otherness “will prove to be our

undoing”? (13). By extension, delivery systems, in order to function

effectively, to maintain themselves, have to suppress difference by

inscribing sameness. As Palumbo-Liu notes, “even the most benign and

seemingly neutral ones of them actually work to filter out ‘excessive’

otherness for the sake of the functioning of the system” (xi). In short, they

attempt to codify the relationship that they establish with otherness. A

system of delivery, it would seem to follow, can only ever be conditionally

hospitable. Even sympathy, which puts us in touch with different lives, must

be codified and therefore limited. There is a “correct level” at which to

express one’s emotions, an “affective register,” a “sentimental consensus,”

which precludes “[e]xtreme behavior on the part of the individual” (9-10).

Individuals must “adjust” their “emotional register to the social norm” (11).

An unstated corollary of Palumbo-Liu’s argument on the way in which

systems of delivery seek to maintain themselves by inscribing sameness

even as they aspire to deliver otherness is that the desire for the other is a

desire for death. This is a point that Beckett most certainly would have

understood. Toward the end of Murphy, Murphy, who is waiting in his

rocking chair, is visited by a visitor he cannot see, even though his eyes are

wide open. The guest in question is the invisible gas that, unbeknownst to

him and therefore uninvited, invades his garret and overwhelms him. Gas, as

Murphy’s earlier etymological exercise reveals (110), derives through Dutch

from the Greek word for chaos. Tellingly, too, the word ‘gas’ is in Dutch a

homonym of gast, that is, ‘guest.’ What this visitation reveals is that

Murphy, in seeking his other self, the one from which he is estranged, has all

along sought his own death.

One encounters a similar irony in Age of Iron, where Mrs Curren is in

search of the self from which she has been divided by her community. As

she tells Vercueil, “From the cradle a theft took place: a child was taken and

a doll left in its place to be nursed and reared, and that doll is what I call

I” (100). Her search for this lost self is figured as a search for her own death.

168 MIKE MARAIS

In seeking the self from which she has been divided by community, she

seeks the death of the self that she presently is, that is, the self that seeks.

This is why she constantly articulates her will to die, and even sees death as

a redemption of sorts. It is, of course, only in becoming other than she is,

that is, by dying, that she will be able to see Vercueil as he really is.

Palumbo-Liu’s examination of the ways in which delivery systems are

informed by a desire for the other which threatens to overcome them

proceeds through an examination of a number of novels, each of which

“tests the faith” that such systems “place in commonality and

commensurateness” (1), and critiques “both the claims of commonality that

allow ‘others’ to be delivered to us and how those claims, founded on the

‘proper’ or ‘acceptable’ ratio of self to other, are themselves predicated on

certain assumptions about not only what it means to be human, across the

board, but also how human beings connect” (41-42). For the purposes of this

review, I will focus on his reading of Elizabeth Costello.

In this novel, Palumbo-Liu argues, we are provided with a sequence of

narratives in which Costello occupies different, even conflicting, roles. First,

she performs “the role of the aesthete against the hegemony of cold reason,

then the role of liberal secular humanist armed with reason against the

hegemony of cold, choiceless religious passion” (56). In the next narrative,

she “takes on the role of a moralist who will constrain the very realm of

artistic choice that she has just championed against religious

constraint” (56). Having advocated art for its “humanistic value,” that is, she

now questions literature’s ability to improve the reader, and wishes to

delimit aesthetic choice. The thrust of Palumbo-Liu’s argument is that the

novel, through providing an “inventory of possible modes of belief,” poses

the question of how reason, art, and religion may “form the foundations on

which we meet the other” (57-58). Tellingly, in this regard, Costello, in the

final narrative in which she appears, is required by an anonymous tribunal to

name that in which she believes before she can cross over to “the other

side.” While she has earlier in the novel championed various and varying

beliefs, she is now reluctant to subscribe to any of them.

Crucially, though, in questioning the ability of systems of belief to

deliver the other, the novel suggests that the self, through forfeiting itself,

may merge with the other. Palumbo-Liu contends that Costello’s “refusal to

state her beliefs is paradoxically founded on a belief in an indistinct and

fluctuating self” (57). Hence she defies the tribunal with the question “But

who am I, who is this I, this you?,” which is followed by the observation:

“We change from day to day, and we also stay the same,” and finally the

assertion “I am an other” (Elizabeth Costello 221).

