On Rudeness: J.M. Coetzee
2013; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 19; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/13534645.2013.808015
ISSN1460-700X
Autores Tópico(s)South African History and Culture
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (London: Vintage, 2008), p.85. 2 J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, pp.92, 85, 91. 3 See Anya's diary in J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, pp.57–60. 4 J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, pp.115–17. 5 Tim Mehigan, ‘Introduction’, in A Companion to the Works of J.M. Coetzee, ed. Tim Mehigan (Suffolk: Camden House, 2011), p.2. See also Nadine Gordimer's review of Life & Times of Michael K., ‘The Idea of Gardening’, The New York Review of Books, 2 February 1984, p.3. 6 Myrtle Hooper, ‘“Scenes from a Dry Imagination”: Disgrace and Embarrassment’, in J.M. Coetzee's Austerities, ed. Graham Bradshaw and Michael Neill (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), p.129. See also Nadine Gordimer, The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places, ed. Stephen Clingman (New York: Knopf, 1988). 7 See David Attwell, ‘Race in Disgrace’, in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, ed. Derek Attridge and Peter McDonald; Interventions 4:3 (2002); Rosemary Jolly, Cultured Violence: Narrative, Social Suffering, and Engendering Human Rights in Contemporary South Africa (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2010), pp.37–40. 8 See Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004); Derek Attridge, J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Mike Marais, Secretary of the Invisible: The Idea of Hospitality in the Fiction of J.M. Coetzee (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009). 9 It also focuses attention on a process or mode of action, rather than a being or entity. 10 J.M. Coetzee, Age of Iron (London: Penguin, 2010), p.29; J.M. Coetzee, ‘Erasmus: Madness and Rivalry’, in Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p.95. In Age of Iron, Curren's definition of stupidity takes the word back to its root, and finds there cause to view ‘amazement’ and stupefaction with suspicion: ‘From stupere, to be stunned, astonished. A gradient from stupid to stunned to astonished, to be turned to stone […]’, writes Curren: ‘To stupefy: to deprive of feeling; to benumb, deaden; […] Stupor: insensibility, apathy, torpor of mind. Stupid: dulled in the faculties’. In putting these remarks into Curren's mouth, the novel highlights the difficulty of finding a position from which to condemn the stupid – and its correlates – for stony, changelessly numb responses to phenomena and persons. In so speaking, Curren herself exhibits deadened, single-minded condemnatory response to these shortcomings. Unlike Coetzee, her language attempts to separate a brutalizing, stupid ‘they’ from a thoughtful, vulnerable, questioning ‘I’, showing her as the proponent of a message that is as stupidly unchanging as those it rails against: ‘Why do I watch’?, ‘Why do I let them into the house?’, ‘“Why do they behave like this?” I asked […] in bewilderment’, ‘the last of the dodos […] safe, safe in her cage’, ‘The bullies […] infesting the country […] their message stupidly unchanging’. Contra Curren, it is my belief that to be ‘stunned’, ‘astonished’, ‘astounded’ can also be a temporary state of awe – one that exhibits a phenomenological turbulence which can launch change, rather than fixing one forever a deprivation of feeling. To be ‘stunned’ and ‘astonished’ is to enter into a temporary state, not a permanent condition. See also my remarks on being rendered stupid (a positive transitional state akin to stupidity), in ‘The Fate of Stupidity’, Essays in Criticism, 62.2 (2012), pp.125–38. 11 See Oxford English Dictionary Online: ‘stupid, adj. and n.’: ‘Void of interest’, ‘lacking ordinary activity of mind’. ‘morally dull or insensible; apathetic, indifferent’ < http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/192222?redirectedFrom = stupidity#eid> [accessed 18 December 2012] (emphasis added). 12 J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, p.125. 13 J.M. Coetzee, Age of Iron, p.29. 14 See Oxford English Dictionary Online: ‘stupidity, n.’ < http://oed.com/view/Entry/192222?redirectedFrom = stupidity&> [accessed on 18 Decemeber 2012]. See also Oxford Dictionaries: ‘stupidity’: ‘behaviour that shows a lack of good sense or judgement’ < http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/stupidity> [accessed on 18 December 2012]. 15 See Oxford English Dictionary Online: ‘rude, adj. and adv.’, < http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/168501?rskey = nkYxQS&result = 3&isAdvanced = false#eid> [accessed 24 July 12]. 