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From this agnosticism, this questioning of the structures through which

the self maintains itself even as it seeks to cross over to “the other side,” it is

but one small step to the narrative of self-dissolution with which the novel

ends. In Palumbo-Liu’s argument, the question of self-dissolution is taken to

its logical conclusion in the Chandos story, which stages the “madness

brought about by too much otherness” (60). While one is obliged to respond

responsibly to the other, doing so “will ultimately strip one of reason and

selfhood at once” (58). What this narrative intimates, according to Palumbo-

Liu, is “the logical and ethical consequences of embracing otherness

absolutely” (60).

What this astute reading of Elisabeth Costello suggests is that the

Chandos narrative is a story about the impossibility of unconditional

hospitality, the irony that one can only become a home for the other by

becoming other than one is, that is, by dying. As I have repeatedly noted,

one cannot decide to be unconditionally hospitable, to open oneself to the

other. To the extent that unconditional hospitality is something that happens

to one rather than something that one does, it is like dying. It is for this

reason that this form of hospitality, throughout Coetzee’s oeuvre, is

described as an invasion of the self by the other rather than a reception of the

other by the self. It is a violent process in which the individual is penetrated

without consent, taken over, possessed. Indeed, the metaphor that is used for

this process in some of the novels is rape, which is itself depicted as a kind

of death in Disgrace. Like Beckett, Coetzee, in his fiction, suggests that we,

in our relationship with the other, are always waiting to die.

In conclusion, it is worth noting that this understanding of hospitality as a

possession that dispossesses the host of himself or herself has interesting

implications for the act of reading. Like López and Hayes, Palumbo-Liu is

interested in the relationship between reading and difference. If otherness is

something that can fray the fabric of society, and if narrative fiction is

informed by a desire for the other, it should follow that reading is a business

in which one constantly runs the risk of being exposed to an otherness over

which one can exercise no control. It is with this in mind that Palumbo-Liu,

in the context of a discussion of the way in which the individual is altered,

even undone, by his or her encounter with otherness, asks the following

question: “How to know when to keep reading and when to close the

book?” (14). Ironically, there is a scene in The Master of Petersburg that

suggests an answer to this question in its portrayal of reading as a process in

which readers may be overwhelmed by that which they read. The scene in

question is the one in which Dostoevsky berates Maximov for his response

to Pavel’s story about a revolutionary named Sergei, who uses a hatchet to

170 MIKE MARAIS

cleave open the head of Karamzin, a landowner who has tried to rape a

peasant girl (40–41). While the story is obviously agitprop, Dostoevsky

accuses Maximov of “not know[ing] how to read” it:

All the time you were reading my son’s story – let me say this – I

noticed how you were holding yourself at a distance, erecting a

barrier of ridicule, as though the words might leap out from the

page and strangle you. [. . .] What is it that frightens you,

Councillor Maximov? When you read about Karamzin or

Karamzov or whatever his name is, when Karamzin’s skull is

cracked open like an egg, what is the truth: do you suffer with

him, or do you secretly exult behind the arm that swings the axe?

You don’t answer? Let me tell you then: reading is being the arm

and being the axe and being the skull; reading is giving yourself

up, not holding yourself at a distance and jeering.

(46-47)

If one were to read with unlimited sympathy in the manner here described,

one would be possessed by the text, by the words that leap from the page and

strangle one, and so lose one’s self-possession. Reading would have become

a form of dying.

WORKS CITED

Beckett, Samuel. Molloy. Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition. Vol. 2. Ed.

Paul Auster. New York: Grove, 2006. 1–170.

———. Murphy. London: Faber, 2009.

———. The Unnamable. Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition. Vol. 2. Ed.

Paul Auster. New York: Grove, 2006. 283–407.

Coetzee, J. M. Waiting for the Barbarians. Johannesburg: Raven, 1981.

———. Age of Iron. London: Secker & Warburg, 1990.

———. The Master of Petersburg. London: Seeker & Warburg.1994.

———. Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons. New York: Viking, 2003.

———. Summertime. London: Secker & Warburg, 2010.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to

Respond. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. 1997. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000.

Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise Than Being Or Beyond Essence. Trans. A. Lingis.

The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981.

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