16 J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, pp.73, 54, 92. 17 Within earshot is the astonishment and ‘awe’ of the Romantic sublime, and Viktor Shklovsky's later conceit about art as ‘defamiliarization’. See ‘Art as Technique’, Russian Formalist Criticism (1965), pp.11–12. Here I see a nod to Kantian aesthetics (a challenge to the ‘disinterested’, the true and the beautiful), and to more recent arguments about ‘thick concepts’ in analytic moral philosophy. See Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana, 1985), pp.129–140 and Peter Goldie's account of rudeness as thick, ‘Thick Concepts and Emotion’, in Reading Bernard Williams, ed. Daniel Callcut (Oxford: Routledge, 2009), p.97. See also Peter de Bolla on the function of literature, architecture and the visual arts as ‘mutism […] being struck dumb’ in Art Matters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp.1–5. For ethical literary criticism see Martha C. Nussbaum, who argues in favour of the emotions as ‘upheavals of thought’ that are kinds of value judgements, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of the Emotions (Cambridge: CUP, 2001). Coetzeean rudeness taps into wider contemporary interests in art and arrest, knowledge and stupefaction, and literary value. It touches on questions about literature's duty and function – its ethics. 18 See J.M. Coetzee, Summertime (London: Harvill Secker, 2009), p.126: ‘As soon as their ease is threatened, the Coetzees rush in with jokes […] to keep the world and its woes at bay. But how long will the jokes go on doing their magic?’ 19 OED online. 20 J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, pp.104, 105. 21 J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, pp.30, 93, 204, 136–7, 142. 22 I use the term ‘stupid’ in its everyday sense here. 23 J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace, pp.132, 201–2, 201, 132. 24 J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, pp.1, 139, 139, 139, 146–7, 138. 25 J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, p.30. See also stupefaction, the body and the limitations of thought and judgment in Waiting for the Barbarians, especially the relationship between the magistrate and the girl, which prompt a ‘sleep of oblivion’ pp.28–31. 26 J.M. Coetzee, Age of Iron, pp.8, 180, 30. 27 J.M. Coetzee, Age of Iron, p.30. 28 J.M. Coetzee, Age of Iron, pp.173, 173, 180, 181. 29 Myrtle Hooper, ‘Scenes from a Dry Imagination: Disgrace and Embarrassment’, in J.M. Coetzee's Austerities, ed. Graham Bradshaw and Michael Neill (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp.127–78. See also Elleke Bohemer, ‘Sorry, Sorrier, Sorriest’, in J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual, ed. Jane Poyner (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006). 30 See Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature and J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading. See also Mike Marais, Secretary of the Invisible: ‘Knowledge, that which invests the rational subject with control of both the world and the self, enables only conditional hospitality, the comprehension of others within the subject's previously formed conceptual system […] requires its members to respond to them with indifference’ (pp.31–32). 31 Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature, p.x. 32 Derek Attridge, J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, p.111. 33 J.M. Coetzee, Age of Iron, pp.108, 136, 185. 34 Derek Attridge, J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, p.xii. However, whilst I argue that rude astonishment engages ethics, some ethical critical readings of his work treat the term with suspicion. When, in his book Secretary of the Invisible, Mike Marais turns his attention to Iron, he quotes a rare example in Coetzee in which astonishment is associated negatively, in the mind of the protagonist, with ‘paralysis’. (Curren is using ‘astonishment’ not in its rude sense, but its passive one, to describe a state-controlled ‘stupor’ that arrives via the media, dulling the affects of each watcher, ‘turn[ing] him or her to stone’.) But Marais associates Curren's particular fear that viewers will be stupefied by ‘insensibility, apathy, torpor of mind (108)’, and unable to respond to political atrocity, with astonishment in its wider application as a moral negative – as if all events which left one ‘standing transfixed’ prompted ‘the subject's indifference to difference’ (98). This casts astonishment into a quite different space from ethical experiences of the ‘encounter’, the ‘interruption’, the ‘demand’, in which, as Attridge writes, one is ‘opening oneself to the unpredictable’. Astonishment's disorientation of responsive habits is read as a vicious impairment of healthy (and moral) reaction; not a breathtaking moment, but a permanent ‘paralysis’. Here, astonishment is not part of ethics' affective clout, but a tool in its suspension. This is uncharacteristic of Marais's attitude in the book, which persuasively shows how being ‘surprised, perplexed, and bewildered’ continually bring about the ethical rethinking of ‘standard rituals’, knowledge and rationality (28–29). Usually, moments of not getting it are seen to enable an ‘unintentional, involuntary […] form of responsibility’, but not so with the astonishing (29). 35 In their readings of Coetzee, Attridge and Marais also use terms that make ethical contact with the other sound aggressive: in its ‘grip’, ‘hostility’, ‘interruption’, ‘demand’, ‘irruptions of otherness’. See Derek Attridge, J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, pp.x-xii,110–111. 36 Martha C. Nussbaum, ‘Exactly and Responsibly: A Defence of Ethical Criticism’, Philosophy and Literature, 22.2 (1998), p.344. 37 Disgrace, p.132–41. 38 See David Attwell, ‘An Interview with J.M. Coetzee’, in Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p.68. 39 Coetzee's remarks proffered a view of ethical engagement that was markedly different from those expressed by many of his compatriots in the 1990s, and which appeared to be an act of aggression toward the political solutions attempted by the post-apartheid government. Coetzee's commendation of a rude upheaval that ‘short-circuit[ed] the imagination’ – rather than an attempt to establish reconciliation – was not well-received. His work prompted objections guided by concerns about the socio-political responsibility of fiction set in contemporary South Africa. Coetzee was criticised for expressing a ‘gloominess about post-apartheid South Africa… [which] has only served to undermine the fragile process of reconciliation underway in that country’, Tim Mehigan, ‘Introduction’, in A Companion to the Work of J.M. Coetzee, p.2. 40 Derek Attridge, J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, p.x-xii, 110–11. 41 J.M. Coetzee, Summertime, pp.62, 21 63, 113–4, 120. 42 J.M. Coetzee, Youth, pp.160, 172–84. 43 J.M. Coetzee, Summertime, pp.118, 175–84, 114–20. 44 An interesting case arises with Paul Rayment in Slow Man (London: Vintage, 2006). Rayment and Elizabeth Costello live together and their rudenesses bump into one other with developing intimacy. Yet Rayment's attention is drawn intensely toward other, differently rude relations – a succession of arresting figures that include Drago, Marijana, and the unnamed blind woman – so that a much weaker form of transformation (if any) between Costello and Rayment is wrought. 45 J.M. Coetzee, Youth, p.3. 46 During the 1990s, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Committee enacted a version of social justice that aimed to be restorative rather than retributive (an enactment of which Disgrace's 1999 fictional sexual harassment tribunal is widely seen as critical). The formal spectacle of visceral remorse, the enactment of exchange and confession between victims and violators of the former apartheid regime was weighed and judged by TRC panels, as a means of attempting peaceably to settle the demands of social responsibility and justly to assess culpability. Coetzee's fiction appeared to endorse the view that genuine transformation was not achievable or assessable in relationships negotiated by formal panels of judges or investigation boards: real transformation would rather be personal, unpredictable, non-rational… even rude. Yet if the TRC's formalized processes of restoration were at risk of stimulating false affect, certain forms of Coetzeean rudeness are in danger of prompting retributive affect. Some of the perils of Coetzee's approach are in evidence here. 47 J.M. Coetzee, Giving Offense, p.95. 48 J.M. Coetzee, Giving Offense, p.95. 49 David Attwell, Doubling the Point, p.299. 50 David Attwell, Doubling the Point, p.300. 51 David Attwell, Doubling the Point, p.299. 52 David Attwell, Doubling the Point, pp.298–99. 53 David Attwell, Doubling the Point, pp.297–98. 54 Summertime is structured around interviews conducted by an unnamed ‘biographer’ producing an emerging account of the novelist ‘John Coetzee’; Elizabeth Costello is organised around a set of lectures and talks by the academic/writer protagonist of the title; in Slow Man the novelist Elizabeth Costello reappears, writing the protagonist into her current novel; in Diary of a Bad Year each page comprises part of an academic essay, now awaiting publication, and parts of two diary accounts by different protagonists; in Disgrace, the protagonist David Lurie, is an ex-lecturer of English Literature.
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